Here’s maybe the saddest part about this: If we take Colin out of the water, dry him off, and put him into the shuttle box, he will not even try to escape the shock, though the door is right there.1 In the shuttle box, Colin could escape if he tried, but he can’t try. His brain has learned that trying doesn’t work, that nothing he does makes a difference…and so he has lost the ability to try.
This inability to try is called “learned helplessness.” Animals, including humans, who repeatedly find themselves in bad situations from which they can’t escape may not even try to escape, even when given the opportunity. When an animal has learned helplessness, it goes straight past frustration right to the pit of despair. It’s not a rational choice; their central nervous system has learned that when they are suffering, nothing they can do will make a difference. They have learned they are helpless. Their only available route for self-preservation is not to try.
When you read studies like these—and there are hundreds of them—part of you can’t help wanting to go to the rat and let him in on the secret: “Colin, this thing is rigged! The experimenters are messing with you on purpose, just to see how you’ll react.”
That’s what researchers do when they study learned helplessness in humans. In one example, researchers subjected study participants to an annoying noise that participants either could or could not turn off. Many participants in the “helpless” group shut down as the rats did, and simply stopped trying to solve the problem. But researchers made sure participants didn’t walk out of the experiment trapped in the pit of despair. As soon as a participant in the “helpless” group was “shown that the noise was rigged or the problem was unsolvable, his symptoms would disappear.”2
Just knowing that the game is rigged can help you feel better right away.
And that’s what this chapter is for.
In the young adult dystopian series The Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen is forced into a “game” in which she has to kill other children. It’s a ritual developed by the totalitarian government to control the provinces.
Before she goes into the game, her mentor says, “Remember who the real enemy is.”
We are not our own worst enemy. Nor is the enemy the other people in the game.
The enemy is the game itself, which tries to convince us that it’s not the enemy.
Let’s get started.
The Patriarchy. (Ugh.)
We know. The word “patriarchy” makes many people uncomfortable. If you’re one of those people, that’s completely fine. You don’t need to accept the word, or use it, to recognize the symptoms of living in it. Its messages ring inside us like a song that’s been stuck in our heads so long that we don’t even notice it anymore, not recognizing that it was taught to us in our infancy.
On the day a baby is born (if not sooner), the adults declare either “It’s a boy!” or “It’s a girl!” If no difference existed in the way boys and girls were treated, a baby’s genitals would be no more important in deciding how the child was raised than any other part of their body. But instead, the baby is treated as if all sorts of other things about them are true—what kind of toys they’ll enjoy, what skills they’ll develop, whom they’ll grow up to fall in love with, what they’ll want to be when they grow up.
The difference between how boys and girls are raised is gradually shrinking; more and more, fathers are in favor of their daughters possessing “traditionally masculine” traits like “independence” and “strength”…even if they’re not so enthusiastic about their own wives or girlfriends possessing those same characteristics. But our expectations are still widely different for girls and boys; you can see how wide the difference is simply by looking at the toy aisle for girls and the toy aisle for boys. The difference isn’t neutral. Being raised as a boy makes it easier for boys to grow up and take on positions of power and authority, which is all “patriarchy” means.
This takes a lot of forms:
Explicit misogyny. One example of this is a reality TV star declaring he can grab women “by the pussy” whenever he wants because he’s famous, and a flood of media coverage suggesting that this sort of thing is perfectly okay—“just locker-room talk.” Imagine if he (or a woman) had said he can “grab men by the dick” whenever he wanted.
Or a young man goes on a murderous rampage, killing several people and injuring many more, and justifies it by saying women refuse to have sex with him. In response to one such mass murderer who identified as an “incel” (“involuntarily celibate”), The New York Times ran an op-ed that unjokingly argued that “redistribution of sex”—that is, sex for men, with women—was a reasonable idea.3 You see, women could be preventing these deaths, if only they did their job of meeting the sexual needs of dangerous men.
In the time that we were writing this book, there were fifteen public mass shootings in the United States perpetrated by men or boys, several of whom were motivated, at least in part, by some form of jealousy, sexual frustration, or emotional rejection by a woman or girl.4 In more than half of all mass shootings, the perpetrator kills his intimate partner or family members, including his mother, his wife or girlfriend, or his children.5
Sex and relationship violence. Sexual assault disproportionately and systematically targets women: women are three times more likely than men to be assaulted, while 95 percent of sex offenders are men; one in five American women college students experiences sexual assault or attempted sexual assault during college.6 Globally, men who rape women report that their primary motivation is the basic belief that they have a right to a woman’s body, regardless of how she feels about it, a belief termed “sexual entitlement” in the research.7 Women are held responsible for being assaulted based on how they “lead men on” with behavior or attire, but perpetrators are disproportionately under-prosecuted. At the same time, public officials accused of sexual assault are allowed to defend themselves by implying that the woman making the accusation is too ugly to rape.
In addition to the threat of acute physical and sexual violence, women face chronic gendered stressors every day. These experiences of patriarchy are like traffic noise in a big city. If you live there, you get so used to it you hardly notice it anymore, but that doesn’t make it less noisy. The noise includes:
Body image. We talk about this extensively in chapter 5, so we’ll save a complete discussion for then, but we want to mention now that body dysmorphia and disordered eating disproportionately and systematically impact women more than men, and the dynamic is already in place by elementary school, with half of six-year-old girls worrying they’re “too fat.” And let’s remember that eating disorders have the highest mortality of any mental health issue. Body image isn’t about vanity; women’s lives are on the line.
Getting a word in edgewise. Again, the dynamic is already in place by elementary school: boys speak up and call out answers eight times more than girls.8 Among grown-ups, in meetings where men are the majority, women speak a third less than men; only when there are more women than men do women speak as much as men.9 During President Barack Obama’s first term in office, his women staffers struggled so much to get their voices heard that they coordinated an “amplification” tactic, where when one of them made a key point, the others would repeat it, crediting the original speaker. Even President Obama, a self-declared feminist, needed active intervention to create gender balance.