Patriarchy Isn’t Just Out There. It’s In How You Respond.

Since decentering men, the way I orient my life around them has changed significantly. I’m more selective now of who I let in. I stay with what happens in my body when I’m with them, letting that organize how I respond and determine how I relate.

And to be honest, as someone who works at the level of pattern, it feels like a lot of work to engage with men. The tracking is constant. What’s being assumed, where the interaction is moving, what starts forming around me without being named. I can feel it almost immediately now.

And it’s exhausting.

Most of my interactions with men happen out in the wild these days. Clubs, shows, events, places where people move in and out of interaction without much structure. And in those spaces, there’s almost always a moment where a man approaches and assumes some level of access to me. Not every time, but enough that it no longer surprises me. What’s changed is how I respond depending on the contact.

Long time ago, I would go along with it. I’d smile, nod, follow what they were saying, respond in a way that kept the interaction moving. Sometimes I’d be waiting for it to end the entire time, internally scanning for an exit without taking one. Other times I wouldn’t even realize I didn’t want to be there until it was already over.

And then I’d feel it. That immediate, visceral “what the fuck was that.” A kind of disgust that landed after the fact. For a long time I turned that back on myself.

Why didn’t you interrupt that? Why didn’t you say something? Why do you keep doing this?

Then I started noticing it in real time. I’d be mid-conversation and suddenly realize I didn’t actually want to be there. At the same time, I could feel part of me step out just enough to keep the interaction going. My body would tighten, my thoughts would scatter, and I’d lose access to something that had been clear a second before. I could feel what was true, but I couldn’t act on it.

So the work became staying with myself while it was happening, instead of abandoning the moment and trying to make sense of it after. Letting the awareness land fully enough that it could actually organize my response. After enough repetitions, something shifted. And since I already knew this was likely to happen, I didn’t need to keep being caught off guard by it. I could meet the moment as it unfolded and respond from there, without defaulting into the same pattern.

As you read the following, stay with what happens in your body. Notice where you tense, tighten, justify, or pull back. Pay attention to that. Let it show you something.

The first time I really did this, I was at a show several years ago.

A man walked up to me and started talking. Conversation was neutral, even pleasant at first. Then he asked who I was there with. I told him, myself. Without hesitation, he said, “Oh, well I can be your buddy for the night.”

I felt it instantly. My stomach tightened, heat moved through my chest, something in me sharpened. I looked at him and asked, what makes you think I want a buddy for the night? He stepped back slightly, trying to recover, and before he could get there I asked him something else. Would you say the same thing to a man if you found out he was here alone?

He paused. “No.”

Then don’t say it to a woman. And I walked away.

My heart started racing almost immediately. That surge of activation, the clean edge of anger moving through my system. And then, just as quickly, it shifted. Thoughts saturated with guilt: that was too harsh, Alexandra. He was just being nice. The whole thing replayed itself, looking for a way to take the edge off of what had just happened.

The pattern didn’t stop there. Once I began interrupting instead of accommodating, I started seeing the same dynamic in different forms.

Another night I was sitting outside by a fire. A man came up, made a comment about my hair, asked what I did for a living. When I told him I was a psychotherapist, something benign turned into labor. He sat down and moved straight into talking about his mother. Boundaries, shame, things he was working through. There was an expectation built into it, subtle but unmistakable, that I would stay, listen, help him organize it. Like my attention was already his to use.

So I interrupted him. I asked if he had $200 on him. He looked at me, confused. “No.”

I told him my hourly rate was $200, and if he wanted me to sit there and listen to him talk about his mother, he needed to pay me. He half-smiled, shifted in his seat. My face remained neutral. The awkwardness between us was thick. I didn’t wait for him to speak. I got up and left.

Again, the same aftershock. This time layered with something else. Because here was a man opening up, talking about his feelings. And there’s a whole narrative around that, about how rare it is, how important it is, how it should be met and held space for. So now the doubt comes in slightly different. Maybe I should have stayed. Maybe that was one of those moments where I’m supposed to hold space. You can feel how quickly the narrative tries to distort what just happened.

The most recent one was off the dance floor. I had stepped outside for a minute when a man walked up and told me we had shared a moment while dancing.

I paused. I had never seen this person before. So I told him, you may have had a moment, but I didn’t. He tried to recalibrate, smiling, telling me his day had gotten better because he was talking to me now, like that was something I should graciously receive. And my body responded before I could shape it.

Ew. Gross. It came out clean and direct.

He laughed, trying to smooth it over. “I’m just being nice.”

Heat rose and tightened in my chest. I stayed where I was and told him it wasn’t nice. That it wasn’t flattering and he was assuming he had access to me because he decided to approach me, spoken with a charge of anger and clarity.

Then he said it. “Oh, so you’re taken.” And that’s when it fully landed. Because in his mind, that was the only explanation. Not that I wasn’t interested or that I didn’t want to engage, but because access to me must already belong to another man. What the actual fuck.

I told him that was telling. That the only way he could make sense of me not engaging was to assume someone else had claimed me. Like it hadn’t occurred to him that I might belong to myself. He immediately starting stumbling over his words, something about taking too much MDMA that night. I didn’t let him finish. Again, I walked away. And almost on cue, the guilt filled self-doubt followed me back into the club.

These moments aren’t rare and there have been MANY more. They’re consistent enough that once you start paying attention, you can see the pattern clearly. What disturbed me wasn’t just the interactions themselves, but what happened inside them.

The moment I didn’t respond the way they expected, something changed. You could see it in their body. The hesitation, the confusion, the attempt to reorient the interaction back to the script of me accommodating their entitlement to access. And that used to be the moment that hooked me, not what they said, but their discomfort.

There’s a reflex that comes online right there. To buffer it, make it less uncomfortable, help them land somewhere easier by stepping back in and regulating what just got disrupted. That reflex is strong enough that for a long time, I didn’t even recognize it as a pattern. Now, when that moment comes, I don’t stay in it. I leave. Not because I can’t handle the interaction, but because I’m not interested in organizing myself around what gets stirred up in someone else when I stop playing a role I was trained into. They can feel what they feel. And I don’t need to carry it. My work is in being with what shows up next.

I share these examples because of how deeply this lives in the body. It doesn’t require a relationship to activate. It plays out in passing interactions, in moments that seem ordinary and still organize in the same way.

What’s underneath all of these encounters is consistent. Different words, tone, and contexts, yet same underlying assumption.

Access.

Access is already in the room before anything is said. It shows up in the way a man walks toward you and begins speaking as if the space between you has already been crossed. There’s no pause where the situation has to be established or no moment where participation gets oriented to. Conversation just starts, and your presence is folded into it without being asked for.

At first it’s easy to miss because nothing feels overtly wrong. The delivery often starts as neutral. A question, a comment, something that reads as casual enough to pass without resistance. And by the time your body registers that you didn’t choose this, the moment is already moving.

There’s a subtle current underneath it. Something that assumes continuation, expects response, and treats your attention as part of the environment rather than something you are actively giving. You can feel it in how quickly the exchange gains shape. How it starts to carry itself forward, building a kind of momentum that doesn’t ask whether you want to be inside of it or not.

And once you’re in it, even briefly, that momentum does something. It begins to organize the space around itself. The longer it holds, the more it starts to feel like a shared moment that needs to be sustained because it’s already underway, and stepping out of it carries weight. It feels like interrupting something that has taken on its own coherence. That’s where the distortion sits. Nothing explicit was ever established, but something is still expected to continue. And when it doesn’t, when you stop tracking it, feeding it, and letting it organize your attention, there’s a visible recalibration. A pause and a slight disorientation, as if the structure that was forming suddenly lost its support.

Nothing has been taken; the structure collapses the moment you stop holding what was never yours in the first place.

And every time, what follows in me is just as consistent. That internal turn, the questioning, the pull to reinterpret what just happened in a way that makes it nicer to hold. That’s the part that took longer to understand because the interaction itself is only one piece of what is hard to hold. Saying something direct, interrupting, walking away, even naming what’s true in the moment, that part becomes almost clean once you’re inside it and have practiced it enough. My body knows what it wants to say. I trust the clarity there.

What’s more challenging is what comes after because almost immediately, something in me moves to change what I just did. To make it more reasonable, considerate, in line with who I’ve been taught to be. Like I’m being thoughtful, reflective, empathetic. However when I stay with it, I can feel what’s actually happening.

I’ve stepped outside of something I was trained to do my entire life. To be accommodating, receptive, easy going, “nice”. To make space for men’s needs and emotions even when I didn’t choose that space. To prioritize being experienced as warm, generous, “good”. That training runs so deep that when I don’t follow it, it registers as wrong or bad.

That’s where the guilt comes from, arriving the moment I move outside of what I was trained was acceptable. And if I don’t see that clearly, I’ll use that feeling to correct myself. I’ll recalibrate next time, stay a little longer, explain more than I need to. Return to the same pattern, just with more awareness.

I think about this in relation to my own position.

I’m a white, femme nonbinary person. That determines this in ways I can feel, even when I’m not consciously tracking it. There’s a way I’m read before anything happens, a kind of baseline assumption that I’m safe, approachable, easy to engage. That frames how I’m approached, how my responses land, and how guilt shows up when I step outside of it.

There’s a pressure inside whiteness to be seen as good, to be liked, to be read a certain way, smoothing, managing, softening, keeping things relationally intact because of proximity to power. That lives in me. It’s part of what gets activated when I step outside of what’s expected. The guilt doesn’t just come from gendered training. It’s braided into how I’ve been conditioned inside whiteness too. And I can feel the margin that gives me.

When I interrupt, don’t accommodate, and I let something land without managing it, there are consequences. I’m read differently and interaction shifts, and yet there’s still a kind of containment around it. It doesn’t tend to follow me in the same way or close things down in the same way.

That isn’t true across the board. I’m not moving through these moments with the same stakes, and everything about how it unfolds shifts depending on who you are and how you’re seen before anything even begins. So even this experience of guilt isn’t universal, and the room to interrupt it changes depending on where you stand.

This sits inside something much older. Guilt has been woven into how women are conditioned to move through the world. It forms early, through small reinforcements that accumulate over time. Agreement steadies the interaction, attunement preserves connection, and responsiveness makes it easier for others to stay close. For many it is rooted in survival. Those patterns don’t need to be explicitly taught. They are absorbed through repetition, what is punished, what is rewarded, and what maintains belonging. It is implicit memory.

Over time, that orientation becomes reflexive. Attention shifts outward automatically, tracking how others are feeling, how something is landing, what might need to be adjusted to keep the interaction cohesive. The body learns to anticipate disruption and move to resolve it before it fully forms. Guilt is what sustains that movement.

It operates as an internal pressure that keeps behavior aligned with what has been reinforced. It doesn’t require anyone to say anything. It arrives on its own, shaping perception, narrowing options, guiding action back toward what is known. Decisions begin to form around relieving that pressure rather than following what is actually wanted.

That’s how it becomes difficult to distinguish between choice and conditioning because the feeling itself carries authority. It signals that something has gone off course, that a rupture has been made, and repair is needed. And in response, attention turns toward restoring a version of oneself that is more pleasant to receive. Gentler, more accommodating and in script with what has been historically recognized as caring.

Seen in that context, guilt isn’t simply emotional. It functions as a regulator. It maintains continuity with a role that has been constructed over generations, keeping behavior predictable, legible, contained within a range that doesn’t disrupt the expectations placed on women in everyday interactions. And when that pattern is interrupted, even slightly, the feeling intensifies.

That’s how it maintains itself. Not just through what men assume they are entitled to, but through what women have been trained to do in response. So when you step outside of that, even slightly, it can feel like you’re becoming someone else. Colder. Meaner. A bitch. Ugly. That’s the edge. In the moment after, where everything in you wants to move back toward what’s familiar. Staying there, without editing yourself to relieve that tension, is where something actually begins to shift.

Over time, this has become a practice in my life. I’m not only ust paying attention to what happens in an interaction anymore. I’m paying attention to what happens in me as it unfolds. The way my body organizes before I’ve even decided what I want to do. The way a response starts forming on its own, and I can feel myself orient toward keeping something intact without ever consciously choosing it.

That’s where I’ve learned to stay.

Not in the story of what’s happening or the identity imposed on me, but in the pattern underneath it. In the moment where something takes hold and begins to move me in a direction that feels familiar, even when it doesn’t feel true.

And what I’ve come to see, again and again, in my own experience and in the work I do with clients, is how predictable it is what happens next. The second there’s a deviation, something interrupting the script, then something else enters just as quickly. A voice, a sensation, a tightening that begins to calibrate the moment. It often sounds like self-awareness, care, kindness, reflection… like I’m taking responsibility for how I showed up.

It sounds like me.

But there’s a quality to it that doesn’t shift. It arrives with the same timing every time, moving in right after the disruption, right after the moment where something different has already happened. And what it’s organizing toward is also consistent. It pulls for adjustment, softening, for a return to what has already been established as legible and acceptable.

For a long time, I treated that as insight. Now I recognize it differently. There’s something internal that has been made by the same structures I’m interrupting externally, and it knows exactly how to move me back into place. It knows how to speak in a voice I trust, how to make its case in a way that feels reasonable, even necessary. It doesn’t need to convince me of anything new. It just needs to redirect me toward what I have been trained to do.

I’ve started to think of it as the internalized whitecishetero patriarchy, because that’s what it functions like. It maintains the pattern from the inside, restores continuity, and keeps everything aligned with what has been reinforced over time. And once that became clear, the way I relate to it changed. When it shows up now, there’s a moment of recognition. Hello, sneaky fucker. A noticing that it’s here, it’s doing what it’s always done, and it’s moving in at the exact point where it’s most effective.

And instead of following it, I stay where I am. I bring my attention back into my body, into the place that registered what was true before any of that came online. I let the discomfort of that remain without trying to resolve it. I let the moment hold without trying to make it more acceptable, understandable, palatable, or digestible.

That’s the practice. Building capacity for discomfort that comes with actual disruption. Not getting rid of what shows up, not trying to override or avoid it, not attempting to get relief from it, but learning how to stay with myself while it’s happening, without returning to the pattern that would make everything feel easier again.

It’s too easy to point outward and name what men are doing. The assumptions, the entitlement, the way access is taken for granted. But that’s only half of it. The other half is what happens in you. The part that turns inward the second you step outside of the expected role. The part that questions, adjusts, pulls you back toward being someone who is pleasant and obedient. That’s the mechanism that keeps it running.

If you’re still trying to be liked inside of it, still organizing yourself around being seen in a certain way, you’re not actually interrupting anything. You’re just making yourself more convenient to move through and participating in the system.

What shifts something is much more uncomfortable. It’s a woman who belongs to herself in real time, who can stay with what’s actually happening in her body long enough to trust it and speak from there, who can feel the moment her system says fix this, soften this, make this less messy, and stays where she is. Who can feel the guilt without turning it into truth. Who can sense how she’s being perceived without reorganizing herself around it. That doesn’t read as nice or accommodating. And it isn’t meant to.

The version of you that is always warm and effortless to be with has been doing a tremendous amount of labor. The second you stop doing that labor, you feel it. It lands as betraying your training, as becoming someone you’re not supposed to be. And it comes with costs.

So the question becomes what still organizes you once you feel that.

When the guilt comes in, when the impulse to adjust is right there, what are you actually moving to protect?

And what happens if you don’t?

In contact,

Alexandra Winteraven 🖤

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Alexandra Winteraven (they/them) is a queer, nonbinary somatic depth psychotherapist working at the intersection of somatic process, depth psychology, structural analysis., and cultural emergence. Their work focuses on interrupting inherited patterns at the level of the body, where the psyche continues to organize itself despite insight.

They are known for naming incongruence with clarity and care, and for working with people who are no longer able to live inside familiar shapes. Their approach is relational, embodied, and uninterested in performance or bypass. Their work supports internal structural reorganization rather than symptom management, and is oriented toward honesty, the cost of real change, and collective transformation.

If you’re curious about working in a 1:1 somatic depth container with Alexandra go here.