we are living through the patriarchy’s last tantrum

the system is doing the most because it is done.

A lot of us are struggling to describe what were feeling right now. It isn’t shock, and it isn’t even just anger. It’s something heavier and more disorienting than that, something that settles in the body and doesn’t quite move, like a low-grade grief you can’t shake.

I think what’s landing so hard is realizing we weren’t exaggerating patriarchy’s harm at all, in fact we were underestimating it. It’s the strange grief of being right about something you hoped you were exaggerating. I think back at a few weeks ago when I’m invited into a debate framed as “did feminism go too far?” or when the New York Times asked whether women have ruined the workplace, and for a split second I caught myself wondering if we somehow overcorrected, if pushing too hard made things worse, if the backlash is on us. Then I read what’s actually in the Epstein files and that thought doesn’t just collapse instantly, it becomes insane. The visceral reaction isn’t confusion, it’s nausea. The absurdity of being asked to justify the need for feminism in a world where men in positions of extraordinary power were humiliating themselves for access to a convicted pedophile sex trafficker is almost hard to process. Epstein doesn’t just expose individual depravity, he exposes how many powerful men were willing to privately and publicly humiliate themselves for access to it. In that context, the question isn’t whether feminism went too far. It’s how anyone can still pretend it went far enough. It’s difficult to take critiques of feminism seriously in a world where male solidarity routinely outranks basic moral judgment.

And here’s what I keep thinking about. I’m not an idiot. None of us are naïve. We knew patriarchy existed. We knew powerful men abused power. We knew institutions protected them. We knew women and children were routinely harmed. We knew silence could be purchased, that money insulated people from consequences, that harm could be absorbed and normalized if it served the right interests. None of that is new information.

And yet, reading what’s emerging now feels overwhelming in a way that’s hard to articulate. It’s not just the facts themselves, but the density of them, the way they accumulate without relief. I found myself trying to understand why this particular moment feels so destabilizing, why even people who thought they were clear-eyed are struggling to stay oriented. One explanation that keeps resonating for me is something psychologists call trust bias.

Trust bias is the tendency to assume that other people are operating within roughly the same moral universe that you are. It’s the quiet belief that most people, especially those in positions of authority, are constrained by similar lines of decency, guilt, and self-limitation. You don’t expect perfection, but you assume there are things people simply wouldn’t do. Crucially, this assumption isn’t foolish, it’s actually necessary. Without trust bias, social life collapses. You couldn’t function if every interaction felt adversarial or every institution felt predatory. Trust bias is how societies scale and how cooperation becomes possible at all.

Photo by 1MilliKarat on Unsplash

The problem is what happens when trust bias is exploited systematically. And that’s what we’re all going through now.

Because you would never do this, you assumed other people wouldn’t either. You assumed there were limits everyone recognized, lines that once crossed would trigger consequences. But over the last few weeks, and really over the last decade, it’s become clear that the people in power are operating by a completely different set of rules, ones you would never agree to, never obey, never even consider legitimate. You would never knowingly enable harm children or anyone at this scale. You would never abandon your values for access. You would never quietly maintain relationships that required this level of moral compromise. You would never encounter something this grotesque and decide it was tolerable, manageable, or strategically ignorable. You don’t understand their cruelty. And that’s my favorite part about you.

Because you wouldn’t do it, your brain assumed others wouldn’t either. That assumption is what’s breaking right now, that’s why you feel like you’re sleepwalking. Not because evil exists, but because restraint didn’t. Because so many men with authority encountered grotesque behavior and chose to step into it rather than stop it.

This is why Epstein no longer feels shocking as a singular villain. What’s shocking is how many men bent to keep operating around him, how many men recalibrated their ethics instead of their proximity, how often the response wasn’t rupture or refusal but careful adjustment. How to continue without disruption. How to keep the machine running. And not just let it happen, but ask to take part in it.

There’s a particular whiplash in being vindicated and horrified at the same time. You knew the system was rotten, but you didn’t know how much rot it could contain without collapsing. Your mind is trying to reconcile two realities at once: the version of the world that allowed you to trust, and the evidence that trust was misplaced far more often than you imagined. This isn’t just moral outrage, it’s a cognitive injury.

What many people are experiencing right now isn’t helplessness so much as cognitive overload. It’s the sensation of trying to metabolize too much reality too quickly. Too many dots connecting at once. Too much coherence arriving without relief. Your nervous system isn’t reacting because you don’t understand what’s happening, but because you understand it all too well.

What’s being exposed now isn’t your naïveté, but the extent to which the system relied on decent people projecting their own limits onto men who did not share them.

That’s why so many people feel furious and exhausted at the same time, why rage no longer feels mobilizing but instead leaves people strangely frozen. Why it can feel like you’ve run out of ways to fight, protest, explain, or dismantle. Not because you’ve stopped caring, but because the scale of what you’re witnessing exceeds the capacity of individual response.

Here’s the part that often brings relief once it lands. The system can no longer convincingly explain itself. The lie requires too much maintenance. The cruelty is too exposed. The benefits are too narrowly distributed. We are not watching patriarchy reform. We are watching it fail.

This is what its last gasp looks like: loud, destabilizing, cruel, exhausting. A system burning through whatever credibility it had left in an attempt to stay upright. This is why places like this matter. Patriarchal saturation is isolating. It can make you feel dramatic or unhinged for being so affected, or frozen instead of activated, or unsure why everyone else isn’t screaming. It can convince you that you’re failing because you don’t know what to do next.

But you’re not crazy. You’re responding appropriately to a deeply unwell system. This community, this newsletter, this space exists for exactly these moments: to slow the panic, to put language to what’s happening, to remind each other that clarity often feels like collapse at first, and to say plainly that what we’re witnessing is not normal, not acceptable, and not sustainable.

We are living inside a distorted system, and we are watching it reach its final stage. That’s destabilizing, but it’s also clarifying. You don’t need to burn it down or save it or have the next world fully imagined. You just need to remember that the fire you’re watching isn’t inside you. It’s the system, finally burning down to the ground.

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