Patriarchy Chicken is Cool, But I Like This Even Better
Should we teach our daughters to take up space, or to be kind?
I keep losing games of Patriarchy Chicken.
You know the deal. When men are walking straight at you, mindlessly assuming you’ll move out of the way for them, you just don’t. You keep walking straight at them, confident you have as much of a right to be there as they do.
I’ve tried and failed so many times. Even when I tell myself, today I’m going to take up space, I end up moving, sometimes muttering a polite, unacknowledged, “Excuse me.”
It wouldn’t be such a big deal, except I’m the mom of a 4-year-old daughter. Each time I cede the sidewalk to a man, each time I physically shrink my own body to make more space for him, I grip my daughter’s hand and pull her right along with me.
Dr. Charlotte Riley coined the term Patriarchy Chicken in a piece for New Statesman. “Women have not been socialized to take up space,” she writes. “Women have been socialized to give way, to alleviate, to conciliate, and to step to the side.”
Right now, my daughter is receiving that socialization, learning what it means to be a girl in this culture, what it will mean to be a woman. And most of this teaching comes from adults who were socialized…
