A few months ago, after a reading I did at the Calabash Literary Festival in Jamaica, an older woman approached me and said: “Things will never change until mothers raise their sons differently.”
My inner womanist bristled. Why is the burden always placed on women to solve a problem men created? We are told it’s our labor—emotional, domestic, political—that must undo centuries of male violence and entitlement. And yet, at the current rate of progress, the World Economic Forum estimates it will take 123 years to achieve gender parity. That timeline isn’t because women have failed; it’s because men, who hold the majority of power, haven’t done enough to change themselves or the systems that reward their silence.
The Soil We’re Raised In
I grew up in a place where women were treated as appendages. Our value is measured in our capacity to serve: sexually, domestically, reproductively. Sons carried the family name, daughters carried the burden of care. I remember elders saying: “Have one of each. The son for your legacy, the daughter to care for you in your old age.”
Even the women who “made it” weren’t spared. A friend of mine, a brilliant lawyer, once stood beside her husband at a cocktail party. Someone complimented him on marrying such a powerful woman. He smirked and said: “If I wanted to marry a great lawyer, I’d have married Johnny Cochran. I don’t need my wife to have intellect.”
That’s the soil patriarchy grows in. Where a man’s car and his wife can be weighed as equally valuable, equally disposable. Where men are rewarded for diminishing women and still told that gender equality is somehow “a women’s issue.” But if men and boys are the primary perpetrators of inequality, how could women ever be the ones expected to fix it?
Men Listen to Men
The truth is men should be listening to women. But the patriarchy trained them not to. From birth, boys are told women’s words are emotional, irrational, “too much.” That’s the chokehold—this idea that women’s voices are background noise while men’s voices are gospel.
The consequences are everywhere. Studies show when men speak up for women at work, culture shifts—fairness becomes the norm, women report more belonging. But women have been saying the same things for decades, only to be ignored or punished. What does that tell us? That men’s words are given the credibility women are denied.
Cultural patterns reinforce it. Ninety-four percent of what men stream on Spotify are male artists. Male authors’ biggest audiences are other men. Men overwhelmingly read, watch, and listen to other men. Which means the voices that shape their worldviews, their politics, even their empathy, are men’s voices.
So yes, men should be listening to women. But until they unlearn what patriarchy drilled into them—that our truths are less valid—it matters when men break silence. It matters when they risk the comfort of their status to confront each other. Because the system is designed to mute us, but it hands the mic to them.
Patriarchy Eats Its Own
The lie we keep repeating is that patriarchy only destroys women. That’s never been true. Patriarchy eats its own sons alive.
bell hooks reminded us: “The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead, it demands psychic self-mutilation.” That mutilation starts early. Boys are taught to cut tenderness out of themselves before they even know their own names. To strangle softness. To bury grief. To measure their worth in dominance and silence.
And then we act surprised when the rage that comes from that wound spills over—first drowning the women they love, then destroying themselves.
The data is brutal. Men die from suicide four times more than women. One in nine American men will end up in prison. In England, men are only 36% of therapy referrals, even though they report higher rates of insomnia, addiction, and violence. Globally, men are four times more likely to die by homicide—usually at the hands of another man.
Psychologist Ronald Levant found that the closer men cling to “traditional masculinity,” the more likely they are to suffer psychological distress, addiction, violence. Robert Pleck called it “discrepancy stress”—the rage men feel when they fail to meet the impossible ideal of manhood. That rage is often taken out on intimate partners. Patriarchy teaches men to harm themselves first, then everyone else.
What Allyship Looks Like
So when men insist, “Not me, not my friends,” I want to remind them: if one in three women experience violence, then you or someone you love is part of the problem. The question isn’t whether patriarchy has shaped you—it’s how deeply.
Allyship is not about pointing to the even worse man down the road. It’s about looking inward. It’s about a man who notices women are being talked over in a meeting and risks his credibility to interrupt the interrupter. The father who refuses to leave childcare to his wife. The friend who challenges the sexist joke instead of laughing along. The leader who moves money toward women’s organizations even when it’s unpopular.
And it’s also about interrogating what you consume. If men overwhelmingly read men, listen to men, follow men—how are they ever going to imagine themselves otherwise?
Digging at the Roots
From an economic standpoint, the stakes are dire. In the UK, less than 2% of all grants in 2021 went to women’s and girls’ organizations. Half of those grants were £10,000 or less. We cannot close that gap without shifting resources
Culturally, the metaphor is simple: patriarchy is the tree. If the roots stay poisoned, the fruit will always rot. Women have been tending the fruit for centuries, but the soil is still toxic. If men don’t start digging at the roots, nothing changes.
That’s why, at Comotion, we value the groups not just led by women, but also with those focused on men and boys—like MenEngage, the ManKind Project, and the Smiling Boys Project, which reframes how young Black boys see themselves, teaching joy where stoicism once ruled. Because if you want to change the fruit, you have to change the soil.
When that woman at Calabash told me it was mothers who had to raise their sons differently, I knew she wasn’t entirely wrong. But the truth is, women have been raising sons differently for generations, and the world is still the same.
It’s not because we failed to raise. It’s because men have failed to reckon.
We’ve been asked to polish the fruit, to carry the bruised harvest, to swallow what was never meant to feed us. But the soil is poisoned, and we didn’t poison it. If men don’t start digging at the roots, the tree will keep growing the same way it always has—violent, bitter, heavy with fruit no one should have to eat.
I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m tired of carrying the weight of a patriarchy that was never ours to bear. Change won’t come from women carrying more. It will come when men decide to carry their share.
