There’s a question I’ve been pondering for quite awhile because I see the effects and challenges it creates for my students when they try to become more free as they paint with me. And that question is this:

What is the patriarchy and how does our allegiance to it mess with our creative process?

The patriarchy ( also referred to as the dominant culture or over culture) as I’m defining it here is a system. And it’s a system based on male privilege where men hold the primary power and authority to dominate political, economic and social structures.

Patriarchy primarily excludes women from positions of any kind of real power and does this through promoting cultural values ( rigid gender roles), beliefs ( women are second class citizens) and behaviors ( allowable levels of violence perpetrated on women) designed to keep women oppressed and the patriarchal machine running.

These authoritarian patriarchal standards are permeated throughout the culture that we live in. And they are largely unconscious. We are STEEPED in them and they impact EVERYTHING that we do. Including our creativity. These oppressive dictates are one of the main things that gets in the way of creative flow and creative joy.

The patriarchy highly prioritizes things like control, dominance, assertiveness, toughness, stoicism, power over, linear thinking, high level functioning, pushing through, productivity and entitlement. And these are inflexible qualities that individual men are also absolutely expected to conform to, no questions asked, if they want to be a member in good standing in the patriarchal club.

The patriarchy also has very strict and clear parameters around what it considers important, necessary, allowable and appropriate. It sees anything that isn’t part of its extremely narrow value system ( like empathy, emotions, intuition, softness, and needs), as deviant and even broken. ( And big surprise, these qualities are deeply associated with the feminine.)

Those things that are outside of what it deems to be acceptable are expected and even demanded to either be fixed, changed or completely gotten rid of. There is no room in the patriarchy for the wholeness of a human being.

So our authentic thoughts, feelings, intuitions and impulses continually come under that patriarchal scrutiny. What I often refer to as the inner critic is actually the part of our mind that upholds those dominant culture values and punishes and shames us if we act or feel or think… or create… in ways that go against those incredibly truncated parameters.

And we are so deeply hungry to FEEL valued that we will go along with the patriarchal program even if it means we lose connection with our heart, feelings, body and creative self.

As it turns out, being truly creative and fully alive is one of those things that the patriarchy does NOT value … like AT ALL… and actually feels threatened by. So we learn to squash anything that resembles a true creative impulse because those impulses are dangerous to the patriarchal system. And even worse, we are indoctrinated early on to not even recognize those impulses much less act upon them.

Over the next few blog posts I am going to be exploring and ( hopefully) helping you to wake up to all those ways that your creativity has been colonized. To begin to name those often unconscious internalized messages around creativity, self expression, the body, and our emotions that have been undermined and denigrated by the patriarchal agenda that is sneakily operating in the shadow realms of your psyche.

In the meantime, I would encourage you think about this question for yourself and see what you discover.