The patriarchy is a structure, not a person. We can never forget that. Nor can we deny how expertly it is woven into the fabric of not only our development and existence, but of our expectations. It is a structure so solidified that operating within it is as intuitive as breathing—we nurture and sustain it without knowledge or intention. And for those who benefit, it can be a formidable challenge to contribute to its demise. I’ve borne witness to this conundrum, one in which progressive and kindhearted humans come face-to-face with what they must relinquish, how they will need to hold back, pipe down, and shrink just a little to make room for the voices of this dialogue. It’s hard. I appreciate that. And it doesn’t happen overnight. That’s okay, so long as the trajectory of evolution points toward the seismic dismantling of the structure.

In part three of this contemplation, I’m considering the notion of boys being “left behind” and/or neglected. It’s become a rallying cry for the far right in their ongoing effort to reassign women and girls to supporting roles of silent conformation and auxiliary pieces for their male partners. But even within conversations with my tolerant and contemporary peers, the idea that we’re forgetting about boys in favor of supporting girls has become prevalent. Having just raised a boy and a girl to young adulthood, I can assure you that is not the case. In our experience, it was indisputable that the patriarchal structure remains alive and well, and misogyny is ripe for use even in spaces where human becoming is fragile and the sense of self is delicate.

I have a son. I will move heaven and earth for him, always and without hesitation. Yes, we must nurture and support boys. But please let’s not whiplash to the past and roll back our growth to do so. We need to birth, nurture, and sustain an evolved boy and man. From the moment my son was placed in my arms, I knew that I would support, protect, and cherish him as fiercely as I would a daughter, even though, before that moment, I’d never imagined myself with anything but daughters. I was uncertain and wary of men and boys and assumed I wouldn’t know how to love or nurture them as well. But that insecurity took flight the instant he was there to nurture, love, and defend. There is not a single one of my mothering peers who isn’t just as committed to their sons’ thriving as to their daughters’.

But we seriously need to reevaluate how equality has taken shape so far and streamline its future. I contend that within the context of the generation of the ERA, young men and boys weren’t so much left behind as left out—not left out of the discussion but of the expectation of evolution towards equilibrium. For some reason, the surge toward equality was defined by the notion that in order to achieve it, women needed to prove they could be more like men. Men were the standard that women needed to rise and adapt to meet. Male attributes were the goal in order to more seamlessly mesh. Women may have been reluctantly granted space in male spheres, but only once they could prove that their femaleness wouldn’t interfere.

Why on earth did no one consider the possibility that maybe men needed to be a bit more like women? While women were killing themselves to bridge the perceived gap and make up for the assumed lack in their worthiness of the same respect, why weren’t men required to reimagine themselves as the ones who were standing in the way, and instead of reluctantly opening the gate and allowing a few to pass through, extending a hand and asking, how can we be better?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg famously quoted Sarah Grimké, (born in 1792, daughter of a South Carolina Chief Justice of the State Supreme Court who was clearly ahead of her time by more than a century), “I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.” These words have been quoted and requoted over the course of the struggle for equality, but to my mind, it reveals the reality women knew they were facing, that they could not expect assistance from the architects and sustainers of the patriarchy; the best they could hope for is that they would just stay out of their way and not actively undermine them.

Which, of course, they didn’t.

Women are resentful and furious that they’ve had to work more than twice as hard and be more than twice as good as men to earn respect and a fraction of the salary; men are whiny and vindictive that women have moved into “their” spaces and surpassed their abilities. And they want revenge. And I think that part of the reason for this is that there was no one teaching men how to evolve to meet the expansion of their counterparts. Women were encouraged to model their behavior on men’s to compete in a man’s world, but men were never encouraged to be more like women to meet their new peers in that world. Again, the persistent narrative has been that to achieve equality, women need to be more male, to assimilate into a male world, to embrace and embody male attributes.

I reject that narrative vehemently because equality isn’t about becoming more like your oppressor so that they recognize themselves in you and can therefore respect you. Equality is about accepting the feminine as indistinguishably valid in its most natural and pure state, unchanged—not dumbed down to protect the fragile male ego. If someone can only respect you when you contort to be the mirror, then that’s not respect at all; it’s a reward for acquiescence. If the only way men will respect us is if we look and act like them, there’s no evolution in that, no changing of minds or expansion, just us coming up with yet another way to take care of ourselves without upsetting their tenuous sense of self. This reiterates the conclusion that women need to go it alone—be better, faster, more committed, and more determined just to scratch the surface of the respect and admiration granted to men as a birthright.

It takes monumental effort and an uncanny presence of mind on the part of all women not to hold men in general responsible for the transgressions of the patriarchy, even when we understand that in order for the patriarchy to have survived this long, it has required nurturing by more than just men. We know that. When young women today post incessantly about toxic masculinity or demand that their male peers stop mansplaining, it’s easy to understand the conflict that ensues. Young women can’t possibly comprehend the centuries of pain and resentment they carry, nor do young men possess the awareness of the centuries of entitlement and abuse they are being asked to reform. It really isn’t fair. I can’t mitigate that; it’s far bigger than me, but I hope I can be a backdrop, a sounding board. We may have handed them a mess, but we also handed them the permission to take no shit, to defy all of it, even if it sometimes means defying us and demanding our evolution, to redesign the world without our interference, but with our support.

Women started from a place of having to prove we weren’t less than, and now the world wants us to apologize for our success. Fuck that. I am capable of building on the progress of our mothers and grandmothers while simultaneously supporting, sustaining, and promoting the evolution of young men. It’s not either/or. It’s called multi-tasking, one of the skills that has allowed women to outperform at many of the positions that we were previously barred from by the patriarchy.

Our populace is eager to pay lip service to supporting equal opportunity and standards for women at all levels of society, but when it comes down to it, it predictably doesn’t follow through. And it’s difficult to have this conversation without referencing our current political shitshow. The two times Trump won the presidency were when he ran against a woman. The one time he was forced to compete with a man, a feeble one at that, he lost. Which speaks volumes to how we feel about women in power.

Trump didn’t win the presidency.

Misogyny did.

The patriarchy did.

And yes, it really is that simple.