1325: Matriarchy | Skeptical Sunday

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Now, today, on "Skeptical Sunday," we are talking about "Maitreearchy."

Not "Patrearchy," the word you hear all the time on the internet. We're talking about "Maitreearchy." Now, I know you're thinking this is either about dunking on feminism or building some kind of shrine to it, but the actual story here is so much more complicated. I don't actually know what a "Maitreearchy" looks like globally,

but I do know what it looks like when I lose an argument at home. Now, tell me, think through it is writer and researcher Jessica Win.

“Okay, so let's not start with a definition, because I think definitions are where this conversation”

kind of goes to die, so let's start with a place. Is there an actual "Maitreearchy" somewhere on Earth right now? There are places routinely described that way, like the millions of menincapal people in West Sumatra, Indonesia. They are the largest matrilineal society on Earth.

Property passes through the mother, the family name comes from the mother, women control land and inheritance, and when you marry, the husband moves into the wife's family home. Okay that sounds pretty matrilineal, but is the land and namesake thing? Is that just performative or does this mean women kind of run everything?

So, men hold most of the formal, political and religious roles, so Islamic law operates alongside customary law, and in both systems, men have significant authority. Women control the property, but often not the decisions happening on the property. Okay, so the women own everything, and the men kind of sounds like they run everything? Yeah, that's right.

And this is considered the world's largest matriarchy. Yeah, but by journalists who visit and see property passing through women and make the claims without digging further. So the people who actually live there are sometimes baffled by the label.

“Are there other societies or is this kind of where it ends these days?”

Well, there's the Kasi and Northeastern India. They're also matrilineal, name, property, and clan identity all come through the mother. Okay. The youngest daughter typically inherits the family home, and women are central to the household, and they do hold high status.

Okay, and the men? The men there have religious and political authority, but they don't seem content with this agreement, because there's actually a men's rights movement among the Kasi. Okay. So it's a group called the Sinkong Rimpade Timmy.

They're organized specifically to push back against what they see as men being marginalized by matrilineal inheritance. All right, I probably shouldn't have left, but hold on. So this so-called matriarchy has men in charge of religion and politics, and those men are complaining.

So that's like optics. I mean, which tells you something about the gap between what it looks like from the outside, and what's really happening on the inside. So a society can look progressive on paper while the day-to-day experience is still pretty constrained,

This kind of reminds me of a vice-news piece from a few years ago. So my friend is a journalist who used to be a vice-isabel young,

“and she interviewed this, I think he was like an Afghan member of parliament about women's rights.”

And the man wouldn't look at her at all, of course, and he would stop her questioning, and then she pressed him on something a little bit like in a very polite way.

And he basically tells the translator, "It sounds like she wants to have her nose cut off

for being so insulin," or something like that. And they subtitle it. It's just, have you seen this? It's actually close. Oh, I remember it for sure.

I mean, it's a wild clip. Yeah. Nothing says, "No, we take women seriously, like threatening to mutilate the reporter mid-interview." I mean, he just proved her point by shutting down the interview with wild. Right, exactly. Having a woman questioned him and questioned his authority or whatever he perceived,

that was just too much. In the minute, guys like that feel like they're on the losing end of a gender gap, even a hint of the balance. It's only, hey, we should consider equity.

The word fairness shows up real fast with issues on the other foot.

Yeah, it's impressive, actually. Perspective changes very quickly when the dynamic shifts. There's also the bribe of Costa Rica, and they're organized through matrilineal clans. So women are the only ones who can inherit land,

and the only ones permitted to prepare the certain cacao for sacred ceremonies, which is a really significant ritual role in their society. So women control land and the sacred substance. Yeah, that sounds like real power, at least in that society. Yeah, and it is.

But still, the highest spiritual authority, the shaman, is a role exclusive to men, and only men perform funeral rights. So women hold the land, and they do sacred daily work, while men hold the roles that carry the most prestige and respect. Okay, so it sounds like women have the responsibility in men in some ways have the glory here.

And you know, me, I'm not like a hardcore feminist guy. I have people listening right now who've maybe surprised by this, but this is what it sounds like to me. And I can't say I'm surprised because it seems like optics are important in these systems.

“Is there anywhere to actually flips and goes the other way?”

Where women genuinely hold both the resources and the prestige? There's one more case that's worth looking at, and it's probably the most misunderstood. So the Masuo in southwestern China near the Tibetan border. Their society is often called the last matriarchy.

So the household is led by a senior woman, usually the grandmother. Children take the mother's name, they stay in her household, and inheritance passes through the female line. Women run the domestic economy and take on work that in many cultures is reserved for men. Okay, that all tracks so far, so where does it get complicated?

So the relationship structure is what's complicated. The Masuo practice what's called oxia translated it means walking marriages. So women and men decide by mutual consent to be together, but they don't ever live together, they don't merge finances, and there's no formal contract.

The man literally walks to the woman's house at night and goes back to his own family home each morning. How romantic, structural sleepovers?

This is basically how my high school relationships work.

Just with better organization and probably they didn't have to keep it. It's secret from their parents, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know if they're sneaking in and out of windows like my high school boyfriend, but it's just a normal life works for them. Cash, can you imagine knocking on the door like, "Hi, oh hi, yes.

I'm here to bang your daughter." Yes, I'll be here for my nightly. I'll leave in the morning. It's also funny that the guy basically does the walk of shame back to his mom's house in the morning. Just like, well that's us putting our wedges to the high school idea into it.

I mean, I think it's less walk of shame and more of just their marital commute. Sure, sure. So the matriarchies built on booty calls, who knew? Okay, it really is the lineage that's the unit and not the couple. That's the big difference I'm hearing here.

Right, and anthropologists call it something closer to serial monogamy. You know, it can be short-term or lifelong. And the relationship can end if either person decides it's over. And what's interesting to me is there's relatively little social drama around all of this. Okay, and what happens if the couple has kids.

Children are raised entirely in the mother's household.

“So the primary male figure in a child's life is usually the maternal uncle,”

not the biological father. The father can be involved by agreement, but he's not the central paternal presence. So this system operates quite a bit outside of what we're used to. I'm impressed that it's unbothered by the norms and most other places. Wrap your head around this.

Year a man in this society and you're raising your sisters or whatever kids as their father figure. And you might even have your own kids, but you're not really a big deal in their life. Their mother's brother is, right, you're just the guy who comes over after they go to bed.

But the thing is, and I think about that and I'm assuming a guy's listening right now,

I'm thinking about that and they're like, oh, I don't really know that about that. I don't really like how that feels, but to them, it's completely normal. And it might be that it's a non-issue for those guys. So I don't know, it is hard to wrap my mind around this because we're so immersed in the current system that we have. It's just so different.

“I think it's hard for a lot of people even close to them to wrap their mind around it.”

The Masua weren't frozen in time and they're under real pressure from the state government. Yeah, you know what? That makes sense. You'd have to build a legal system around this.

Like, who gets custody when this relationship breaks up?

And it doesn't make sense to give the father 50% custody. It's like, what do you do? And I don't want to know those are, let her in the uncle Razum. I don't want anything to do. Like, I'll come over and hang out. What are you in child support? No, it's not my responsibility. I mean, that's just a totally different

game. So when you say pressure from the state, what exactly do you mean the government is against marriage by booty call or what? Yeah, pretty much. China's legal and economic systems are built around nuclear families and formal marriage. And the Masua system doesn't fit neatly into that. They don't have any kind of contract when they get these walking marriages put in place.

So there's a constant push towards standardizing these their practices. Plus the Masua are heavily marketed as the last matriarchy, which causes this huge influx of tourists expecting to see something exotic going on. So this is the whole system becomes a spectacle and has a bit of an audience. Yeah, right. And that can start to reshape how the system is practiced.

But even with that, the core structure holds the women anchor the household and the economy. I mean, the men aren't powerless, but their roles are more specific. They tend to have authority in areas like ritual and funerals and the killing of animals, like certain community decisions. But the domestic and economic center of gravity is unmistakably female. Women run it. And that's the part that's hard to wrap your head around if you come from

a system where marriage is the foundation of everything. Yeah, that is structurally highly unique. I mean, I can already hear some men say, hey, this sounds great. No pressure to be the

“provider or a traditional family man. And they get to have sex on the regular still, right?”

It seems like the system could have been developed on behalf of men. But it still gets called a matriarchy because of who's in control of the resources, I guess. That's the misunderstanding. So it's not no responsibility. It's just a different responsibility. So men are still deeply involved in family life, but just in their own household as brothers and uncles, not as husbands and nuclear fathers. Right. Okay. So you don't get to opt out. You just play a different role. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. Responsibly doesn't disappear. It's just redistributed. And it's worth noticing something across all of these examples. Okay. What's the through line? So in every case, women hold significant structural power over the property inheritance land and the lineage. But in every case, the men retain the prestigious roles, the ritual authority, the formal political positions. So yeah, women get the property and the work, but men keep the ceremony and the title. So in the most

famous matriarchies on earth, the women have the burden and the men still have the prestige.

“Wow. Right. Yeah. Which raises the question, what are we even looking for when we say matriarchy?”

Because that word is doing about six different jobs at once. And it's being paid. What is it? 80 cents on the dollar for all of that? Exactly. So I mean, but let's actually sort this out. Because the distinctions matter enormously. And I think the definitions will make sense now that we've seen some real examples. So first, you have matrilineal societies. These are the societies about descent and inheritance, like your family name and property. They all get traced

through the mother. That tells you how a society organizes families. It does not tell you who holds

power. Okay. That's an important caveat. Yeah. Yeah. It's a crucial caveat. Then you have

matrilocal societies. This is when a couple marries. The husband moves into the wife's family home. Again, this is all about structure, not authority. My trainer moved in with his wife in her house. So I guess he tells me he's part of a matrilocal. Yeah. He's matrilocal. Yeah. There you go. So this guy moves in with her family and certainly every mother in law joke ever told. But it doesn't necessarily mean women are shaping how power actually works. And then there's

matrilocal, which are household centered around the mother as the primary social and emotional anchor. This brings women high status and they often wield a lot of influence. Still not the same as political authority or any formal power, though. Okay. So we've got a bunch of things that kinda look like matrilicate, but aren't actually even the same thing at all. Which leaves us

authority. All formal power structures are female dominated. The problem here is that this kind of

“society is extremely hard to find. Well, okay. Hard to find because it doesn't exist or what?”

Yeah. Well, there's a few possibilities. One being that pure matrilicate might not exist. Or it's possible we've been looking for the wrong thing when we say matrilicate or maybe the historical record we're using wasn't written by people interested in recognizing matrilicate when and if it did ever exist. But that's three different conclusions. So do we know which one might be truth? I don't know. Yeah. All three might be partially true, which is really uncomfortable. Okay.

But why does this definition mess even really matter? Because I feel like in popular conversation,

you know, you just say matrilicate, everyone just nods. Yeah. It matters because the confusion

distorts real societies. So from the manank about Indonesia or the Kasi and Northeastern India, they're constantly being misrepresented. A Western journalist visits sees property passing through women and the family name coming from the mother and then writes a piece about the world's largest matrilicate. People there read it and think that's not what's happening here at all. They might be flattered, but they are bewildered. So this is sort of amateur armchair sociology

or anthropology romanticizing a different culture. Kind of, but a lot of them are professional holes that you know that are really armchair, you know. But on the other side, you have anthropologists with a very strict checklist on matrilicate. And this means women must hold formal political power. So they look at a place like manank about, see men in many official political and religious roles and conclude that it's not a matrilicate. But that misses how power actually functions

in that society. So we're measuring this with the wrong tools and we get the wrong answers. Yeah, exactly. It's applying a Western framework. What power is supposed to look like

“and using that to judge a system that may be organized very differently. And that's why these”

debates about matrilicate just go in circles. People arguing from different definitions without realizing they're not talking about the same thing. Okay, so did matrilicate ever exist? Was there a prehistoric golden age where women ran everything someplace before men showed up and invented bureaucracy? Yeah, people really like to think this. This is actually a claim with a very specific origin. It was formalized in 1861 by a Swiss scholar Johann Jacob Bakkelfen.

Maybe not formalized. Maybe invented is a better word for his theory. Yeah, and in 1861. So this is an exactly ancient wisdom from some papyrus scroll. Right? This is a 19th century man with a theory. Yeah, so it's just this Victorian guy Bakkelfen argued that early human societies were organized around women and motherhood. And that over time they evolved into patriarchy, which he saw as a more advanced stage of civilization. Oh, bold claim. Okay. So the guy who invented

the idea of prehistoric matrilicate thought patriarchy was a good upgrade. Nice. Yeah, he thought it was more advanced. Yeah. And that detail gets lost every time the theory gets reused. So later regangles the German philosopher and co-author of the communist manifesto. Right. He connected the idea of matrilicate to capitalism. Of course he did. Okay. Of course. He argued that the

overthrow of what he called mother right, which basically meaning inheritance and family lineage

passing through women was the first major defeat of women. So he saw matrilicate's disappearance as linked to the rise of private property and class society. Then in the 1970s and 80s parts of the feminist spirituality movement reshaped the whole thing into a story about a lost golden age of peace and goddess worship that was violently destroyed by patriarchy. But that's the version

“people remember. Some lost peaceful world before I don't know. Men ruined it. I mean, I've heard”

that story a bunch. I kind of get the appeal. But yeah, but there's pretty much no evidence this prehistoric matrilicate actually happened. So the idea circulated widely in feminist organizing glorious stynum talked about this. It spread in neopeigen communities in academic conferences and on network television. So the images of a prehistoric world where women were revered society was peaceful and ecological and men hadn't yet ruined everything. What's interesting is

that the most rigorous takedown of this peaceful matrilicate world narrative comes from a feminist scholar, her name Cynthia Eller, she wrote a book called The Myth of matrilicate prehistory

I've ever read. I feel like you're making enemies. Alright, what is she so sure? I know people are going to say how anti-feminist I am. But her core argument is that the evidence offered for prehistoric matrilicate simply doesn't support the claim. And her evidence is strong. You know, you have female figurines found at archaeological sites, goddess imagery in ancient art, burial patterns, suggesting high status for some women. That all feels really empowering. But Ella says, look,

a finding a statue of a woman does not tell you women ran the government. Finding goddess worship doesn't tell you women held political authority. So spiritual symbolism and public governance are very different things. And a male god is worshiped in most traditions and that hasn't stopped most men from being excluded from power. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, and then Ella makes a

“second argument that I think is even more interesting and more genuinely feminist. She argues the”

myth of matrilicate prehistory is actually bad for feminism, even though it may feel empowering. That feels counterintuitive. Why is the idea of a society run by women bad for feminism again? Because of what it assumes women are, right? In these stories of the matrilicate golden age,

it always looks the same. Peaceful, nurturing, communal, close to nature. Women are cast as caregivers,

consensus builders and life givers. And Ella's point is, yes, that might sound empowering and it flips the valuation, but it keeps the stereotype. So the same traits that have been used to exclude women from power are now being used to justify it. So if the premise is the same, you know, women are naturally nurturing. It doesn't matter if the conclusion is that they should be subordinate or that they should rule. It's just the same box within nicer labels. Right. And the assumption goes completely

unchallenged that women are all about care and emotion and men are about reason and hierarchy.

“Historically, that assumption has done a lot more harm than good because it frames women as”

submissive and men as dominant. Okay. So the empowering myth of matrilicate prehistory is in a weird way, running on the same operating system is the thing that it's pushing back against. That's exactly her argument. And she goes further saying that this myth didn't originate in feminism. The myth was originally created by men. Bokofin, angles, and their intellectual heirs, who thought of matrilicate as something humanity had correctly outgrown. Savage. So the feminist version

is a later reinterpretation, not the original idea. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show. We'll be right back. This episode was sponsored by the perfect gene. You know, when you're throwing your usual genes in there, like fine, not great, not comfy, just something you tolerate, that's basically the deal with genes forever. You don't love them. You work around them until we tried the perfect gene. No stiffness. No break in period. No, they'll feel better after a few

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Every Wednesday to your inbox. Very practical. Something you can apply and use right away. Right out of the box. It's a nugget of wisdom or a gem from the show or our lives from us to you. Jordanharbinger.com/news is where you can find it. Now, back to skeptical Sunday. I feel like I'm taking like women's studies one or two right now. In this episode of the show, I was not expecting this. Okay. So that's a pretty devastating critique though. So even the

Origin story comes from guys with a heck. The thing we move past that nonsense. All right, guys. But the argument that there's no evidence for prehistoric matriarchy, it really depends on the

“historical record. And I think we should be at least a little bit skeptical about who's record that”

is because who wrote the record, right? Who decided what counted as authority and what was worth documenting? Some just some picturing old sort of British guys with monocles that I don't know hunt, quail with those long rifles and wear those smoking jackets. And they're like, "We're a look at the statue of old men clearly. They exalted women." And also there's savages. So of course the women were running things. Anyway, write that down in your little book about

why brown people are bad and our culture is superior. And women are, yeah, submissive. You're

not far off, probably because, of course, who wrote it, the answer is largely men from patriarchal

societies. And they're working with their own assumptions about what power looks like. And those assumptions were not neutral. So what assumptions are we talking about? Okay, so this is documented, it's not speculative. So when European colonial administrators, the ones you're imagining, arrived in West Africa among the Akan in what's now Ghana, they encountered societies where women held real political authority. There were female chiefs, female councils, female religious leaders.

But when it came time to negotiate and sign treaties and establish colonial governance,

“they just couldn't process it. Europeans dealt almost exclusively with men, because that's what”

authority looked like to them. The women's political roles were simply not legible to them, so they gave no respect to female power. Okay, so they couldn't see it because they weren't looking for it.

Yeah, I mean, the women's authority wasn't always invisible, but it was often treated as irrelevant.

And over time, that selective recognition reshaped the actual power structure itself. So for the Europeans, acknowledging patriarchy would have complicated the story they were telling about the progress of civilization and who was qualified to govern. And the male designated authorities gained real power that the female authorities had previously held. And the colonial record showed a patriarchal society because the colonizers had created a more patriarchal society by only

recognizing male authority and only communicating with men. Oh man, behind the scenes of the women were quietly like, no, no, this is what you should do. Yeah, this is so interesting. This is really extraordinary. So they didn't just misread the system. They actually helped change it by refusing to recognize it as it was. But then quietly, the men were running to the women to confirm what they should do. If I'm a British guy or a Dutch colonizing someplace in Africa

a couple hundred years ago, I roll in and I'm like, all right, I need to speak to the man in charge. And it's like, that would be me. And I'm like, nah, Miss, I want to talk to your husband or whatever right equivalent of that is because I can't imagine I'd be dealing with this lady. So she's like,

“okay, fine. So she goes and finds someone she trusts and she's like, hey, you need to be the”

face of this because they're only going to talk with you. They don't want to deal with me. And then I don't know, 50, 100 years goes by or I don't know a few decades. And that guy's actually the one in charge because he's the only one who can do trade or negotiate treaties or set up business or anything like that with the breads or the Dutch and the other ones who have all the

resources that are funneling into this place. So basically, it just de facto becomes men in the

government running things. That's really, wow, I guess I didn't see that coming, but it makes perfect sense. Yeah, it makes sense that it's just a little bit depressing, right? But you see the same pattern with the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Iroquanations in North America, the European historical records show male chiefs making decisions and signing treaties. What those records failed to mention is that those male chiefs were selected by senior women, the clan mothers, and they could be removed by

them. So the women's authority was real and structurally embedded, but it was invisible to European observers who were looking for a chief who looked like a chief. Yeah, like I excuse me, man. Can I speak to your husband? And it's like, he doesn't make any decisions when he's talking about. He's over there wearing a head dress. He's busy. He's my arm candy. Look, Erie, it's me, he wanted to deal with. Yeah, okay. So the women in power were smart enough to basically know that

dealing with Europeans meant the visible authority needed to be a guy. That's so interesting. Yeah, and if you only document the kind of authority you recognize, like titles and formal leaders,

hey, there's no evidence for matriarchies. She's not really wrong, but at the same time, the archives,

“they have these significant blind spots because certain evidence was basically ignored or erased.”

Yeah, I mean, Ella would probably push back on that and say, even accounting for bias records, there's still no solid evidence for her prehistoric matriarchy. And she's probably right about that. Sorry to disappoint everybody. But absence of evidence in a bias record isn't proof something didn't exist, and it's not proof it did. So the honest answer here is, we just don't know, which is not a satisfying answer. So that leaves us in an uncomfortable place. If there's a lot of

time left to kill, so I hope you get more. Yeah. Well, intellectual honesty sometimes requires sitting with this uncertainty. Yeah. So the temptation, of course, is to fill that uncertainty with a story that feels good, a golden age, a lost harmony. But we don't need that story. The case free more balanced society with gender equality doesn't depend on whether women were in charge 10,000 years ago. It stands on its own. So is there anywhere we can actually look for evidence

“of genuinely different ways of organizing society because we could probably use some options?”

Absolutely. I mean, instead of looking at myths and archeological guesswork, we can look at living societies. Yeah. Places that exist right now that have been directly studied by anthropologists who can actually go there, ask questions, and measure outcomes.

Oh, actual data. Always a risky move. So, okay, what do we find?

So there's a lot of variation. Match or linear systems, match or focal systems, and hybrid structures, which don't fit neatly into any category, they all exist. And one of the most comprehensive attempts to study this globally comes from the work of a German scholar. Her name is Heidi Gottner Abendroth. She's spent decades documenting what she calls matriarchal societies across Asia, Africa, and the Americas. And this is based on field research,

not myth or speculation, and her work focuses on living cultures, none of this prehistoric network. Okay. So she's pushing back on Ella, who says there's basically no real evidence for matriarchy. Yeah. Well, she's pushing back on the idea that we should throw the whole concept out. But here's where it gets complicated. Her definition of matriarchy is very different from what most people have in mind. So Abendroth is not describing female domination. She's describing

societies that are matrilineal, egalitarian, and just organized around care, consensus, and redistribution. So in other words, not women on top, but a system that isn't built around domination at all. Which sounds great. But is that really matriarchy? That's the central tension that are work. Right. So mainstream anthropologists and other critics argue she's redefining the terms so broadly that it loses analytical meaning. So if matriarchy just means a relatively egalitarian

society where women have high status, then you find a lot of nice societies where women have high status and you can call them matriarchies. But if the definition is that elastic, you know, what work is that word actually doing? Yeah. Well, it's kind of like calling every present neighborhood a utopia. The word loses all meaning. Stop demeaning anything specific. Yeah. And her response is that the old definition was already biased toward patriarchal assumptions.

So if you define matriarchy as female domination, you're just importing the logic of patriarchy into the definition of it's supposed alternative. You're assuming power must mean domination. Okay. But what if the thing you're looking for is a society that

“doesn't organize itself around domination at all. For example, what word do you use for that?”

Yeah. I mean, maybe that's the real question. Not who's on top, but whether the system is organized

around dominance as it's central principle in the first place. We do need a new word. But first,

we have to figure out what kind of framework we should be working in because we're using the wrong one, which is either profound insight or a very convenient way to avoid being wrong. I think it might be both. So these ideas of like sharing and redistribution, care, prioritizing community well-being. That doesn't sound anthropological. It sounds like something economists argue about today. Oh, yeah. Economists are definitely arguing. And scholars

make similar points about how modern economies systematically under value care work, like raising children, caring for the elderly, maintaining social bonds because none of that shows up in the GDP. And the result is economies that are very good at accumulating capital and very bad at producing human flourishing. Okay. So yeah, because we measure what's easy and not necessarily what matters.

not accumulation is the central organizing principle. So whether you call them matriarchal or not,

“it's almost secondary. The important point is that alternatives exist. And they have measurable”

effects. You know, if we go back to the misuO, there was a research team in the 2010s that looked it, specifically health outcomes across the misuO communities in China. So it makes this useful is that there are both matrilineal and patrilineal misuO villages. So researchers can compare the health outcomes within the same culture. The primary variable is the social structure. And across over 1,000 participants, they measured biomarkers like sea reactive protein and things,

which indicates chronic inflammation and blood pressure. And they found that women in matrilineal communities had a significantly lower rates of both. Okay. So are you, are we saying husbands make women sick because I've been blaming the kids this whole time. I might know Jenna pretty significant retraction. Yeah. Yeah, you might or amassage or something. Yeah. You know, what I'm saying is that the studies show in patrilineal communities about 8% of women showed elevated

inflammation in matrilineal communities that dropped to 3.6%. So less than half. Hypertension showed a similar pattern. It was like 33% of women in patrilineal villages had high blood pressure compared to 26% in matrilineal ones. That's a big difference. Yeah. So something about that structure is protective to your heart and body. I don't think a lot of women listening are going to be shocked by these findings at all though. Yeah. Ladies, the data shows a strong correlation between

men and power and your health and the part that really landed for researchers is women in matrilineal communities. They weren't just healthier than women in patrilineal ones. They were on average healthier than men in their own communities. Wow. You know, this reminds me of those stats. Have you ever seen stats unlike what happens to men when they get divorced and how their life and quality and health changes and what happens to women when they get divorced and they're

basically the spoilers this. Everyone takes a lifestyle hit because you don't have maybe a shared

income or the pooled resources or the men being a higher earner or whatever it is. But the women their stress level goes way down. They live longer in the guys like die early, basically. I mean, I shouldn't laugh about that because it's sad. But yeah, it's a very similar directional data. I can see the merch now, matrilineal makes women healthier than men. I mean, that's that's a pretty crazy conclusion here. It is. A lot of it too has to do with what you're raised to think

is normal, like if you need a partner or not. But the data shows a strong relationship, sure, but it doesn't prove a single cause. So don't get too hard on yourself, guys. What the researchers point to are two factors, autonomy and social support. The matrilineal structure creates conditions for both. Yeah. And the men, what happened to the men in the matrilineal communities health-wise? Because if you empower the women and they gain benefits with the men taking a health hit,

“half the population still loses, right? It's sort of zero-sum-ish. Right. Yeah. I mean, that's what”

makes this finding significant. There's no strong evidence of a major health penalty for men. So differences are really small. The men in the matrilineal villages had a hypertension rate about one percentage point higher than men in the patrilineal villages, so it's a very small difference. So no one is getting crushed under the matrilineal boot, disappointing for some people out there. I'm sure. Does the current system, does it cost men anything in terms of what their lives look like?

Because I feel like one of the things that doesn't get examined in discussions of patriarchy versus

it's so funny. I never say that word. It just sounds funny to me when I say of patriarchy versus

alternatives. So what are men actually experiencing under the current system and what might they experience differently? Well, the question is important because this isn't a man-hating conversation. I want to be really clear. It connects to something important about what men in Masuo communities actually report. So anthropologists who've spent time in these communities describe men as largely content, including men who are aware of the more patriarchal alternatives available elsewhere in China.

Their identity isn't organized around being a provider or a head of household or an authority figure. It's organized around kinship and craft and community. And that sounds appealing compared to the pressure a lot of men face in more traditional systems. Be the provider. Be in charge. Don't fall apart.

“Don't cry in front of your wife because your mom passed away. That's weak. Right. You have to be”

the breadwinner. And yeah, all of those pressures. And this is where Eric from who's a mid-20th

societies push people into two roles. Domination or submission. Fun options both. It depends what you're into, I guess. But yeah. I don't know king shaming on skeptical Sunday. And men typically get pushed toward the dominance role. But even when that works, it comes with a cost, right? Men experience emotional isolation, all these pressures, and a really narrow version of what you're allowed to be. So you win the game, but it's a pretty bleak prize. Sure. You know, you get the

status, but you lose access to vulnerability, like you said, crying in front of people, genuine dependence on others, and all the things that actually make people feel connected. So it's not

“really power than it's pressure. I mean, that's the trade. And crucially, from key point is that”

this isn't biology. Men aren't inherently dominant. Women aren't inherently submissive. These are patterns created by social arrangements, which means they can change. And when you look at a place like the Masuo where male identity isn't built around dominance or provision in the same way, men seem by most accounts, fine and content, even. Less man as job description. Yeah, exactly. Let's pressure to perform a role that cuts you off from half yourself. And that points to something bigger

than matriarchy versus patriarchy. Which is, I mean, this question, it really isn't about gender.

It's about what any society loses when it organizes itself around dominance as a first principle.

So men lose access to care and vulnerability. Women lose access to authority and autonomy. Everyone loses something. And the data from societies that organize differently, you know, they're not perfect, but they're different. Suggest those losses don't have to be inevitable. Okay, so you don't need some sort of prehistoric matriarchal golden age to make the argument. You really don't. And leaning on one actually weakens the case because then people argue about

the history instead of engaging with the reality in front of them. Right. Okay, so if it existed

“before we're recovering something, not trying something new. But this gets tricky, I think, because”

we've been talking about women like that's one experience. You know, and I've heard, again, I'm women studies one or two over here. It's not one thing to just be like a woman in the world. You know, you know, you just all kind of stuff that intersects with that. Right. And you can say the same thing for men. I mean, just look at your friend group. You know, there's some women are more masculine than some of your guy friends. That's just how it is. And there's a scholar named Kimberly

Crenshaw. She makes this essential point with her theory on intersectionality. So gender doesn't

operate alone. It interacts with race and class and culture. So a black woman's experience of patriarchy it's not patriarchy plus racism. It's a different experience entirely and it's shaped by how all those forces interact. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Momentus. When people talk about energy recovery

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Now we're in women's studies, too. So even a matriarchy could still be terrible for some women, I suppose, right? A society that centers women's authority could still be really unequal.

So it doesn't mean equity all around. It's not automatically a happy ending.

So when we talk about matriarchy as an alternative to matriarchy, we need to ask matriarchy for whom. Yeah. I mean, history gives us examples of that. Yeah. Look at parts of the suffrage movement in the United States that centered around white women's rights while excluding all the others. That's a good point. And we should also

“remember that societies with different structures are not happening in a vacuum either.”

Right. Yeah. This isn't a controlled experiment. There are real societies with a lot of forces acting on it at once. So the thing we think of as isolating so this matriolineal structure, whatever, it's not ever isolated and it can't be in 2026 anyways, I suppose. Yeah, of course, which that also doesn't invalidate the findings, but it does mean we should be careful about how much we claim the findings prove. I think there's a risk in a conversation framed as

skeptical Sunday matriarchy that the audience might hear like matriarchy is fake. So what are we actually skeptical of here? So we are well justified in being skeptical of the idea of this prehistoric golden age of matriarchy. The evidence just isn't there as much as so many people want it to be. And we should be skeptical of the idea that matriarchy is just this mere image idea of matriarchy with women dominating men because that just imports the same logic. It assumes these

fixed biological traits that men and women are naturally wired in a certain way and we're justified in being skeptical of these biological stereotypes in either direction. So women are not naturally more nurturing. Men are not naturally more dominant. Those claims just don't hold up. These are patterns produced by social arrangements and social arrangements can change. Men are from Mars, women are from a better marketing team. And that idea is seductive, right? So you see it all the time

in sci-fi. These matriarchal worlds are shown one of two ways. Either hyper-peasful and harmonious utopias or just as violent and hierarchical as patriarchy but with women in charge. So even when we imagine something different we just repaint the same system. That's kind of, yeah. I guess funny's not the right word, but you know it. ironic, maybe I don't know. Yeah, sure let's go with that. We're still defining power as domination. You see versions of this in things like Wonder Woman's a good

example. You know, she comes from this isolated, idealized female society and there's darker

depictions of her world where it's basically patriarchy flipped. But in both cases it's still built

on the same assumption that power means domination. Sometimes it just dresses sexier. And it has a cool plane. So we're just distorting the idea of which gender is in charge, not with their in charge of. Right. We're still working inside the same framework. So different ways of organizing society exist and they have real effects on people's lives. That part is well documented. Which is a sign the framework is the problem not the society. Okay. So the goal is not flipping the hierarchy.

It's asking whether hierarchy itself is the right model and who should be on top. Yeah, it might not look like anyone on top. You know, there's different ways to be on top. I guess a society based on equity might look like systems organized solely around care, reciprocity and support, not domination. So it's not a gender swap. It's a different structure. Right. Which means this doesn't have to be a fight. It can be a question about what actually works. So we did not find a lost matriarchal utopia

or evidence that women ran the world 10,000 years ago. It's just much less satisfying. But I guess more useful. And the way we organize society is not fixed. Right. We're choosing it whether we admit to that or not. And we should make the choices that make people healthier, more connected and more human.

“Yeah. I mean, we should. I agree completely. And I think the word made Cherokee may be doing a”

disservice because as well as the word patriarchy because it immediately puts people into a gender war. Is it accumulation, hierarchy, end dominance or is it care consensus redistribution? You know,

set of values suggests, tentatively, carefully, that people in those societies across genders

tend to do better by various measures of well-being. And calling that matriarchy, that might maybe both accurate in some structural sense, but also misleading in terms of what it actually means for the people living in it. Yeah. I mean, keep considering the misovo, they have their own vocabulary for their own arrangements. But Westerners come along and impose a category that comes loaded with a whole set of Western assumptions about what power is and what gender means. And we've applied it to a

society that may be organized around fundamentally different premises. Did you come across any sort of

“non-binary gender systems or are we stuck in the two-lane matriarchy patriarchy highway?”

Yeah. I mean, this is a crucial point. So some societies don't organize around a strict

male female binary at all. And when that's the case calling something female lead can miss the entire structure. It makes sense that if people occupy other genders and roles, then the category of matriarchy is simply, it's just not the right tool. Yeah. It's just another sign that the framework needs revision rather than the evidence needs to be squeezed into that framework that exists and really isn't working. Yeah. Well, the conversation has to change completely. It seems almost impossible to talk about this

in a non-binary way. I'm almost being cheeky because it's like we're trying to wrap our heads around female lead society and I'm like, aha, what if we throw another wrench in there? I don't know.

Again, this is like women's studies last, some sort of woke college class that I'm trying to

sift through here. We have to be looking at power dynamics in societies. I can't believe them about to say this, but gender fluid. So what is the vocabulary for that is what we have to figure out? We could lean into some kind of genderless archie, I guess. Sure. How about barbearchy? Not the movie, not the female version of the doll, but you know how they have that smooth, featureless

“candle situation down there with no confusing parts? Yeah, a private partless? Yeah, that's what I'm”

going for. I'm for it. You know, if we could take gender out of the equation, there might be more equity. I grew up playing in an orchestra and when you would audition for things, they changed it so that it wasn't the men getting all the good seats in the orchestra and there were really specific rules. The judges would sit and you would perform behind some kind of barrier. They couldn't see you. And so the big rule if you were a woman was mostly don't wear shoes at all. They can tell when

you walk over because of your heels. Yeah, they could tell by what shoes you were wearing. So is this really particular thing of, oh my gosh, like I have to wear soft-sold shoes for my audition, otherwise they'll know them a woman and how horrible that would be. Don't wear perfume or anything. Yeah, so it's like imagine if we could run political campaigns and not know if the person was male or female. How would that change who we voted for? Things like that. But I like what you're thinking

“about this genderless ideas, but I think it's all a bit more nuanced in reality. So how did that”

did it work? Did they end up with like a 50/50-ish split in the orchestra? It was upsetting how much it worked. How many more women got seats in the orchestra? Yeah. Wow. Okay, just curious. I think it's hard for people to not look at the matriarchy patriarchy conversation is taking sides. I mean, right now, a lot of people probably find themselves uncomfortable with some of what we're talking about. It can be that way. I mean, I'm a little bit like, oh, she should have used

the word patriarchy more than I have in my entire life during the past hour. I hate the vocabularies uncomfortable. You know, but it doesn't have to be. I think the vocabularies uncomfortable because the definitions are pretty wishy. We can treat it as a question and work out solutions that bring more balance. Different societies, they've tried different arrangements. Some of those arrangements produce better outcomes by measurable standards. Some of them don't, but we can study that without

turning it into some manifesto. Okay, so matriarchal societies are not a blueprint. It's just data. Which means change is possible. I suppose. I mean, the health outcome thing is no joke. That's crazy. And ignoring that has real consequences. So if increasing women's autonomy is linked to better health outcomes, and we dismiss it out of discomfort, we're choosing ideology over evidence. Yeah. Well, people are doing a lot of that these days. But what else are we missing by framing the debate

incorrectly in your opinion? Well, for one, I mean, we touched on an earlier, but what these systems cost men. So conversations about feminism? No, we want all these allies, but we also need to include what masculinity does. It causes emotional isolation. It does mean shorter life spans,

disadvantage women. They're just the other side of the same coin. And the matriarchy conversation

almost never really goes there. Yeah, because it's framed as a conversation about women's liberation,

which it is, but it points at something bigger. A social arrangement, the probably doesn't look like women on top any more than it looks like men on top. I'm trying to not be a 12-year-old boy here in this episode specifically. Right. Okay. And just to be clear, when we say women on, yeah, let's keep

“it scientific. How's that? Okay, sure. Don't say reverse cowgirl Jordan. Don't say that's what”

you want to say. I knew it. So what we're really talking about is something that doesn't organize itself around domination at all. Building something like that is a project that benefits men as much as women. Okay. And the project doesn't need to dig up some weird golden age of feminist Amazon, whatever, with pyramids to justify it. Yeah. It just needs honest observation, intellectual humility, and the willingness to look at what human beings are actually capable of when they're not being told

that hierarchy is the only option. The problem is so many people are turned off by any

egalitarian society and they want more resources than everybody else. People in that society. I don't mean people listening to this going to be annoyed that there's a society that's equal. I just mean living in a society like that. They want that hierarchy. They want to be better than other people. I know. I mean, now we're getting into the philosophy of power being applied in whatever social norms were raised in. So that might be a conversation for another episode, maybe.

Maybe. I don't know. This is like, it's weird because it's not a woke episode, but I feel like somehow it is because we're talking about these topics that we never actually talk about anywhere. When I was talking about this topic with you, pre-show, no resources came up, but easily. That wasn't something ridiculous or sci-fi based. So what we managed to talk about matriarchy on Mother's Day without anybody storming off, cool, that might be the most successful

family dynamic we will have all day. So happy Mother's Day. Everybody call your mom. She's earned it. Thanks so much, Jess. Ask her who's on top. Yeah. You heard it from her, not me. At least you said it, not me. Thanks, Jess. And thank you all for listening. Topic suggestions for future episodes of Skeptical Sunday to me, Jordan at Jordanharbinger.com. Advertisers deals discounts, ways to support the show all at Jordanharbinger.com/deals. I'm @jordanharbinger on Twitter and Instagram.

You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. Jessica is on her sub-stacks between the lines and where shadows linger. We'll link to those in the show notes. Her work is on Instagram at NeverMet. Jessica's. And this show is created in the association with podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jason Sanderson, Tata Sadlowskis, Robert Fogaddi, Ian Beard and Gabriel Mizrahi. Our advice in opinions are our own. Now might be a lawyer, but not your lawyer. Also, we try to get these as

right as we can. Not everything is gospel even if it's fact checked. So consult a qualified professional before applying anything you hear on the show, especially if it's about your health and well-being.

“Remember, we rise by lifting others. Share the show with those you love. If you found the episode”

useful, please share it with somebody else who could use a good dose of the skepticism and knowledge that we dulled out today. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn and we'll see you next time. We'll spend hours optimizing diets, workouts, and morning routines, then sit in rooms with air bad enough to quietly wreck our focus, mood, and sleep. After the LA wildfires, air quality expert Mike Feldstein saw just how toxic

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