Patriarchy Eats Your Attention in 7 Ways (at a Minimum)

Quick note before we begin: I’m running a new survey on waiting in relationships and I’d love your input. You can fill it in here. Thank you!

Welcome to the next installment in my series on decentering men, focusing on the slow drain of mental resources. One of the most underrated things patriarchy takes from women is attention.

We talk endlessly about the material things women lose under patriarchy: money, career opportunities, bodily autonomy, political power, leisure, safety, domestic freedom. We also talk about the unpaid labor women perform and the emotional labor they provide and the care work they are expected to absorb.

But there is another resource being extracted all the time, one that is harder to quantify because it lives inside your head. Your attention.

A remarkable amount of a woman’s mental life can be spent thinking about men.

Do they like me? Do they still like me? Why didn’t he text back? Is he angry? Is he cheating? Does he think I’m attractive? Am I attractive enough? Is he bored? Is he sexually satisfied? What should I cook? Why is he in a bad mood? Did I say something wrong? How do I make him understand? How do I make him happy? How do I make him less angry? What do men think about feminism? What does this man on Twitter think about feminism? What did that man on TikTok say about women? Should I respond to him?

At some point you have to look at the sheer volume of this cognitive activity and ask yourself what, exactly, you might have been thinking about if you weren’t spending so much of your life monitoring the male population.

This is one reason decentering men is so much more radical than simply telling women to “love yourself” or “focus on your career.” It is about reclaiming a finite cognitive resource from a social system that has trained women to spend it on men.

Patriarchy eats your attention in at least seven ways. Here are the ones that are most common for everyone...