What is Matriarchy?
A comparison of matriarchy vs patriarchy as foundations of social logic
Do you know what patriarchal myth grinds my gears the most? The myth that matriarchy is the same organizational system as patriarchy, just with women dominating men for pleasure and profit.
This is utter nonsense - a patriarchal projection of its own zero sum mentality where order is strictly defined by sadistic control and submission.
Let’s talk about it. We’re going to look at matriarchy and patriarchy as competing social logics that create the foundational expectations for human relationships individually and collectively, setting the course for nations according to the standards upheld at the family/community raising level.
To be clear - I’m speaking to the social logic these systems produce. I’m generally unconcerned about superficial focuses like family name or inheritance standards (whether family and property is inherited from father-to-son or mother-to-daughter).
I’m uninterested in these aspects because they are manifestations of the deeper social logics at play. We’ll explain as we go, but ultimately, I believe that investing in matriarchal social logic will lead to innovating all of our social systems and standards in ways that de-emphasize marriage and excessive material hoarding at the heart of our radical inequalities.
What is Matriarchy?
Matriarchy centers society and the logic of human connection around caring for children and investing in rising generations. Patriarchy centers society and the logic of human connection around serving the fears and desires of adult men.
These radically different organizational systems result in radically different values, cultures, and outcomes.
Okay, cool - what the heck does that actually mean?
Matriarchies center children and investments in rising generations as the primary social logic. This means that every adult participates and contributes to meeting the needs of every child in the community - regardless of genetic connection.
It is a social focus on cooperatively establishing a baseline quality of life for all people within the community by investing resources on children and the stewardship of future generations first.
The difference between cooperation and exploitation is participation.
When every adult - regardless of gender, relationship or parentage status - participates in meeting children’s needs, by extension all basic needs get met.
That doesn’t mean that every person is doing the same work or fulfilling the same roles, but it does mean every adult is contributing cooperatively.
Already, we’re breaking out of patriarchal gender roles because every adult is expected to contribute, but they’re not limited to traditionally “masculine” (public) or “feminine” (domestic) spheres.
The more important aspect of this perspective is dismantling myths of entitlement that are currently tearing our families and communities apart. Men are not entitled to receive a clean, well organized and maintained household from women. Men are not entitled to receive the title of husband and father without fulfilling a mature vision of said role.
Men must develop the basic adult skills and the maturity to participate and contribute to the wellbeing of their homes and families. Men must develop the basic emotional maturity to respect women as human beings, not objects of use and pleasure.
Critically, men must hold each other accountable for how they treat women because only men can confront and dismantle the culture of male narcissism that perpetuates unaccountable violence against girls and women.
This is what I mean when I say everyone is participating and contributing. Children are best served by parents who model care, cooperation, and love as a practice. Men’s role is critical in this if they can find the will to overcome their attachments to patriarchal welfare entitlements, rage, and self-selected emotional isolation.
Cooperation means men must contribute to the daily labor of life. The difference between cooperation and exploitation is participation.
The equation of a man doing 10 hours of irregular chores every quarter while receiving 7 extra hours of domestic labor every week from his girlfriend or wife is not acceptable.
That is unqualified and unnecessary male welfare and our society is weak and fragile for relying on these gendered entitlements as the foundation of human connections.
So, I’m not speaking of some magical utopia where everyone only has to perform work that they personally enjoy and find fulfilling. I’m speaking of a cooperative understanding where every adult is competent in performing basic life skills to meet their own needs and contribute to the wellbeing of the larger communities and systems they belong to.
Patriarchy’s goal was and is to gender and privatize cooperative care work under individual male ownership.
Embodying this cooperative understanding on the interpersonal level is critical. Institutions and social structures will follow suit if we lead them.
Building new systems along matriarchal social logic can and will happen as we align to those cultural expectations on the village level first.
Ultimately, transitioning society to a social logic of cooperation will require a total overhaul of our structures and taxing billionaires and their stateless enterprises out of existence.
That is how we’ll redirect the surplus humanity has collectively created, but that corporate billionaires currently hoard back into our communities and in service of human life once more. We’ll talk about that in greater detail in future articles, but it is absolutely possible.
Remember, our systems exist to serve human life. Human life does not exist to serve these systems.
Cooperation as Social Currency
Within matriarchal communities, collective decision making and investments are held to a standard of stewardship in service of the long term prospects and prosperity of rising generations. This cooperative understanding prioritizes caring for the environment and making long term investments over short term profiteering.
Ultimately, matriarchal social logic is dedicated to a baseline quality of life for all by cooperatively meeting all basic needs first. If you’re familiar with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, think of matriarchy as pooling human resources to ensure everyone has secured their lower tier needs first, which is required before a person can fulfill higher level needs like the actualization of individual potential.
We can think of matriarchy as a social logic of cooperating to mutually secure the lower tier needs for all people within the community from a cultural understanding that no one can actualize personal freedom and manifest their own unique potential and innate talents without securing those basic classes first.
In this way, everyone recognizes that it is in mutual self-interest to cooperatively participate for the greatest health and ultimate freedom of every individual.
Moving towards matriarchal investments aligns with socialism, right? Mandating that our social systems facilitate positive basic rights for all people as their purpose.
Basic positive rights include: universal healthcare, access to affordable housing, robust public education, ensuring nutritious food security for every person and especially children through free breakfast and lunch offerings at school, freedom from preventable diseases, freedom from violence, and environmental stewardship and protection.
Gender Roles Are the Privatization of Care Work
The greatest obstacle to cooperative investment is our patriarchal conditioning.
Let me be clear - the purpose of patriarchal gender roles is to serve the process of men abandoning cooperative participation to instead leverage human needs to subjugate women into slaves.
Patriarchy’s goal was and is to gender and privatize cooperative care work under individual male ownership.
This is why patriarchy created the false gender binary and wack ass concepts of masculinity and femininity as mutually exclusive expressions of sex at birth. This was necessary to privatize care and excuse men from cooperative participation.
It’s how men moved away from contribution to consumption as their self-concept of masculinity.
Check out this article about masculinity and femininity for a deep dive into why that polarity references the duality of a whole individual, not a distinction of sexes as conservatives whine on about.
The glorification of heterosexual marriage as the standard for human connection - and the corresponding demonization of same sex partnerships, queer, gay, and trans identities - was about institutionalizing the exploitation of women as property.
When men are excused from cooperative standards and mastering basic adult skills, then they require a woman to perform that labor for them. They require welfare.
This is what marriage was created for. Buying and selling girls and women as slaves and concubines for male use and pleasure.
Same sex partnership is in opposition to this labor theft. We see in Greek and Roman histories how man-on-man sexuality was tolerated and even celebrated in some cases, but woman-on-woman was always demonized.
If every man feels entitled to own a woman as his means of production, then you absolutely cannot have lesbians. You can’t even tolerate childless celibate women by choice - that’s like an empty factory! That cuts men out of their birthright to profiteer from the existence of girls and women!
I really enjoy this lecture from Dr. Roy Casagranda discussing this history and so much more about the evolution of masculinity - check it out!
But let’s get back to matriarchy, shall we?
Politically Speaking - Do Women Get to Stick it to Men?!
Nope! There is no evidence that any matriarchal society ever barred men from participating in political and social power structures. Which makes sense.
If the whole logic is based on serving kids and future generations, why would you turn around once boys become men and say JK WE ACTUALLY HATE YOUR GUTS, LOSERS! OH MAN, WE GOT YOU SO GOOD - TRICKED YOU BY LOVING YOU, CARING FOR YOU, INVESTING IN YOU UNCONDITIONALLY THROUGHOUT YOUR CHILDHOOD AND YOU SUCKERS ATE IT ALL UP! HAHAHAHAHAHA NOW WE ABUSE YOU!!! MAHAHAHAHA
Yeah, that makes no sense. That would be a long con with no punch line.
So, no, adult men are not denied political and social participation within matriarchy and thus they are not denied political and social power. That being said, according to the social logic of stewardship and cooperative care, it would naturally make sense for women to assume greater authority socially and politically from a greater demonstrated competency.
When leadership is based on competency women outperform men because we’ve had to develop more resilience due to patriarchal obstacles and burdens placed on us since childhood. It’s like comparing someone who jogs everyday vs someone who jogs with 30 lbs of weights every day. The person burdened with weight will develop stronger, faster capacities.
That’s a rule of thumb bred from experience and baked into the reality of community. Acknowledging that does not erase the productive contributions and participation of men, nor how individual men are capable of demonstrating their competency of leadership in ways that enhance their own authority and social leadership.
Ultimately, adult men aren’t systematically disadvantaged or advantaged within matriarchy. They are not centered and irrationally empowered and aggrandized above women and children.
Matriarchy Best Hope for Healing Masculinity
Patriarchal societies excuse men from processes of maturation through cooperative contribution and, as a result, we forfeit a mature vision for masculinity.
In this way, patriarchy actually centers adolescent/teenage boy mentality as our social logic and standard because men aren’t held accountable to emotionally and functionally mature beyond their teenage pleasure seeking and egoistical pursuits.
The adolescent boy needs to participate in cooperative care to learn how to overcome narcissism. All people do - our problem is how we’ve coddled and enabled boys and men to avoid these processes.
Listen, narcissism isn’t a man-only issue - it’s a state of arrested development that any person can embody and that any person can do the work to evolve beyond.
It is a natural process of maturation to evolve beyond child-like narcissism that only recognizes self as real and all others as means for personal ends.
Systemically excusing men from maturing capacities to perceive and relate to other people as human beings with equally valid rights of autonomy and independent needs and realities is what creates patriarchy’s culture of male narcissism.
In Contrast to Patriarchal Social Logic
This kind of matriarchal cultural understanding is a stark contrast to patriarchal social logic which is generally transactional to the point of dysfunctional impoverishment of us all.
Patriarchal social logic is driven by leverage points in the most competitive and anti-cooperative sense.
Patriarchy encourages men to leverage the basic needs of others to consolidate their own power to extract, exploit, and profit. Creating leverage points to ensure women must go through men to access basic resources enables men to refuse cooperative contribution - the processes they actually need most to mature beyond perpetual boyhood that prioritizes pleasure seeking above all else.
This is how patriarchy artificially empowers men. Patriarchy banned women from controlling their own bodies, energies, and creative products to create leverage points for men to consume cooperative care and pleasure from women without participation, compensation, or reciprocity.
By institutionally hoarding all resources away from women, patriarchy forced women to serve men to survive. Men leveraged the existence of needs for short term profit of enslaving women.
This social logic is what we’ve built society upon. Patriarchal society does not create systems with the mandate to facilitate meeting human needs because it is assumed that society only serves men, and every man privately owns a woman to produce needs and care for his personal exploitation and profit.
In Conclusion…
Let’s be clear - matriarchal vs patriarchal organizations set the foundational social logic that societies are built upon. It is this intimate and abstract social logic of how to value each other in cooperation or exploitation that grows within households to determine the fate of nation states.
Matriarchal cooperation is our best hope for creating a brighter, happier, more connected future for us all.
Thanks for reading! Please share, like, and subscribe for weekly articles and more!
As always, I love to hear from you! Drop a comment to let me know your thoughts :)
Check me out on
TikTok at CocoHasIdeas
IG PowerCultureCoco
YT PowerCultureCoco
xoxo,
One of the best works I've ever read on this topic! Criminally underrated. Thank you so much for writing this and publishing!
👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽