The Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy

This is an excellent book because he does not enforce a man-hating policy. Instead, he addresses everyone who participates in the patriarchal society. So many men and women resist feminism because everyone's looking for the people to blame, and no one wants to feel guilty. He states simply that we are all to blame if we do not examine how we live our lives. I know now that even though i'm a woman, i too was to blame. Patriarchy is bigger than all of us, and to say that Johnson hates men or is self-loathing is ignorant and only goes to prove the point of his book. If you have the chance to see him speak--do so. It's worth it.

Allan Johnson writes with rare clarity about gender issues. Here at last is a book about gender relations that both men and women can feel connected to. Johnson validates women's feminist work, holding it up as an example of both moral and intellectual achievement. In fact, he takes feminism absolutely seriously, which made me realize just how rare that is. And yet, he's not a guilt-ridden "sensitive 90's guy" who is merely kow-towing to anything female because of the long history of our mistreatment at the hands of his gender. Instead, Johnson takes a far more responsible role than passive guilt. He is actively working to understand patriarchy from a male perspective in order that he can be part of a large-scale, *societal* (not individual-level) solution to the gender problems we are mired in. Men will not feel personally attacked by his stance on patriarchy, and yet, women will feel validated. This is a very important book.

When I first read this book a couple of years ago, I was not prepared to accept the full sweep of Johnson's arguments. It was not that I disagreed with his reasoning -- his logic is as sound as his prose is lucid! But I was not prepared for the implications of what he had written for my own life -- as a man who professed to be active in the feminist movement, I was for some time not prepared to make the changes in my private life which were necessary to unravel my own "gender knot". But I have grown, I have changed, and as I mature both as a man and an academician, I realize just how fundamentally right on Johnson is. His words haunt me: "That I don't rape women doesn't mean I'm not involved in a patriarchal society that promotes both male privilege and male violence against women." Men need to remember that.

This book, at a minimum, should be on the reading lists of every introductory course in Sociology and/or Anthropology (which, in turn, should be part of every college's core curriculum). No where have I seen a more lucid discussion of oppression, as it occurs in the patriarchy of western society.What's more, the author does what many others writing on the topic fail to do: He effectively sets aside "the blame game," reminding us that social forces are well beyond the reach of any individual's control. And that proves to be an interesting irony, as oppression is always about "control."There are a few gaps in the book. Touching on some evolutionary psychology could have benefitted the discussion. (Although one could reasonably argue the author was clearly focusing on systems, not individual behavior; therefore, the discussion of the evolutionary psychology of individual behavior as it affects groups is perhaps outside the scope of this discussion). And the discussion of the history of patriarchy left out some critical causation, requiring the reader with no prior historical background to make some logical leaps. However, in the whole scheme of the book, considering everything he does cover so effectively and thoroughly, one can hardly argue with what he left out. Furthermore, his citations and his resource list are excellent. The reader can in fact get the additional background s/he might want to fill in the gaps almost entirely from the citations. There is only one book he didn't reference that I believe is equally essential reading about human behavior in the developed world, Robert Wright's _The_Moral_Animal_. Put these two books together in a Sociology curriculum along with some of their more notable citations, and we might just find ourselves creating a generation of enlightened people who appreciate not only that patriarchy is bad for everyone, male and female, but who will understand why and can start developing ways in which it can be replaced as the operant social system in Western Society.

Allan Johnson takes a complex and highly charged topic and makes it clear, concise and understandable, regardless of one's gender. His analysis spans the gamut from the personal to the general with regards to not only power relationships between men and women, but also the dynamics of all kinds of oppression. He is "radical" in that he gets to the root causes of sexism -- all isms for that matter. Yet he stays clear of the guilt/blame spiral and instead inspires a sense of empowerment, suggesting how to be part of the solution to the immense problems wrought by patriarchy's fallacies. Also, appreciated his challenges to some of the leading gurus in the "mythopoetic men's movement" as well as the trendy gender arbiters like John Gray and Debra Tannen, who normalize male/female behavior differences, without examining the root causes and how they actually perpetuate behaviors formed out of thousands of years of patriarchal conditioning.This book removes the veil of illusion about the world we live in -- while offering hope, not for quick fixes, but of the long-term, big-picture variety. It reveals the scholarship of one who has gone to the depths in the study of people, social systems and how they interact.