Bullying & Patriarchy (Part 7)

War is the ultimate patriarchal evil.

Front cover of the book Peace as a Women’s Issue: A History of the U. S. Movement for World Peace and Women’s Rights, by Harriet Hyman Alonso. Syracuse University Press, NY: 1993.

This is part of an ongoing series of essays, starting here:

Bullying & Patriarchy (Part 1)

While Georgie Porgy squatted in the White House in the early twenty-first century, I concluded that war is the ultimate patriarchal evil. Starting a war is the ultimate bullying.

Gathering weapons and tanks by another country’s border or building a wall along that border is an extreme form of bullying. It’s large-scale bullying: bullying an entire country or culture or people. Invading another country because you’re a fascist patriarch is an extreme and especially violent and murderous form of bullying on a vast scale.

I’ve always been instinctively anti-war. This didn’t require any research. I didn’t need to listen to any lectures on the topic. It was simply the only opinion on the matter that made sense to me. As an undergraduate, I was delighted to see a professor and students protesting a gulf war, and I took one of their “No Blood for Oil” buttons.

At the time, I still considered my Aunt Ethel a wonderful person. She was…