Our Habitus, Or: Men Are Collateral Damage of Patriarchy

This passage of Toril Moi’s great essay on using Pierre Bourdieu’s work for feminist theory touches on why men are affected by sexist structures – without there being such a thing as reverse sexism: 

 Our habitus is at once produced and expressed through
our movements, gestures, facial expressions, manners, ways of walking, and ways of looking at the world. The  socially produced body is thus necessarily also  a  political body, or  rather an  embodied politics. Thus even such basic activities as teaching children how to move, dress, and eat are thoroughly political, in that they impose
on them an unspoken understanding of legitimate ways to (re)present their body to themselves and  others. The  body-and  its apparel such as clothing, gestures, make-up and so on-becomes  a kind of constant reminder ( of sociosexual power relations.It follows from Bourdieu’s understanding of the social effects of gender divisions that the dominant group -in  this case  men- do not escape the burdens of their own domination.