The System's Favorite Fight
Why the gender war serves the pyramid and what to do instead - Issue 1.3
I’ve spent the last few weeks being very careful to say that the pyramid harms men too and that feminism shouldn’t be fighting against men, but against the system that makes men think hurting others is okay. I stand by that. But something I’ve been reading lately cracked open a layer I hadn’t examined. The system harms men in different ways than it harms women, sure, but it also shields men1 from the harm they create. Cis white men have a get-out-of-jail-free card. They system’s narrative is that violence perpetrated by cis white men is the system’s fault so they shouldn’t bear any responsibility at all.
Bullshit.
If a man kills his wife, he’s a murderer and it doesn’t matter whether or not he kills himself afterward.
But so often, the narrative is that these men’s mental health crisis is caused by lack of success or (unproven and posthumously assumed to be false - although that’s a whole ‘nother can of worms) allegations of criminal activity and so his mental health isn’t his fault. He should have been able to get help. The system should have stepped in, and because it didn’t, he shouldn’t have to be responsible for his actions. He’s the real victim here, and it’s tragic that he took others with him in his victimhood.
See that? The picture of a sympathetic murderer who may-or-may-not have had a long history of abuse?
What about the people he hurt? What about the people he killed?!
The pyramid strips men of emotional vocabulary, teaches them that vulnerability is shameful, isolates them from genuine connection. And then — when they explode, when they lash out — it rushes in with an explanation. He was struggling. He didn’t have the tools. The system failed him.
Some of that is true. The system did fail him. But somewhere between “this was made harder for him” and “therefore he bears no responsibility,” something has gone very wrong. When we talk about privilege, this is exactly what we’re trying to point out. Because society fails everyone. Society makes everything harder for most people. And the more factors you add in (race, gender, ability, neurodiversity, native language, country of origin, economic class), the more society fails you. And somehow the fact that he didn’t have to deal with 99.9% of these barriers every day of his life, somehow the fact that he got used to the system working for him instead of against him, somehow all that means the system failed him worse than the woman he murdered?!
Well, society did fail him. A man whose behavior is explained away is a man who never has to look at the structure that shaped him, and a man who stays useful to that system, even after death.
The pyramid teaches boys — particularly boys who are also told by class, race, or conventional privilege that success is their birthright — that they won’t need coping skills. That failure won’t be something they have to make peace with. That the world will accommodate their expectations rather than the other way around. This is harmful. It makes emotional development harder. It means that when the reckoning comes — and it always comes — they haven’t built the muscles for it.
But harder is not impossible.
Women develop those muscles early, not because we’re naturally more emotionally intelligent, but because the system forces the reckoning on us constantly through microaggressions, dismissals, and a steady drumbeat of no, no, no, no. It’s not fair. It’s not character-building in any meaningful sense. But it does produce a forced acquaintance with the reality that the world will not simply bend to your will, and that you have to learn to carry disappointment without making it someone else’s emergency.
At some point, you’re expected to grow up regardless of whether anyone made it easy. You’re expected to take no for an answer. You’re expected to process rejection without turning it into a weapon. And “I wasn’t given the tools early enough” has to eventually become go get the tools — not a permanent shield from the consequences of not having them. The system failing you in childhood does not grant you a lifetime pass on the harm you do to others. At some point, the responsibility to change belongs to you.
The system failing you in childhood does not grant you a lifetime pass on the harm you do to others.
We’ve spent too long on trying to figure out whose fault all this is. The system shares blame, the person shares blame, but that’s not the important conversation, even though that’s where most discussions end.
No, the real topic of conversation should be around the intentional action people take once they’ve realized that the system has failed them. What do you do after you realize you’ve done harm to others? And this is where the wider conversation breaks down — because the system has a vested interest in making sure that question never gets asked.
Instead, it offers us a war.
Psychologist Stephen Karpman mapped a pattern he called the drama triangle — three roles that lock people into cycles of harm without ever resolving anything. There’s the aggressor, the victim, and the savior. Feminists name men as aggressors, position women as victims, and step into the savior role. Misogynists do the same thing in reverse, casting women as the aggressors destroying men and traditional society. Both sides feel entirely justified. Both sides are fighting hard to win. And the pyramid sits back and runs the waterwheel, because a gender war fought across a false binary is exactly the kind of perpetual motion machine it was designed to exploit. The more injustice the system creates, the more bitter the war becomes. The more bitter the war becomes, the more everyone’s energy goes into fighting each other rather than examining the structure that started the fight.
And then there are the trolls.
Not everyone engaged in the gender war is a casualty of it. Some people like it there. The misogynists who have built identities around hating women, who show up to argue in bad faith, who treat the whole exchange as a game they’re playing for points — they’re not looking for resolution. They’ve embraced the aggressor role and are looking for people to play victim and savior. They’re looking for engagement. Every reply is a win. Every feminist who takes the bait and spends her energy trying to out-argue someone who doesn’t want to be persuaded is energy the pyramid has successfully redirected away from anything that might actually threaten it. The gender war isn’t just a product of the system. For some of its participants, it’s entertainment. And the pyramid monetizes every single reply.
This is why, as feminists and people interested in building something geometrically different, we have to be very deliberate about which fights we pick. Not every argument deserves an answer. Not every bad faith provocation is an invitation to engage. Stepping around the gender war isn’t conceding it. It’s refusing to power the social geometry that requires us to be at the bottom.
The question that gets us out isn’t whose fault is this. It’s what are you going to do about it.
Think of it this way. If you knock over a vase by accident, the moral weight of the moment isn’t really in the knocking. It’s in what comes next. Do you shrug and walk away — in which case the accident reveals something about your priorities? Or do you pick up the pieces, replace what you broke, and make it right — in which case it was a real mistake?
The same applies here. If the system shaped you to cause harm (as and it shapes all of us in different directions and to different degrees) the question isn’t whether that’s your fault. It doesn’t matter whose fault it is. The question is what you do when you see it. Educate yourself. Change the pattern. Make it right where you can. Do that, and the original harm belongs to the system. It’s evidence of what the pyramid does to people, and dismantling it protects the next generation from inheriting the same patterns. But if you see it, name the system, and walk away — that part is yours.
The drama triangle runs on blame — on finding the aggressor, punishing them, and rotating into the next round. What I’m describing is something lateral instead. Not who caused this, but what do we do about it. Not how do we win, but how do we build something the pyramid can’t convert into fuel.
The gender war has no winners. It has participants and it has casualties, and the longer it runs, the harder it becomes to tell them apart. The pyramid designed it that way.
We don’t have to play.
Together, we resist. Together, we endure. Together, we thrive.
I’d love to know where this lands for you — whether it tracks, whether it pushes somewhere uncomfortable, whether I’ve missed something. The comments are open.
Specifically cis white men - there’s a different conversation around race, gender, and violence that needs to be had, and it’s almost polar opposite of the conversation that happens here. Intersectionality matters!
Well written, thank you!