ADRIENNE RICH
31
placed, as he notes, from the actual father onto some abstract author–
ity, fantasy-father, or onto technology itself-he implies- that patri–
archy is the real name of the system he is describing and which is
ultimately dangerous to human existence.
None of these writers mention the possibility that a "return to
the feminine" may actually involve pain and dread, and hence active
resistance, on the part of men. We do not find in their work any such
powerful analysis of the nature and extent of patriarchy as in Fire–
stone, Millett, and Daly; but we do find corroboration of a sense that
patriarchy, in degrading and oppressing its daughters,' has also, at
some less overt level, failed its sons.
We find some sense of this in the "Movement" of the 1960s,
despite the profound sexism underlying its apparent rejection of racist
violence and the Vietnam war . Men who refused to serve in the armed
forces, and who underwent imprisonment or exile as the penalty for
their decisions, demonstrated a revulsion against the patriarchal
stereotypes of authoritarianism, militarism, nationalism, "being a
man ." ([he "counter-culture" style of unisex clothing, male self–
adornment, gentler manners, long hair, was a more superficial token.
Much might be written on the various costumes in which male privi–
lege and male supremacism have masked, as well as advertised, them–
selves in our time.) The peace movement, sexist as it was ("Chicks Say
Yes
to
Men Who Say No"), expressed disenchantment with the
patriarchal values of violence, supertechnology, and imperialism. The
student radicalism of the sixties commonly met with the charge that
these young people were in revolt against their fathers, "acting-out"
their Oedipal rage; but in fact the "counter-culture" (most of it, to
be sure, soon absorbed into the omnivorous Culture) did for awhile
constitute an unconscious critique of the authority-through-role or
through force which has characterized patriarchy. There was a fleeting
revolt against the kind of education which, in Mitscherlich's terms,
"often takes the form of terrorism rather than of guidance toward
independence. " The teacher was for the first time asked
to
justify
himself as a human being rather than as a role; obedience was seen as
the reverse of learning. This questioning of the power relationship in
education often took on an aggressive, antiintellectual and destruc–
tive style, thoroughly masculinist in its dehumanization of the indi–
vidual teacher facing the classroom. Yet it, too, sprang from some
