Patriarchy Explained Through a Boot on a Woman's Neck

Taylor Swift wrote "The Man" specifically to imagine how differently the world would treat her ambition if she moved through it as a man instead of a woman.

Margaret Atwood built an entire novel, The Handmaid's Tale, around the same mechanics, tracing a patriarchal state that controls women's bodies through law and religious authority, and that novel has since generated a television adaptation running for six seasons.

Greta Gerwig took a different approach with Barbie, using the film to name patriarchy directly on screen and to show how fast Ken's imported idea unravels Barbieland's matriarchal order once he brings it home.

Feminism has been making this exact point for decades, in courtrooms, in workplaces, in ordinary conversations. It's life. It's reality.

A Black feminist writer named LeAndra Lee Baker put the whole argument into one analogy: patriarchy is a boot on a woman's neck, and feminism is just asking for the boot to move.

Baker writes for Medium, mostly about motherhood, race, and gender. In one essay, she explains why raising sons feels easier than raising daughters, not because boys are simpler, but because the whole world clears a path for them before they even ask. That same instinct, naming the obvious thing everyone tiptoes around, produced the boot analogy driving this entire article.

According to Baker, the analogy works like this.

Patriarchy functions as a boot pressed against a woman's neck. Feminism asks for the boot to be lifted. Nothing more radical sits underneath that request, and the specific reaction to it, across several distinct groups, reveals considerably more about each group than the request itself does.

Men's rights activists treat the request to remove the boot as an attack directed at the person wearing it. Removing pressure from someone's neck gets reframed as oppression against the one applying that pressure, and this reframing supplies the foundation for an entire online movement built on grievance rather than evidence.

Some people take a different stance on the same boot. The boot never caused a problem, in this view. The complaining did. Silence kept things running smoothly, and the woman speaking up broke that, not the boot pressing down. Compare that to the men's rights position and the contradiction shows up fast. One side wants women quiet about the boot. The other side wants credit for suffering once it moves. Both sides stare at the same object and land on opposite conclusions.

Men in the category commonly labeled "good guys" treat any mention of the boot as a direct accusation against them personally. Not all men wear boots, they respond, addressing a claim nobody in the conversation actually made.

Male allies choose to discuss the boot carefully, selecting language designed to keep the person applying pressure comfortable throughout the exchange. The conversation continues around the neck while the neck itself remains exactly where Baker originally placed it.

Women carrying internalized misogyny direct their objection toward other women rather than toward the boot itself. Baker describes this group as insisting they want the boot positioned on their neck, then directing frustration toward the women who question that stated preference.

Patriarchy costs men something real, too. Federal law requires only men, ages 18 to 25, to register for Selective Service, and skipping it is a felony, punishable by up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Only Congress can change that. Starting in December 2026, the government registers those men automatically, pulling from federal databases instead of waiting for them to fill out a form. The same hierarchy that claims to reward men elsewhere has assigned them this particular weight since 1980.

The wellness industry sells relief from pressure its own marketing helped create, framing exhaustion as a personal failing instead of a structural one. Girlboss culture repackages that same pressure as growth, telling women to see the constraint as opportunity. Diet culture runs the same play, offering women a smaller version of themselves in exchange for comfort and acceptance. Different label, same boot, same markup.

Matriarchy doesn't move the boot to a different neck. It gets rid of the boot and makes sure everyone has shoes. Getting there is the hard part. It only takes one person to press a boot down. It takes agreement from everyone else to keep it there, and agreement is exactly what never happens, because as long as people keep arguing about whether the boot should move, nobody has to be the one who moves it.

@Santitos

@salinasmariasantos

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