Patriarchy Has No Gender: From a Berlin Sticker to a Rooftop in Guntur
- Jonah Batambuze
- 6 hours ago
- 5 min read
From Berlin to Guntur: A Sticker, a Rooftop, and a Conversation Men Rarely Have
I didn’t expect a sticker on a café machine in Berlin to follow me all the way to a makeshift rooftop bar in Guntur, India—but it did.
Fuck the Patriarchy.
White letters, black vinyl. A fragment of dissent inside Oyoun, the arts space punished for hosting voices critical of Israel’s assault on Palestinians.
I snapped the photo and moved on. I didn’t know the sticker would turn into a bridge between continents.
Two weeks later, after giving a talk in Hyderabad titled Black × Brown Love Can Help Change the World, I was on a rooftop in Guntur with a man I’d just met—a friend-of-a-friend, introduced because “you two think alike.”
As we arrived, the owners were still taking drying clothes off the line. Shirts, saris, night air, street noise drifting upward. It was improvised, lived-in, ordinary.
I told him about the BlindianProject—how 80% of our community identifies as femme, how women and femmes move first, intervene first, hold the contradictions first. They create space long before the rest of us arrive. (I’ve written about this emotional architecture in my piece on femme infrastructure.)
He nodded. And then he began talking.
He didn’t start with theory. He started with his life. I leaned in as he described what patriarchy was doing to men in Guntur: the pressure to be “the provider,” the shame when roles reverse, the mental-health crisis nobody discusses, the suicides, the fear of failing a script none of us wrote.
And in the warm dark above the city, two men finally talked about the weight patriarchy puts on our backs.
Patriarchy Hurts Women First — But It Damages Men in Quieter, Invisible Ways
Let’s be clear: Women bear the earliest and most devastating impacts—domestic violence, femicide, everyday fear. That cannot be minimized.
I remember a Zoom call during lockdown when two of my female colleagues suddenly went silent. News had broken that Noor Mukadam, the 27-year-old daughter of a former Pakistani diplomat, had been held captive and beheaded by a man she knew. They couldn’t continue the meeting. The violence felt personal.
I realized: the news didn’t hit me in the same rhythm—not because I didn’t care, but because men aren’t conditioned to fear for their lives the way women are. For many women, patriarchy isn’t a theory. It’s a daily calculation.
But patriarchy doesn’t stop after harming women. It harms men differently.
It teaches men:
vulnerability is danger
softness is failure
worth is measured in earnings
shame is the penalty for falling short
And that logic scales.
Patriarchy doesn’t just shape households—it shapes streets, classrooms, and boardrooms. It’s the force that pushes boys in Chicago, Baltimore, Kampala, and Guntur to perform toughness—sometimes joining crews or gangs to build armor, to avoid humiliation, to survive.
Think of Namond Brice in The Wire—a boy trying to survive a masculinity scripted long before he arrived.
And that performance echoes everywhere: in CEO suites, tech culture, competitive workplaces, politics, family WhatsApp groups. Anywhere men fear the cost of being seen as “soft.”
Women feel patriarchy’s violence immediately. Men feel its erosion slowly. But both are caught in the same architecture.
Masculinity, Shame, and the Silent Burn
“It’s killing the men here,” he said.Not metaphorically. Literally.
He talked about friends overwhelmed by shame. Men collapsing quietly under expectations their culture—and now globalization—insist they must fulfill. The fear of not providing. The panic when their wives earn more. The pressure to mimic Western lifestyles while drowning in debt.
I thought of my own family. Uncles who were never the breadwinners of their households, yet respected for their presence, humor, and steadiness. No whispers. No judgement.
But today that tolerance feels thinner. The room for gentleness smaller. The script tighter.
If It’s Happening in Guntur, It’s Happening in Uganda Too
Patriarchy rarely announces itself—it repeats itself.
I haven’t heard men in Uganda talk openly like this. But if it’s happening in Guntur—another collectivist culture now reshaped by modernization, aspiration, and new forms of debt—I can only assume it’s happening at home too.
Our communities share so much:
breadwinner logic
gendered expectation
family honor
quiet shame
sudden financial precarity
Patriarchy adapts to all of it. Quietly. Efficiently. Globally.
You don’t need to hear the words for the pattern to be real.
bell hooks & Audre Lorde Already Told Us This
bell hooks wrote that patriarchy teaches boys to kill off parts of themselves to survive. Audre Lorde wrote about scripts men never authored but still perform.
On that rooftop, their theory became literal.
Patriarchy doesn’t just dominate—it distorts.It distorts how men see women.But it also distorts how men see themselves.
It’s a global structure. The accents change. The meaning stays the same.
Patriarchy Isn’t Cultural — It’s Global Infrastructure
People often frame patriarchy as “South Asian,” “African,” or “Middle Eastern.”
But patriarchy is not cultural. It’s infrastructural.
Colonialism spread it.
Religion codified it.
Capitalism monetized it.
Caste hardened it.
Racism weaponized it.
From Berlin to Guntur to Kampala, the same script appears with different costumes:
Be strong. Be unshakeable. Be silent.
Why Men Must Join the Work — Especially Across Black × Brown Communities
In my work with BlindianProject and South Asians for Black Lives, one truth repeats across borders:Women—especially femmes—carry our movements.
They step forward first. They hold communities together. They absorb the shock before anyone else feels it.
But if men are collapsing internally—ashamed, silent, afraid—we are not showing up as full partners in solidarity. And solidarity requires full participation.
Ending patriarchy isn’t just a women’s issue. It’s a community issue. A movement issue. A liberation issue.
Men must step in—not out of guilt, but out of survival and love.
If Men Want to Heal, We Must Unlearn the Script
Patriarchy trains men to avoid the very things that make life bearable:
connection
softness
truth
emotional literacy
self-forgiveness
If men want to heal, we must unlearn what patriarchy buried inside us:
Vulnerability is not weakness.
Breadwinning is not identity.
Worth is not measured in earnings.
Strength includes softness.
Relationships thrive on honesty, not performance.
Liberation requires participation, not silence.
We are not being asked to give something up. We’re being asked to reclaim the parts of ourselves patriarchy stole.
The Sticker Makes Sense Now — Because Patriarchy Travels Too
That sticker in Berlin doesn’t feel like a slogan anymore. It feels like a map.
A map that stretches from Germany to India to Uganda—a map of how far patriarchy travels and how deeply it roots itself.
But maps also show routes: Ways through. Ways out.
If patriarchy is inherited across borders, then so must be the refusal to accept it.
Men must be part of that refusal. Not for theory. For our lives. And for the communities who need us whole.
The sticker was right. But the work will take more than a sticker—it will take all of us.
Jonah Batambuze is a, Ugandan-American interdisciplinary artist and founder of the BlindianProject, a global platform remixing Black x Brown identity through art, history, and storytelling. His work moves across installation, film, writing, and education—challenging systems of erasure while building new cultural blueprints.
Batambuze speaks and facilitates internationally on topics including Black South Asian solidarity, caste and colonial legacies, diasporic memory, and cultural resistance.
For speaking engagements, workshops, or media inquiries, contact: jonah@blindian-project.com or visit jonahbatambuze.com/speaking
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