Finding the Spaces in Between, or How to Tackle the Persistence of Patriarchy

Writing in the aftermath of the election of an orange-colored gammon to the White House, Carol Gilligan and Naomi Snider (2018) recently dared to ask the impossible question. Why does patriarchy persist, in spite of decades-long, widespread campaigns for social equality and women's rights? Although they occasionally conflate patriarchy with hierarchy, and power with authority, their answer is that—over and above the fact that a notable sub-section of the population, namely those men-in-power, evidently benefit from the advantages it bestows upon them—patriarchy effectively fulfils an important psychological function:

Patriarchy's persistence is tied not only to a struggle for power and a contest between different frameworks for living or systems of belief, but also to the tension between our desire for love and our desire to avoid the pain of loss. With its gender binary and hierarchy creating impediments to relational presence and integrity, patriarchy becomes a bastion against the pain of loss. The catch is: it requires a sacrifice of love. (p. 135)

Deeply influenced by John Bowlby's theory of attachment and loss (1969; 1973; 1980), Gilligan and Snider argue that the socio-political restoration and preservation of patriarchy provides relief from the psychological anguish that is associated with the intrinsic vulnerabilities of love. In Freudian terms, allowing oneself to (be in) love requires a certain relinquishment of self-love, and thus, the acceptance that a quantum of narcissism will need to be given up in favor of the reorientation of the libido towards the external object of love (Freud, 1921/1955, pp. 112-113). Being in love makes us more vulnerable; vulnerability is tantamount to a reduction of self-love, the resulting experience of loss is painful, and the foundation of patriarchy, which entails a gendering of social imbalances of power, attenuates the affective impact of loss, presumably because it exchanges the