The Silent Wound: How Patriarchy Hurts Both Women and Men

We often talk about patriarchy as a system that oppresses women. And….

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It silences their voices, shrinks their choices, polices their bodies, and limits their potential. But what we rarely say out loud — what we need to name, too — is that patriarchy wounds everyone. Including men, children, and grown-ups as well.

Patriarchy is not just a "women's issue." It's a human issue. And it's time we look at the cost it imposes on all of us.

The Female Cost: Obvious and Pervasive

Let’s start with the obvious. Patriarchy manifests in gender-based violence, wage gaps, reproductive oppression, beauty myths, and the global epidemic of coercive control. These are the daily realities for millions of women. The stats are harrowing:

• One in three women globally will experience physical or sexual violence in her lifetime (WHO, 2021).

• Women perform 76.2% of total hours of unpaid care work globally (UN Women, 2019).

• Femicide—the killing of women because they are women, so perceived as weak, voiceless, and ones that should obey to masculine dominance and corrupt power — continues to rise, especially in regions with weak legal protections.

This is the brutal face of patriarchy. But beneath that, there's a more insidious harm: emotional suppression, internalized shame, and the silencing of female desire and autonomy.

And still, this is just one side of the coin.

The Hidden Male Cost: The Mask of Masculinity

Patriarchy doesn’t elevate men—it confines them. As Tony Porter, author of A Call to Men, explains, the "Man Box" begins to cage boys as early as age 4 or 5. From a young age, they are generationally conditioned by caregivers and society not to cry, show vulnerability, or express any emotion other than anger. This model fosters a powerful and addictive dependency on suppressing softer, relational emotions. It creates an internal pressure always to appear strong, and if they can't, they often resort to demanding that others, especially women, validate them as such.

From birth, boys are often taught to suppress their emotions. To cry is weak. To ask for help is emasculating. To show softness is suspect.

Psychologist Terry Real refers to it as the "performance of invulnerability." Boys learn early that only certain traits are rewarded: dominance, aggression, stoicism, and control. Everything else gets buried deep.

According to the American Psychological Association:

"Traditional masculinity ideology has been shown to limit males' psychological development, constrain their behavior, result in gender role strain, and negatively influence mental health."

The result? Skyrocketing rates of depression, addiction, suicide, and emotional isolation among men. In fact:

• Men die by suicide 3.9 times more often than women (CDC, 2020).

• Men are less likely to seek help for mental health issues due to social stigma.

• Emotional illiteracy leads to dysfunctional relationships and unprocessed trauma.

Patriarchy whispers of power, yet leaves only disconnection in its wake. It binds men to a boyhood they never chose, stunted in the soil of unspoken grief. And it casts women—not just for themselves, but for whole family constellations—into the aching role of keeper of emotions. Too often, they become not lovers, but mothers to their men—nurturing what patriarchy has denied, while longing to be met as equals, sovereign and whole.

How the System Feeds Itself

This system thrives on silence and shame. It relies on women internalizing the outside message of their perceived inferiority and men rejecting their vulnerability as a devil runs from a cross. It demands domination and submission rather than mutual respect and wholeness.

When women are socialized to be accommodating at all costs, and men are taught to value control over connection, the result is inevitable: abuse, inequality, and spiritual starvation on all sides.

There Is Another Way

There is nothing "natural" about patriarchy. It's a cultural construction. And what is constructed can be dismantled.

As trauma therapist Resmaa Menakem says:

"Our bodies are where our safety, trauma, and oppression live. But they are also where we heal."

Through embodiment practices such as dance therapy, somatic work, and conscious relationship healing, we can break the patriarchal trance.

We can raise emotionally fluent boys who don’t fear shedding a tear. We can raise girls who take up space with their power, instead of shrinking with shame like their mothers and their grandmothers. We can raise a generation of people who know love, not dominance, as the highest power.

At Bailalobas, we dance and move into dimensions where systems end, personal freedom and soul attunement begin.

Bailalobas is not just a movement. It’s a rebellion against numbness. A return to embodied truth.

We dance because our bodies remember a time before shame.
We move to shake loose the chains—ancestral pain etched in our hips, our spines, our breath.
We gather in sisterhood, not by chance, but by knowing: healing is born in safe, sacred connection.
And from that fire, we rise—
Carrying the fierce, divine rebellion of the feminine like a torch.
We take it into the world, not to ask, but to lead.
To awaken women and men to a new rhythm,
A new way of power.
A new way of being.

Patriarchy is a prison. Embodiment is the jailbreak.

And the revolution? It starts in your body.

Ready to unlearn the lie and remember your truth?

Join us at Bailalobas. Move with us. Heal with us. Reclaim the parts of you that the patriarchy told you to abandon.

Because we all deserve to be whole.