First off, I know what you are thinking: it should be Patriarchy roosters, not chickens. Or cocks, if you want to be suggestive. But that’s exactly why I ultimately went with chicken, because my husband was concerned we might be sending the wrong message if we kept talking to our children about cocks. None of them have hit puberty yet and it’s hard enough to teach them about hegemony and patriarchy let alone the nuances of when or not to use the word cock in public. Cockpit is ok. Gamecock is also fine, but since the sport itself is banned, or should be, we don’t like to reinforce the practice by using the term. Coxwain would be ok if we lived by the ocean or joined a competitive rowing team, but for now I think my husband is right, teach our daughters about toxic masculinity before they learn to masturbate, let them learn about maritime sports after.
The first rules of Patriarchy Chicken are simple. You put your left foot in and then take your left foot out. This part of it is really just like the hokey pokey except instead of turning yourself about you stand your ground and question the speaker about their authority over your body.
“Isn’t it my decision whether or not I turn myself about?” is a good first question.
“Don’t assume agency over my underaged body, sir.” is a useful retort. Adding sir to the end of the statement gives a kind of respectful deference without handing over any real power, my husband says.
You can also say ma’am, if its a woman, but it almost never is.
After that comes the crane technique. You can explain this to your children as a kind of Pokemon level-up sort of play, from chicken to fighting waterfowl. They can use it if the discussion gets tense fast and a man starts to approach. The idea is to start by standing on one leg with arms extended out and only slightly above the head, hands almost dangling downward. It’s a tricky move and you might want to watch the movie a few times, but basically as the man approaches you hop from one leg to the other and move your arms up and down in such a way as to distract the man while you kick him in the genitals. Yes, like Karate kid. That’s the movie. It’s my husband’s favorite.
The other level-up game we’ve experimented with is the Katniss Everdeen. And it’s a little dangerous and I wouldn’t really advise it for your girls unless you want to put a lot of time in practicing it because 1) they will get hurt, and 2) it just takes a lot of coaching. Basically you leave your daughters in the woods for a week with only some weapons and hidden food caches around that they have to find. Oh yeah, and booby traps. Although we don’t call them that, obviously, since part of playing chicken with the patriarchy is not accepting the male tendency to sexualize everything. Anyway, our girls did fine with this part, it was the part when the cops came in the woods to find them after some hikers complained that got scary. My husband said it was just like “First Blood,” but I didn’t really know what he was talking about because I wasn’t allowed to watch TV or movies when I was growing up. I did see Karate Kid in college. And Hunger Games, we’ve watched all of those films multiple times with our girls since they were born.
Anyway, they didn’t charge our youngest with assault for holding the Bowie knife to the Sheriff’s throat and threatening to bite off his ear. Though threatening a police officer is against the law, the Sheriff was so impressed with my girls survival skills that he didn’t see a point in pressing charges. He even told the girls they’d make good officers some day.
“Our future is not yours to determine, sir.” They told him in unison and I was so proud, but maybe a little embarrassed, because he was really nice actually. I din’t actually find it demeaning. But as my husband says, nice men are the most dangerous of all. Every year he asks the girls the same trick question: “Who’s more dangerous? The slaveholder who beats his slaves or the slaveholder who treats his slaves like family and gives them adequate housing and good schooling and protects them from the cruelty of the world outside the plantation?” It’s the latter of course, because at least in the former the slaves know that slavery is bad and want to fight back. But in the latter, he says, they’re too just dumb to resist it. I think this lesson is maybe a little harsh for the girls, but I understand his point. And he’s the one with the high-paying job, so I generally defer to him.
Mostly what we teach our girls is to confront gender-oppression head on. To look it in the face and not turn away. If you’re going to get in a staring competition with the patriarchy, we tell our girls, you best not lose. I don’t know if there is a man on earth who could beat my oldest in a staring competition. She can go so long that you can see her eyeballs start to dry out. First they get red and veiny and then they start to yellow a bit, like golden raisins, and then from a side angle you can see them shrivel, but you’ll never, and I am not exaggerating, ever see her blink. She was just born like that really though. I mean, we tried to teach all the girls how to do it, but Artemis was a pro from age two on.
The last lesson is of course the one you can’t teach as a parent. But we’ve put them all through wilderness first aid courses and knife sharpening skills, and so if that kind of violation should ever be attempted on one of my daughters, I am fairly sure they’ll all be able to both isolate and neutralize the threat and sew up the resulting wound. And if they fail in their mission, and don’t choose death before dishonor like we’ve discussed, which is ok really, it’s a lot to process for a young girl, we have stocked up on both plan B and rape kits. And I have vowed as their mother to avenge any assault on one of my daughters by not only killing her attacker but the man who raised the attacker. My husband says this is the only way to stop the cycle of gender violence at the root.
Like he also always says, when it comes to confronting rape culture, this family will be the last to look away. These chickens will most definitely come home to roost.