What patriarchy really feels like (and why the U.S. isn't one)

Vignettes of female agency and male control

I’m finishing 2025 with a long-overdue consideration of patriarchy in my life. This is paywalled because I finally wrote about my experience with Indian-flavored patriarchy growing up to complicate the picture of female agency and the male gaze. The male gaze regulates women’s movement and choices in a patriarchy. And within such societies, women control other women even when men aren’t.

You can catch up on parts one and two of this series, though each installment can be read alone.

The gaze as male control

I grew up in generational poverty, though my parents can claim to have achieved the American dream relative to where they came from. I, too, have climbed above their station. Considering their lack of degree and valuable skills (beyond cooking), my own position seems improbable. Intertwined with my story is the promise of feminism, which I later learned was reserved for elite women. For my mother, America was a place to start over after divorcing a man she was compelled to marry. But in examining my entanglement with patriarchy through my family, I wish to complicate the picture of assumed male social control. My experiences growing up in a country affording women endless choices, with a family that coerced choices domestically, showed me both the false promises of feminism and gradations of patriarchal control. This is why I insist America isn’t a patriarchy — I’ve seen true patriarchy constrain women’s choices. In America, women expect to self-determine. Crucially, however, that’s the result of liberal democracy, not feminism, though that’s a different essay.

The year before the horrific rape in 2012 that broke open this depressing reality for women in India, I traveled by overnight train through the same region in which the rape and murder happened to visit family. There were four middle-class-looking men in my compartment. I didn’t realize at twenty-three the risk I was taking, but I could have died that night. In India, women assume that men will undress them with their eyes while walking on the street. Patriarchy meaningfully constrains women’s movement and choices in India, which is my standard for assessing its presence. In the United States, my choices and movement aren’t constrained by considerations of men.

I come from a culture in which misogyny and sexualization are common and accepted. Having spent significant time in India with and without family, I can share that women are literally ogled and catcalled on the street, the colloquial term being ‘eve-teasing’. That sounds innocent, but a woman should fear for her safety from men out in public because India is one of the least safe countries for women. Its sexual violence statistics are depressed because women are also less likely to report it there in comparison to America. Official statistics cannot quite capture the problem; you must experience it. And any woman in India knows going out alone at night is inadvisable. The male gaze controls women’s movement in India, and only there have I experienced fear of men in public.

Unwanted male attention is normalized in Indian culture in a way that would be considered problematic here. I invite white women who think we live in a patriarchy to go east. This is an acceptable and even necessary definition of the gaze because it can serve as a control mechanism in a truly patriarchal context. Patriarchy, similarly, must be defined before we claim that we live in one.