The Intersection of Capitalism and Patriarchy Is a Killer

The Intersection of Capitalism and Patriarchy Is a Killer

TW: Suicide

You know how certain roads just seem to be extra dangerous? At some intersections, you see heaps of flowers and other tributes to people who were lost there. Governments attempt to put up traffic lights or stop signs but some of those intersections are just relentlessly dangerous.

The places where patriarchy meets capitalism are like that, metaphorically speaking and they seem particularly dangerous for Gen X men.

The day I watched the memorial service for my Gen X actor friend, I also saw an obituary for a Gen X visual artist. Both of these tributes paid homage to the generosity of their artistry, the dedication to their crafts and both seemed to suggest that these men just never really figured out a way to effectively make decent money.

To say I relate to this problem is an understatement. I also have never cared much for material things and also have never really solved the problem of capital. And yet I have not even been tempted to throw myself into a river as those men did. I’m not saying this is why both of those Gen X men ended up this way. We can’t know that. In at least one case, severe mental illness was also a factor but I was struck by this commonality between us all and was reminded of the year when I devised a show about money. In having conversations with my peers about money and all the baggage that came with it, I learned that a lot of the men felt an intense pressure to provide, even as they were following their dreams. There was a different quality to their ambitions to make money. Their manhood depended on making a substantial amount of it. They had a little patriarchal demon on their shoulders at all times demanding that they provide. Or maybe there were two demons — one a patriarch and the other a capitalist and they just goaded one another along, degrading a man’s self-worth until he ended up at that treacherous intersection.

The thing is, even though I have a similar relationship to money and success as these guys, I feel fairly certain that no one would mention it in my obituary or in a eulogy. As a woman, it’s not that big a deal, I think. If I’d managed it, the world might be impressed but not managing it is weirdly expected. (That may be one of the reasons it’s not working so well for me.) That men have to suffer so profoundly if they don’t somehow make capitalism work for them is the intersection with patriarchy. Patriarchy defines manhood and success and it uses capitalism to keep its men in line.

The visual artist we lost sounded like a kind man. He drew hearts in chalk all over the city. There are testaments to how his drawings gave people hope in a dark time. This is a beautiful thing to do. He ought to have been rewarded, honored for his service, given a grant to continue it. But no ones gives grants for stuff like that. A grants committee would have laughed such a project out of the room.

But he couldn’t figure out the unsolvable problem of how to capitalize on a work of service and perhaps saw no way to go on. A project like that is not a commodity. It’s not for sale. It shouldn’t be. And an artist shouldn’t have to starve while he creates things that are truly for the greater good. The thing is, I’ve known quite a few artists who died at the intersection of patriarchy and capitalism. Some leaned into capitalism and some ran from it — but the result was the same. It’s heartbreaking every time.

I don’t know whether this is a peculiarly Gen X problem or if we ought to start keeping an eye on Millennial men now just in case. Maybe it’s just part of middle age? It feels like our generational antipathy to selling out and/or working for the man, as well as our propensity for questioning authority might make this intersection especially dangerous for our generation — but I can’t know for sure.

But I do know that smashing the patriarchy would do a lot of men as much good as it would women. When I fight for the end of patriarchy, I really am fighting for men, too. For some of them, it is a life or death situation.

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Originally published at http://artiststruggle.wordpress.com on July 26, 2021.