Patriarchy is like footbinding in that it is an ugly deformity; it is like an accent in that it is hard to see your own.

They say that nobody can hear their own accent. If you grew up in America, the way you and other Americans talk sounds normal to you. Americans can't hear the American accent (setting aside regional accents). But you can instantly tell when someone is from Britain, Australia, etc. because you can hear accents different from your own. And people from those countries can hear our accent, which is why people can instantly tell you're an American when you travel.

One point of this essay is that cultural practices work the same way. The easiest way to see the memes that we carry is in comparison to memes that we don't carry. Thus, this essay starts by looking at a meme that nobody in 2026 carries - the historical practice of footbinding. Footbinding is a dead meme and patriarchy is a dying meme.

The footbinding meme

I'm using "meme" in the original sense coined by Richard Dawkins - a self-replicating cultural unit. Footbinding wasn't genetic - it was a classic meme. It was transmitted culturally from generation to generation for roughly a thousand years until it wasn't.

For those who have never heard of it, footbinding was a practice in China that lasted roughly a thousand years, from the 10th century through the mid-20th century. At its peak during the Qing Dynasty (1644–1912), an estimated 40–50% of all Chinese women had bound feet, and nearly 100% of upper-class Han women did. The process typically began when girls were between four and six years old. Their toes, all except the big toe, were broken and folded under the sole of the foot. The arch was then broken and the foot bent double, then wrapped tightly in silk or cotton bandages roughly ten feet long. The wrappings were removed every couple of days to clean away dead skin, pus, and blood, then rebound even tighter. In more severe cases, girls whose toes were especially fleshy would have shards of glass or broken tiles inserted into the bandages next to their feet to deliberately cause infection, since rotting tissue could be removed to make the foot smaller. It is estimated that as many as 10% of girls may have died from gangrene and other infections caused by the process.

While footbinding caused a physical deformity to the victim's feet, it could only have existed for a thousand years if there were corresponding mental deformities in the minds of the people who carried on the practice. Like any successful meme, footbinding didn't just reproduce the physical practice of breaking little girls' feet. It reproduced the mental infrastructure necessary for the practice to continue. Specifically, I'd argue footbinding required (at least) three coordinated deformities in the minds of its meme carriers:

1. Deformed perceptions: A carrier of the footbinding meme would not perceive a normal woman's foot (like your mom's or your sister's) the way we do. To someone carrying the footbinding meme, an unbound foot looked wrong. It looked big, coarse, peasant-like. The "lotus foot," a foot broken and compressed to roughly three or four inches, was perceived as elegant, beautiful, desirable. Tiny bound feet were a focal point of a woman's attractiveness. Conversely, when we (non-carriers of footbinding) look at photographs of bound feet from the outside we see something grotesque. Same feet, completely different perception. The meme deformed how its carriers saw reality.

2. Deformed expectations: Footbinding limited women's mobility so severely that it effectively determined what roles they could fill. The practice was most common among women whose work involved domestic handcrafts, and it was more prevalent in areas where women's agricultural labor was less economically necessary. In effect, the practice created and reinforced a set of expectations about a woman's "place." To footbinding carriers, a woman's place was handwork, embroidery, domestic tasks, but not field labor or travel. By contrast, through our eyes as non-carriers of the meme we see a practice that physically disabled women and then treated that disability as proof that women naturally belonged in restricted roles. From the inside, it just looked like the way things were.

3. Deformed values: Consider what was actually done in footbinding: the bones of a small child's feet were intentionally broken. Glass shards were inserted to cause deliberate infections. Girls screamed in pain for weeks and months. An estimated one in ten died. And nobody intervened. In order for this to have taken place, the footbinding meme carried with it a set of values that classified breaking your child's feet as good parenting. It was a rite of passage. It was preparation for womanhood. It was ensuring your daughter's marriageability. From the perspective of meme carriers, Mothers who didn't bind their daughters' feet were negligently setting their daughters up for social failure. The meme deformed values so thoroughly that the people who would normally protect children from harm were the ones inflicting it, believing they were doing the right thing.

Before we move on to talk about patriarchy, I want to make one last footbinding observation. Footbinding was not something men did to women. The bindings were applied by mothers, grandmothers, and older female relatives, who had often had this done to them. Women were simultaneously the primary victims and primary enforcers of the practice. That doesn't mean men were irrelevant bystanders (the entire marriage market that made unbound feet a liability was shaped by male preferences). But the hands that broke the bones were women's hands. The people who policed compliance were women.

This is an important observation because patriarchy works similarly - the harms of patriarchy are often inflicted by the same gender that suffers them.

The patriarchy meme

The central point of this essay is that patriarchy operates through similar mental deformities to footbinding, and, like an accent, we can't easily perceive our deformities because we carry the meme.

When I say "patriarchy" in this essay, I don't mean "men consciously oppressing women," just like footbinding wasn't "people intentionally hurting little girls." I mean something closer to what bell hooks described: a system of interlocking cultural assumptions, carried and enforced by both men and women, that assigns rigid roles based on gender, punishes deviation from those roles, and convinces its carriers that these arrangements are natural rather than inherited. You can only understand patriarchy by focusing on the meme, not the people. The people are the hosts for a disease that has deformed them - like footbinding, often in childhood.

A lot of men here want to claim that patriarchy is dead, but that's inaccurate. Patriarchy is dying, but that's thanks to a lot of people putting in the hard work to kill it. There's still more work to be done. Thanks to a major survey published just this month we can actually quantify the meme's death across different countries. Consider the following mental deformities (very similar to the footbinding deformities) broken out by prevalence in country:

Look at that gradient. You are literally watching the patriarchy meme at different stages of dissolution. The countries where modernization, education, and deliberate social reform have been most sustained show the lowest numbers. The countries where those forces have had less time to work show the highest. That's not biology. Biology doesn't change between Indonesia and the Netherlands. That's culture. That's the meme.

The last deformity on this table is especially interesting for several reasons:

• First, this is a clear example of one of the ways that men are victimized by patriarchy alongside women. Being less able to access help because of your genitals is an irrational, stupid debuff. The installation of this debuff into a man's head is an invisible analog of breaking a little girl's feet because of their gender. For example, my grandfather died from this deformity - he had a heart attack but was the kind of guy who thought going to the doctor because his chest hurt was for pussies. The heart attack didn't have to kill him, but the "don't ask for help" debuff that was installed in him as a child meant it did.

• Second, men who are the victims of this deformity tend to have it inflicted on them in childhood, often by other men who suffer from the same deformity. Men carry this deformity because when they are still boys someone (it can be a man or a woman) chastises them for asking for help.

The point is that the patriarchy meme creates an environment where both men and women acquire stupid deformities that they carry around in their heads, and then often go on to inflict on the next generation. The idea that women shouldn't initiate sex hurts both men and women, it is a deformity of patriarchy in the heads of many women, and it is often inflicted on women by other women.

In my personal case, I grew up in the 1990's when crying as a man made you a pussy. As an adult in 2026, I can't cry (the ability was beaten out of me) even though I think as an adult in 2026 that the concept of "men don't cry" is stupid. When my parents die, I won't be able to cry at their funerals, not because I won't want to but because I can't. I don't have a physical deformity as a result of patriarchy, but I have the mental equivalent of a broken, twisted foot in terms of being able to express my emotions.

TLDR

Footbinding lasted a thousand years because it wasn't just a physical practice. It was a meme that deformed its carriers' perceptions, expectations, and values so thoroughly that breaking a little girl's feet felt like good parenting. Patriarchy works the same way: it's a meme that deforms how both men and women perceive gender, what they expect from each other, and what they consider acceptable to inflict on their children in the name of "raising them right." Like footbinding, it recruits its victims as its enforcers: women enforce it on women, men enforce it on men. Like an accent, you can't hear it in yourself, but the Ipsos 2026 survey data lets us literally see it at different intensities across countries, fading along a clear modernization gradient. And like footbinding, which died in a single generation once enough people organized to stop, patriarchy can be killed. It's already dying. The question is whether you're willing to notice the deformities it left in you, stop passing them on, and help it die faster.