men explaining matriarchy to me

“The opposite of patriarchy is not matriarchy but fraternity.” -Germaine Greer.

In the span of the last week, I went from not having a single thought about barbie, to taking a bullet for her.

It seems like almost everybody has an opinion or has been radicalized by the Barbie movie. Like any great work of art, Barbie has sparked a lot of conversation and debate. Sure, it’s made a lot of people angry, but I actually think that it’s just brought a lot to the surface that was already percolating for years. It’s spurred a reckoning about how few movies are made by and for women, the way that we all judge these films more harshly, and are quick we are to call them “fluffy.” It also highlighted just how unfair but also uniquely camp, the patriarchy really is. It confronted both women and men with a lot of uncomfortable feelings. But you know our motto at Airplane Mode. We don’t run away from discomfort, we lean into it, so that we can become freer as a result of it.

One thing I didn’t expect in these uncomfy conversations, is men explaining matriarchy to me. If you’re part of our community, you know that I’ve written and talked about how that the Barbie movie wasn’t matriarchy, but rather just a patriarchy flipped. After posting a video about it, I got several comments telling me that the opposite of patriarchy is in fact matriarchy, when it is very much not. So let’s go a deep-dive about debunk what matriarchy really is!

Liz Plank

Liz Plank on Instagram: “If you hate the barbie movie, it’s because you hate patriarchy 💅🏽💅🏽💅🏽”

July 30, 2023

Let’s begin with the similarities, because there are certainly a few. In the way that patriarchy is a patrilineal system, matriarchy tends be matrilineal. This means that both family name and land is passed down from mother to daughter, rather than father to son.

But the rest is pretty much totally different, because the cultural order is premised on radically different values. While patriarchal societies tend to be organized according to hierarchy and competition, matriarchies make motherhood central, which means the foundation is nurturance, mutual respect and community. Matriarchy expert and founder of The International Academy Hagia for Modern Matriarchal Studies Heide Goettner-Abendroth told Dame that “in matriarchies, mothers are at the center of culture without ruling over other members of society.”

So matriarchy is not a mirror image of patriarchy— it’s a fundamentally different way of structuring a society and the people inside of it. Certain ideas and concepts that are primordial in one system, are completely obsolete in the other. For instance, because lineage doesn’t come from the father, in a matriarchy, the children belong to everybody and there are no “illegitimate children.” And the locus of power no longer residing with the father also creates distinct sexual dynamics. According to sex historian Dr Kate Lister at Vice, the Mosuo tribe in the Yunnan and Sichuan provinces of South West China, one of the few matriarchal societies left, has a neat way of doing it:

“Mosuo women do not marry, take as many lovers as they wish and have no word for "husband" or "father". Lovers do not live together, but the women invite men to visit them in their dormitories at night. This arrangement is referred to as a "walking marriage" and is regarded as no one’s business but the couple involved. Walking marriages can be long term or may last just one night, but nobody would expect to only have just one such arrangement over their lifetimes.”

The treatment of the planet is also different. While Mother Nature tends to be associated with the female in both matriarchy and patriarchy, because females have the most status in a matriarchy, there’s more respect and reverence to the environment. The fact that the Earth is purely seen as a vehicle for the extraction of resources in a patriarchy, can be seen as a reflection of the concept of ownership over the female and the acceptance of her exploitation. Some may say that under our current patriarchal system, we accept the mistreatment of our planet precisely because we see her as as a mother.

Under matriarchy, there’s also a system of co-ownership when it comes to, for lack of a better word, “stuff.” This means that things like money, household items, religious symbols and spiritual tokens are distributed by the female leaders, but owned by both genders. This stands in sharp contrast with patriarchy. Not only that does patriarchy grants all of those things to men, it also gives them ownership over actual people, like their children and their wives. That’s why the origin of the first rape law wasn’t about recognizing the criminal violation of female victims, but rather “merely a form of theft and vandalism, since women were considered property.” It’s also why raping your wife wasn’t even a crime until the 1980s because women weren’t people, they were their man’s property. Even the widely offensive idea that a woman is “damaged goods” if she’s assaulted, comes from the fact that she was literally considered “damaged propriety” in our laws.

This is not to say that there could never be violence against men in a matriarchy. After all, there’s violence against men, under patriarchy! But there is evidence that matrilineal societies are less violent than patrilineal ones.

And while under patriarchy, children are men’s property, they are also conveniently women’s responsibility. Conversely, in matriarchal societies, since motherhood is a valued role, it’s played by everybody (including men) and the entire community takes care of the offspring.

Photo by Arun Anoop on Unsplash

Another common misconception is that patriarchy is “natural” when it’s actually only about 3000-5000 years old. In many respects, even ancient civilizations like Greek society were more feminist than we are today. Even if they weren’t matriarchal per se, they didn’t confine women to the home, and women were active members of commercial and public life. A woman in Ancient Egypt had more rights than most women around the world have today. She could buy and sell land, inherit propriety, divorce her husband and had all the same basic legal rights as men. Some scholars even believe that pre-historic societies were largely matriarchal, or at least extremely egalitarian, although it’s still a hotly debated topic. But the consensus is that sexual equality between men and women gave us an evolutionary advantage because when women and men were in charge of determining how groups organized, those clans were more likely to be diverse and encourage innovation. So you could say that evolutionarily speaking, it’s when power is shared, that humans truly thrive. And that this is our natural way of being!

Part of the reason why we are so invested in the idea of humans being pre-determined to be patriarchal, is because the field of evolutionary studies has been overly interested in the study of chimpanzees (who are patriarchal) to understand humans, and that this has created a male bias. Amy Parish, a primatologist at the University of Southern California, has joined a chorus of voices drawing attention to the bonobos who are just as close to humans, but are very matriarchal. For instance, female bonobos create deep bonds and alliances to insure their safety, and they have virtually eradicated male forms of violence against them. “Females are running the show,” Parish told The New York Times. And the fact that female bonobos have effectively organized their entire species around “solidarity and sisterhood,” she said, “should give hope to the human feminist movement.” Given that chimpanzees and bonobos are both our closest relatives and that we descended from the same ancestor species, why don’t we identify with an ingrained natural human proclivity for female power and leadership?

“I sometimes try to imagine what would have happened if we’d known the bonobo first and the chimpanzee only later-or not at all. The discussion about human evolution might not revolve as much around violence, warfare and male dominance, but rather around sexuality, empathy, caring and cooperation. What a different intellectual landscape we would occupy!” ― Frans de Waal

So no, Barbieland is not a matriarchy. The entire point of the movie was to highlight the consequences of the patriarchy by flipping the sexes, so that men could experience how deeply upsetting and humiliating it is to live in a patriarchal society. Based on the flood of male emotions unleashed about the film, it seems like Greta Gerwig succeeded, at least partially. But there’s a lot of men directing their feelings at the wrong enemy. If you don’t like Barbieland and how it treats men, I have news for you! You actually don’t like patriarchy and the way it treats women! I’m not even saying matriarchy is the solution, but maybe we could all agree that whatever we have now, isn’t working. If we can agree on this, perhaps we could come up with solutions about what better thing, we all want instead.