How Patriarchy Conditions Male Desire and Marriage Choices

I was 18, studying in Gambia for seven months, when my grandmother noticed how many men were circling and sat me down. “You are of high status,” she said. “Intelligent. Beautiful. Mashallah. But you see these men lining up to ask for your hand? Many belong to a generation that will die soon and want your youth to ease their passing. Others choose women they know their friends will envy, not the ones they’re emotionally equal to. Some are already in love with the housemaids they’ll never dare marry.”

She wasn’t warning me out of cynicism. She was naming a system.

“Men today are strategic,” she told me. “They don’t marry who they love. They marry who performs the role. Who gives them proximity to class, to status, to acceptance. You will be told you’re everything, but that will not protect you from being reduced to nothing if the wrong one is chosen.

Think like Lovette. Be strategic for your wellbeing. Understand the people and person you’re dealing with. not who they are pretending to be”

That same season, I declined two proposals, many more would be deckined later. One of those men later attempted to force me, convinced that if he defiled me, I’d have no choice but to marry him. He failed. And the head wound he now blames on football? That’s not where it came from.

Men are not choosing based on desire. They’re choosing based on what patriarchy taught them to want.

The woman they marry often fits the template, socially affirmed, admired by other men, “safe” within dominant norms. The goal isn’t emotional alignment. It’s external validation. That choice is shaped by racialized beauty standards, generational programming, and unexamined entitlement.

Marriage becomes a symbol of arrival, not intimacy. A reward. A ranking. A performance. And the women who fit the template—thin, white, compliant, desirable—are rarely treated well. They are aesthetic prizes men claim to signal power or success, but the pedestal is cold and conditional. Once the performance fades or the woman asserts agency, the same men who pursued her for social validation often turn bitter, withholding, or cruel.

Because they never learned to love her—only to win her. Your own monarchs have modeled this for generations—but no one’s named it clearly.That’s why some white women are called foot soldiers of both patriarchy and white supremacy.Not because they’re powerless, but because they enforce the rules while pretending they don’t write them.

In systems built on domination, even the trophy suffers. Unless she’s surrounded by women who’ve studied these systems and chosen not to replicate them, her downfall is almost inevitable. Not because she failed, but because the game was never built for her to thrive—only to be seen.

Sydney Sweeney and the blueprint of white femininity

The American Eagle x Sydney Sweeney campaign doesn’t just feature a celebrity, it performs a white supremacist aesthetic blueprint.

Sweeney is positioned as more than a brand partner. She’s a familiar template: white, blonde, thin, soft-spoken, and hyperfeminine. She is speaking on genetics in another coded language. Her image aligns with what mainstream Western culture has long coded as desirable, trustworthy, and worthy of protection.

She represents the kind of femininity men are trained to desire—not because it nourishes them, but because it rewards them socially. And she represents the kind of woman women are told to become if they want love, safety, or visibility.

This isn’t just product placement—it’s cultural reinforcement. Media doesn’t simply reflect society; it trains it. This is how racism moves: through repetition, desirability, and the consistent framing of who is allowed to be seen as worthy, aspirational, or “normal.”

The styling, the softness, the camera’s gaze—none of it is accidental. Each element signals an ideal, one that is deeply racialized, classed, and heteronormative. This isn’t about denim. It’s about hierarchy.

What’s being sold here isn’t just clothing—it’s submission, refined into aspiration. The branding may appear neutral, even empowering, but that’s part of the mechanism. When whiteness is packaged this softly, the harm becomes harder to name—but easier to internalize.

And that’s exactly why it works. That is usually where I come in to name and disrupt even in these spaces.

White supremacy uses beauty to secure power

What looks like just another lifestyle ad featuring a “pretty actress” is anything but innocent. These campaigns operate as visual propaganda—subtle enough to seem apolitical, but sharp enough to reproduce social order.

Beauty has always been a tool of white supremacy. Not just to exclude, but to rank, reward, and control. The politics of desirability are racialized and classed, and they function quietly—through advertising, casting choices, and algorithms—to define who deserves attention, love, safety, or care.

In this context, Sydney Sweeney becomes a vessel. Her body, her hair, her tone, her wardrobe—all selected to communicate not individuality, but compliance. She doesn’t just evoke desire. She evokes order.

Scholar Richard Dyer once described whiteness as “the ideal manifestation of humanity”—a default setting that appears innocent while maintaining violent norms. Sweeney fits this precisely: visually soft, structurally violent. She offers comfort to the gaze that shaped her.

What she symbolizes isn’t love. It’s access.

* Access to white femininity.

* Access to proximity.

* Access to cultural approval and systemic power.

The performance of heterosexual success—marrying the right kind of woman, posting her, centering her—is a strategic move under patriarchy. It grants protection, inheritance, upward mobility. Men don’t always choose the women they love. They choose the woman who completes the image.

Desire, in this system, is rarely organic. It’s manufactured. Then enforced.

And beauty isn’t just preference. It’s white supremacy ideology that is being marketed back to us as “natural” as Jeans…I mean genes.

Strategic Marriages Leave Everyone Starving

Many men don’t marry the women they love. They marry the woman they believe will complete the picture they’ve been trained to perform.

There is a emotional cost to submitting to Patriarchal Partnerships. From boyhood, many are taught to desire externally and repress internally. Emotional depth is feminized. Vulnerability is punished. What remains is a hollow performance of masculinity shaped by image, not intimacy.

So when it comes time to “settle down,” love isn’t the metric. Visual capital is.

Men choose partners who reflect cultural value, not personal compatibility. The woman he marries must look the part. She must be desirable enough to win approval from his peers, passive enough to avoid confrontation, and aspirational enough to signal he’s arrived.

Many women especially those who mirror dominant ideals enter these relationships believing they’ve been chosen for love, when in reality, they’ve been selected for legibility. For alignment with whiteness, softness, or social safety. And over time, the disconnect shows. These women are often resented, ignored, or left emotionally malnourished—not because they failed—but because the man never knew how to see them in the first place. He married a symbol, not a person.

This is structural grooming.

It’s the consequence of a system that teaches men to prioritize status over self-awareness, and teaches women to be grateful for proximity—no matter how cold the room.

The rise of “trad wives” isn’t random

-it’s showing up now, during an economic downturn, as some women scramble to align with what they think is the dominant structure. But that structure is in its final throes. You can choose to go down with a system built on colonization, imperialism, and genocide—or you can embrace matriarchy, your own resilience, and align with the disruptors. The women who studied these systems. The ones who refuse to perform obedience for a patriarchy they were never meant to survive.

Fellow women marginalised who know the playbook because we had to study it, or align with perpetual betrayers of us. The choice is yours.

The image i inserted for is the life white supremacy scripted for white women. From cradle to grave: be desirable, be obedient, be useful, then disappear.

My grandmother disrupted that script before it could touch me.She raised me in a matriarchal system where worth wasn’t tied to male approval, aging wasn’t failure, and a woman’s life didn’t end in quiet resignation—it expanded in power.

Trad wife culture is just a rerun of this diagram. Romanticized submission dressed in vintage filters. Some of us were raised to remember something older and freer.

Inclusion Means Disappearance When the System Wasn’t Built for You

This is Why I Refuse Inclusion in a Beauty System Built on Erasure

As a Black woman, I’ve spent nearly two decades dismantling the lie of “aspirational beauty”, in branding, advertising, and corporate inclusion frameworks. I didn’t critique the system to earn my way into it. I don’t want to be folded into a standard that was never built to see me, let alone celebrate me.

I reject the terms.

I’ve worked inside the beauty industry, behind the camera, in boardrooms, on stage, and in frontline advocacy. I’ve watched white beauty standards get rebranded as “inclusive” while still centering thinness, whiteness, and visual softness as the baseline for value. And I’ve watched brands tokenize Blackness while upholding the very standards that erase us.

I don’t want to be invited into a room built on erasure.

I want to build the structure differently. Or not enter it at all.

I live in Sweden, one of the most visually “progressive” yet structurally silent places when it comes to race. We are marketed to as the land of blondes—even though most blondes I see are on Maybelline bottles, not in real life. People forget (or conveniently don’t know) that Sweden was one of the birthplaces of racial pseudoscience. The racism I confront here isn’t loud. It’s institutional, aesthetic, and deadly quiet.

So when I say I practice body neutrality, I mean it. I don’t exist to be visually pleasing or “accepted.” I don’t need to be softened to be respected. My value is not contingent on presentation.

And to white women who say they’re decolonising, pay attention.

If you climb to the top of a new hierarchy while stepping over others—trans people, men of color, fat folks, disabled women—you haven’t dismantled anything. You’ve just renamed the power structure.

That’s not liberation. That’s gynarchy dressed as progress.

Women swapping positions in a hierarchy built on domination won’t free any of us. Resisting replication means being honest about how white femininity is still weaponized even in activist spaces.

So no, I don’t want to be included in a beauty system that requires my disappearance.

I want no part of an aesthetic economy built on erasure and projection.

I’m building something else.

And I know exactly who I’m building it for—those who read between the lines, who engage the work materially, and who don’t flinch when it gets uncomfortable.

Because dismantling systems means dismantling what shaped us: the media we consumed, the families we survived, the language we inherited.

The question isn’t whether you agree.

The question is: are you ready to stop performing and start unlearning?

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Further reading: the work is already here

* If this hit a nerve, it was supposed to.

* If you’re ready to go deeper, start here:

Work With Me: Inclusion Strategy, Keynotes, and Critical Conversations

Explore More from The Lovette Jallow Perspective

You can find more of my essays exploring:

* Neurodivergence, autism, and navigating public life as a Black woman

* Building true inclusion beyond checkbox diversity

* Reclaiming voice and agency across personal, political, and historical landscapes

* Racism in Sweden and systemic injustice

Each essay connects real-world experience with structural analysis—equipping individuals and institutions to think deeper, act smarter, and build sustainable change.

Who is Lovette Jallow?

Lovette Jallow is one of Scandinavia’s most influential voices on systemic racism, intersectional justice, and human rights. She is a nine-time award-winning author, keynote speaker, lecturer, and humanitarian specializing in:

* Neurodiversity and workplace inclusion

* Structural policy reform

* Anti-racism education and systemic change

As one of the few Black, queer, autistic, ADHD, and Muslim women working at the intersection of human rights, structural accountability, and corporate transformation, Lovette offers a uniquely authoritative perspective rooted in lived experience and professional expertise.

Her work bridges theory, research, and action—guiding institutions to move beyond performative diversity efforts and toward sustainable structural change.

Lovette has worked across Sweden, The Gambia, Libya, and Lebanon—tackling institutional racism, legal discrimination, and refugee protection. Her expertise has been sought by outlets like The New York Times and by leading humanitarian organizations addressing racial justice, policy reform, and intersectional equity.

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