I Would Like to Speak to the Manager of Masculinity

Because whatever this is? It's not fit for purpose.

I would like to return this patriarchy. It arrived scratched, unstable, and slightly haunted. I didn’t ask for it. It was just sitting there one day, blinking at me like an unsolicited AirDrop from history. No manual, no warranty, just a centuries-old system powered by entitlement and the quiet assumption that I should apologise for having thighs. If patriarchy were a product, it would be banned in Europe and resold in Britain with a three-star Trustpilot rating and the words “sturdy for its time.”

They say if something causes harm, it should be recalled. In the UK, a faulty washing machine gets more outrage than a man murdering his partner. One woman is killed by a man every three days here. Globally, it’s one in three women facing physical or sexual violence in their lifetime. If these were car stats, Top Gear would be screaming about it. Instead, we get silence, hashtags, and a government that thinks the real issue is too many women reporting things. The whole thing runs on denial, bureaucracy, and women being told they’re overreacting while holding the receipts in one hand and pepper spray in the other.

You know what patriarchy really is? It’s the most cursed subscription box of all time. You don’t sign up. You just hit puberty and it arrives. Inside: a dress code you didn’t ask for, fear disguised as flirtation, and a man named Clive telling you to smile outside a Wetherspoons. It offers no benefits unless you count a lifetime of strategic hair removal and the ability to detect emotional danger by tone alone. It’s like joining a cult, except instead of robes and chanting, it’s heels and pretending you’re fine when you’re actively dissociating in the workplace toilet.

And when you try to return it, good luck. You get passed between managers. You get asked if you’re sure. You get told it’s not that bad and have you considered adjusting your tone. Reporting abuse? Better make sure your skirt wasn’t too short. Experiencing sexism? Maybe you’re just imagining it. Want to exist without commentary? Sorry, that feature’s only available to men named Stuart who think women peak at 22. The patriarchy comes with no accountability, a lifetime of gaslighting, and the emotional support of a filing cabinet full of unanswered HR complaints.

But here’s the plot twist… men are suffering too. Not the ones drunk on power. The ones quietly imploding under the weight of their own silence. The patriarchy teaches boys to be strong but not soft. To bottle up, lash out, and call it masculinity. It gives them violence when what they needed was vocabulary. In the UK, suicide is the biggest killer of men under 50. These men aren’t weak. They’re drowning in a system that told them to swim in concrete boots and call it strength. Toxic masculinity is not just a woman’s problem. It’s a bomb in everyone’s hands.

This entire setup runs on female pain like it’s cheap diesel. Period poverty still exists. Endometriosis takes an average of eight years to diagnose. Women take on the bulk of unpaid care work globally and still get told they’re not contributing enough. You think your mum just “likes cleaning”? No. She’s performing invisible labour so the patriarchy doesn’t accuse her of being a failure in a dressing gown. If women got paid for every hour they spent bleeding, parenting, or pretending to laugh at Steve’s joke in the office kitchen, we could buy the moon and use it as a storage unit for male egos.

And no, before anyone starts, I don’t hate men. I hate that they were told power makes them lovable and feelings make them weak. I hate that we all got fed different scripts and then blamed each other for not improvising correctly. Men are not the product. Patriarchy is. And it’s defective. It teaches boys to dominate, girls to dim themselves, and everyone to die inside just a little bit before breakfast. It’s not broken. It’s working exactly as designed. That’s the real horror.

So I would like to return it. With interest. I want a full refund in rage and store credit in reparations. I want it dismantled, repurposed, turned into something that doesn’t bleed us dry and then ask for a smile. If the patriarchy were a second-hand sofa, it would be missing three legs, smell like resentment, and still come with a sticker that says “lightly used by Napoleon.” We deserve better. We deserve systems that don’t kill us slowly while selling us face cream. We deserve to be human without a performance clause.

This isn’t a request. It’s a recall. And I’ve got the receipts.