1325: Matriarchy | Skeptical Sunday

10:05Jessica Wynn:So this system operates quite a bit outside of what we're used to. I'm impressed that it's unbothered by the norms in most other places. Wrap your head around this. you're 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.

10:28Jordan Harbinger:Right. You're just the guy who comes over after they go to bed. Yeah.

10:32Jessica Wynn:You're like a sperm donor or whatever. But the thing is, and I think about that and I'm assuming a guy's listening right now are 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 just is so different.

10:52Jordan Harbinger:I think it's hard for a lot of people, even close to them, to wrap their mind around it. The Masuo aren't frozen in time and they're under real pressure from the state government.

11:02Jessica Wynn:Yeah. You know what? That makes sense. You'd have to build a legal system around this. Who gets custody when this relationship breaks up? And it doesn't make sense to give the father 50 % custody. It's like, what are you doing? I don't want to know. Those are let her and the uncle raise them. I don't want anything to do. I'll come over and hang out. What do you mean child support? No, that'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?

11:29Jordan Harbinger:Yeah, pretty much. China's legal and economic systems are built around nuclear families and formal marriage. And the Masuo 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 their practices. Plus, the Masuwa are heavily marketed as the last matriarchy, which causes this huge influx of tourists expecting to see something exotic going on.

12:00Jessica Wynn:So the whole system becomes a spectacle and has a bit of an audience.

12:03Jordan Harbinger:Yeah, right. And that can start to reshape how the system is practiced. But even with that, the core structure holds. So 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.

12:41Jessica Wynn:Yeah, now that is structurally highly unique. I mean, I can already hear some men saying, 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.

13:00Jordan Harbinger: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.

13:16Jessica Wynn:Right. OK, so you don't get to opt out. You just play a different role. Yeah. OK. Yeah.

13:20Jordan Harbinger:Responsibility doesn't disappear. It's just redistributed. And it's worth noticing something across all of these examples.

13:27Jessica Wynn:OK, what's the through line?

13:28Jordan Harbinger: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.

13:50Jessica Wynn:So in the most famous matriarchies on earth, the women have the burden and the men still have the prestige. Right.

13:56Jordan Harbinger: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.

14:06Jessica Wynn:And it's being paid, what is it, 80 cents on the dollar for all of them? Exactly.

14:11Jordan Harbinger:So, 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.

14:39Jessica Wynn:Ah, okay. That's an important caveat. Yeah.

14:41Jordan Harbinger: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.

14:53Jessica Wynn:Ah, my trainer moved in with his wife in her house, so I guess I'm going to tell him he's part of a matrilocal.

14:58Jordan Harbinger:Yeah, he's matrilocal.

15:00Jessica Wynn:Yeah, there you go. So this guy moves in with her family, insert every mother-in-law joke ever told, but it doesn't necessarily mean women are shaping how power actually works.

15:09Jordan Harbinger:And then there's matrifocal, which are households 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.

15:26Jessica Wynn:OK, so we've got a bunch of things that kind of look like matriarchy, but aren't actually even the same thing at all.

15:32Jordan Harbinger:Which leaves us with matriarchy proper. So this would mean women hold primary political, social, and moral authority. All formal power structures are female-dominated. The problem here is that this kind of society is extremely hard to find.

15:49Jessica Wynn:Well, okay, hard to find because it doesn't exist or what?

15:52Jordan Harbinger:Yeah, well, there's a few possibilities. One being that pure matriarchy might not exist. Or it's possible we've been looking for the wrong thing when we say matriarchy. or maybe the historical record we're using wasn't written by people interested in recognizing matriarchy when and if it did ever exist.

16:13Jessica Wynn:But that's three different conclusions. So do we know which one might be the truth? I don't know.

16:19Jordan Harbinger:Yeah, all three might be partially true, which is really uncomfortable.

16:23Jessica Wynn:Okay. But why does this definition mess even really matter? Because I feel like in popular conversation, you just say matriarchy, everyone just nods.

16:31Jordan Harbinger:Yeah, it matters because the confusion distorts real societies. So from the Manangkabau in Indonesia or the Kasi in 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 matriarchy. People there read it and think, that's not what's happening here at all. They might be flattered, but they are bewildered.

16:59Jessica Wynn:So this is sort of amateur armchair sociology or anthropology romanticizing a different culture.

17:05Jordan Harbinger:Kind of. But a lot of them are professionals that should know that really armchair, you know.

17:10Jessica Wynn:Yeah.

17:10Jordan Harbinger:But on the other side, you have anthropologists with a very strict checklist on matriarchy. And this means women must hold formal political power. So they look at a place like Menangkabau, see men in many official political and religious roles and conclude that it's not a matriarchy. 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 matriarchy just go in circles.

17:49Jordan Harbinger:People arguing from different definitions without realizing they're not talking about the same thing.

17:56Jessica Wynn:Okay, so did matriarchy ever exist? Was there a prehistoric golden age where women ran everything someplace before men showed up and invented bureaucracy?

18:05Jordan Harbinger: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 Bacofen. Maybe not formalized, maybe invented is a better word for his theory.

18:22Jessica Wynn:Yeah. And in 1861. So this isn't exactly ancient wisdom from some papyrus scroll, right? This is a 19th century man with a theory.

18:30Jordan Harbinger:Yeah. So it's just this Victorian guy, Bakofin, 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.

18:46Jessica Wynn:Oh, bold claim. OK, so the guy who invented the idea of prehistoric matriarchy thought patriarchy was a good upgrade. Nice.

18:53Jordan Harbinger:Yeah, he thought it was more advanced. Yeah. And that detail gets lost every time the theory gets reused. So later, Friedrich Engels, the German philosopher and co-author of the Communist Manifesto, he connected the idea of matriarchy to capitalism.

19:08Jessica Wynn:Well, of course he did. Of course.

19:10Jordan Harbinger: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 matriarchy'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.

19:44Jessica Wynn: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 I don't know.

19:53Jordan Harbinger:Yeah, but there's pretty much no evidence this prehistoric matriarchy actually happened. So the idea circulated widely in feminist organizing. Gloria Steinem talked about this. It spread in neo-pagan 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 matriarchal world narrative comes from a feminist scholar. Her name's Cynthia Eller. She wrote a book called The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, and it's genuinely one of the most carefully argued deconstructions of this cherished belief that I've ever read.

20:43Jordan Harbinger:I feel like you're making enemies. All right. What does she say? Sure. I know people are going to say how anti-feminist I am.

20:50Jessica Wynn:Yeah.

20:50Jordan Harbinger:But her core argument is that the evidence offered for prehistoric matriarchy 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 Eller says, look, 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 worshipped in most traditions and that hasn't stopped most men from being excluded from power.

21:36Jessica Wynn:Yeah, that's a good point.

21:37Jordan Harbinger:Yeah, and then Eller makes a second argument that I think is even more interesting and more genuinely feminist. She argues the myth of matriarchal prehistory is actually bad for feminism, even though it may feel empowering.

21:52Jessica Wynn:That feels counterintuitive. Why is the idea of a society run by women bad for feminism again?

21:58Jordan Harbinger:Because of what it assumes women are, right? In these stories of the matriarchal golden age, it always looks the same. Peaceful, nurturing, communal, close to nature. Women are cast as caregivers, consensus builders, and life givers. And Eller'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.

22:28Jessica Wynn: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 with a nicer label.

22:38Jordan Harbinger: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.

22:54Jessica Wynn:OK, so the empowering myth of matriarchal prehistory is, in a weird way, running on the same operating system as the thing that it's pushing back against.

23:03Jordan Harbinger: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, Bacofen, Engels, and their intellectual heirs, who thought of matriarchy as something humanity had correctly outgrown. So the feminist version is a later reinterpretation, not the original idea.

23:29Jessica Wynn: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 throw on your usual jeans and they're like fine, not great, not comfy, just something you tolerate? That's basically the deal with jeans forever. You don't love them, you work around them, until we tried the perfect jean. No stiffness, no break-in period. No, they'll feel better after a few washes. They fit right out of the box. I bent down, I sat, I stood up, I moved around. Zero resistance, no bunching in weird places. They actually move with you. And that's when you realize you've been putting up with uncomfortable jeans for years for absolutely no reason.

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25:55Jessica Wynn:I feel like I'm getting, I'm taking like Women's Studies 102 right now. on 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 who thought, hey, good thing we moved past that nonsense. Am I 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 whose record that is, because who wrote the record, right? Who decided what counted as authority and what was worth documenting?

26:25Jessica Wynn:So Jess, I'm 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, well, look at this statue of a woman. Clearly, they exalted women and also they're 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.

26:45Jordan Harbinger:And women are 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.

27:25Jordan Harbinger: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.

27:46Jessica Wynn:Okay, so they couldn't see it because they weren't looking for it.

27:48Jordan Harbinger: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 matriarchy 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.

28:29Jordan Harbinger:Oh, man. Behind the scenes, the women were quietly like, no, no, no, this is what you should do.

28:33Jessica Wynn: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 equivalent of that is because I can't imagine I'd be dealing with this lady. So she's like, ah, okay, fine.

29:04Jessica Wynn: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 gonna talk with you. They don't wanna 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 Brits or the Dutch, and they're the 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.

29:34Jessica Wynn:I guess I didn't see that coming, but it makes perfect sense.

29:37Jordan Harbinger:Yeah, it makes sense that it's just a little bit depressing, right?

29:40Jessica Wynn:A little bit.

29:40Jordan Harbinger:But you see the same pattern with the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Iroquois nations in North America. The European historical records show male chiefs making decisions and signing treaties. What those records fail 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.

30:14Jessica Wynn:Yeah, like, excuse me, ma 'am, can I speak to your husband? And it's like, he doesn't make any decisions. What are you talking about? He's over there wearing a headdress. He's busy. He's my arm candy. Lucky it's me you want to deal with. Yeah, OK. 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.

30:35Jordan Harbinger:Yeah. And if you only document the kind of authority you recognize, like titles and formal leaders, then you miss how power actually functions.

30:43Jessica Wynn:So when Eller, who you mentioned before, says, 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.

30:56Jordan Harbinger:Yeah, I mean, Eller would probably push back on that and say even accounting for biased 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 biased 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.

31:22Jessica Wynn:Which is not a satisfying answer. So that leaves us in an uncomfortable place. There's a lot of time left to kill, so I hope you get more. Right.

31:30Jordan Harbinger: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 for a more balanced society with gender equality doesn't depend on whether women were in charge 10 ,000 years ago. It stands on its own.

31:54Jessica Wynn:So is there anywhere we can actually look for evidence of genuinely different ways of organizing society because we could probably use some options.

32:02Jordan Harbinger:Absolutely. I mean, instead of looking at myths and archaeological guesswork, we can look at living societies, places that exist right now that have been directly studied by anthropologists who can actually go there, ask questions and measure outcomes.

32:17Jessica Wynn:Oh, actual data. Always a risky move. So, OK, what do we find?

32:21Jordan Harbinger:So there's a lot of variation. Matrilineal systems, matrifocal 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 Abendroff. She 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 guesswork.

32:57Jessica Wynn:Okay, so she's pushing back on Eller, who says there's basically no real evidence for matriarchy.

33:01Jordan Harbinger: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? I mean, that's the central tension in her work, right? So mainstream anthropologists and other critics argue she's redefining the term so broadly that it loses analytical meaning.

33:47Jordan Harbinger: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?

34:05Jessica Wynn:Yeah. Well, it's kind of like calling every pleasant neighborhood a utopia. The word loses all meaning, stops meaning anything specific.

34:12Jordan Harbinger: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 its supposed alternative. You're assuming power must mean domination.

34:31Jessica Wynn:OK, but what if the thing you're looking for is a society that doesn't organize itself around domination at all, for example? Yeah. What word do you use for that?

34:41Jordan Harbinger:Yeah. I mean, maybe that's the real question. Not who's on top, but whether the system is organized around dominance as its 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.

34:58Jessica Wynn: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.

35:16Jordan Harbinger:Economists are definitely arguing. And scholars make similar points about how modern economies systematically undervalue 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.

35:41Jessica Wynn:OK, so, yeah, because we measure what's easy and not necessarily what matters.

35:45Jordan Harbinger:Correct. You know, not perfect, not utopian. And there are functioning societies where redistribution, 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 Masuo, there was a research team in the 2010s that looked at specifically health outcomes across the Masuo communities in China. So what makes this useful is that there are both matrilineal and patrilineal Masuo villages. So researchers can compare the health outcomes within the same culture.

36:27Jordan Harbinger:The primary variable is the social structure. And across over a thousand participants, they measured biomarkers like C-reactive protein and things, which indicates chronic inflammation and blood pressure. And they found that women in matrilineal communities had significantly lower rates of both.

36:47Jessica Wynn:OK, so are you are we saying husbands make women sick? Because I've been blaming the kids this whole time. I might owe Jenna a pretty significant retraction.

36:56Jordan Harbinger:Yeah, you might, or a massage or something. 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.

37:25Jessica Wynn:Yeah. So something about that structure is protective to your heart and body. So I don't think a lot of women listening are going to be shocked by these findings at all, though.

37:35Jordan Harbinger:Yeah, ladies, the data shows a strong correlation between men in 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.

37:53Jessica Wynn:Wow. You know, this reminds me of those stats. Have you ever seen stats on like 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 spoiler is this. Everyone takes a lifestyle hit because you don't have maybe a shared income or the pooled resources or the man being a higher earner or whatever it is. But the women, their stress level goes way down and they live longer and 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.

38:25Jessica Wynn:I can see the merch now. Matriarchy makes women healthier than men. I mean, that's a pretty crazy conclusion here.

38:33Jordan Harbinger:It is. And 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.

38:59Jessica Wynn: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, but the men take a health hit, half the population still loses, right? It's sort of zero-sum-ish.

39:10Jordan Harbinger: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.

39:29Jessica Wynn:So no one is getting crushed under the matriarchal 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?

39:56Jordan Harbinger: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.

40:31Jessica Wynn: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 week.

40:41Jordan Harbinger:Right. You have to be the breadwinner. And yeah, all of those pressures. And this is where Eric Fromm, who's a mid 20th century German social psychologist, is useful. So his basic argument is that rigid hierarchical societies push people into two roles, domination or submission. Fun options, both. Depends what you're into, I guess. But yeah. No kink 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.

41:22Jordan Harbinger: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, then. It's pressure. I mean, that's the trade. And crucially, Fromm's 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.

42:08Jessica Wynn:Less man as job description.

42:11Jordan Harbinger:Yeah, exactly. Less pressure to perform a role that cuts you off from half of 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.

42:48Jessica Wynn:Okay, so you don't need some sort of prehistoric, matriarchal, golden age to make the argument.

42:54Jordan Harbinger: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.

43:04Jessica Wynn: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's studies 102 over here. It's not one thing to just be like a woman in the world. You know, there's all kinds of stuff that intersects with that.

43:24Jordan Harbinger: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.

44:00Jessica Wynn:You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show. We'll be right back.

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45:01Jessica Wynn:Head to livemomentus.com and use promo code JHS for up to 35 % off your first order. That's livemomentus.com, promo code JHS. This episode is sponsored in part by Quilt Mind. If you're not on LinkedIn, you're probably making a mistake, not because it's so cool, but because it's practical. If you're trying to get hired, recruiters are there. If you run a business, people are absolutely looking you up before they take you seriously. LinkedIn is your built-in credibility slash this person really exists check. But here's the bigger miss. Having a profile and never posting. Most people treat LinkedIn like some kind of static resume.

45:32Jessica Wynn:The moment you start posting consistently, you stand out because almost nobody does. Every time I post, I get DMs from people I haven't talked to in years, like man that hit home. Suddenly I'm top of mind. That turns into intros, partnerships, opportunities. That's not luck. It's visibility. That's why I use Quilt Mind. They help busy execs get LinkedIn famous in about 30 minutes a week. I do a quick call. They pull out my stories and insights, turn them into short, punchy posts that sound like me, and they keep me accountable because my default setting is I'll do it later. And you know how that goes.

46:00Jessica Wynn:And I'll share stuff there that I don't really talk about on the podcast. So if you're curious, look me up on LinkedIn. If you want Quilt Mind, email jordanaudience at quiltmind.com. That's jordanaudience at q-u-i-l-t-m-i-n-d.com. Thank you for listening to and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers keeps the lights on around here. All of the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show are searchable and clickable on the website at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Now for the rest of Skeptical Sunday. Now we're in Women's Studies 201. So even a matriarchy could still be terrible for some women, I suppose, right?

46:34Jessica Wynn: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 patriarchy, we need to ask matriarchy for whom?

46:47Jordan Harbinger:Yeah. I mean, history gives us examples of that. Look at parts of the suffrage movement in the United States that centered around white women's rights while excluding all the others.

46:57Jessica Wynn:That's a good point. And we should also remember that societies with different structures are not happening in a vacuum either.

47:04Jordan Harbinger:Right. Yeah. This isn't a controlled experiment. There are real societies with a lot of forces acting on it at once.

47:11Jessica Wynn:So the thing we think of as isolating, so this matrilineal structure or whatever, it's not ever isolated and it can't be in 2026 anyways, I suppose.

47:19Jordan Harbinger: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.

47:28Jessica Wynn: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?

47:38Jordan Harbinger: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 mirror image idea of patriarchy 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.

48:17Jordan Harbinger:Those claims just don't hold up. These are patterns produced by social arrangements and social arrangements can change.

48:25Jessica Wynn:Men are from Mars. Women are from a better marketing team. Right.

48:29Jordan Harbinger: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-peaceful and harmonious utopias or just as violent and hierarchical as patriarchy, but with women in charge.

48:44Jessica Wynn:So even when we imagine something different, we just repaint the same system. That's kind of, I guess, funny is not the right word, but you know what I mean?

48:51Jordan Harbinger:Ironic, maybe? I don't know. Yeah, sure.

48:53Jessica Wynn:Let's go with that.

48:53Jordan Harbinger: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. 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.

49:18Jessica Wynn:And it has a cool plane. So we're just distorting the idea of which gender is in charge, not what they're in charge of.

49:25Jordan Harbinger: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.

49:36Jessica Wynn:Which is a sign the framework is the problem, not the society. OK, so the goal is not flipping the hierarchy. It's asking whether hierarchy itself is the right model and who should be on top.

49:45Jordan Harbinger: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.

50:04Jessica Wynn:So it's not a gender swap. It's a different structure. Right.

50:08Jordan Harbinger:Which means this doesn't have to be a fight. It can be a question about what actually works.

50:13Jessica Wynn: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.

50:31Jordan Harbinger:Yeah, I mean, we should. I agree completely. And I think the word matriarchy 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 and dominance? Or is it care, consensus, redistribution? You know, those are genuinely different options. And the evidence from societies that lean toward the second set of values suggests tentatively, carefully, that people in those societies across genders tend to do better by various measures of well-being.

51:06Jessica Wynn:And calling that matriarchy, that may be both accurate in some structural sense, but also misleading in terms of what it actually means for the people living in it.

51:15Jordan Harbinger:Yeah, I mean, keep considering the Masuo. 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.

51:36Jessica Wynn:Did you come across any sort of non-binary gender systems or are we stuck in the two-lane matriarchy-patriarchy highway?

51:45Jordan Harbinger: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-led can miss the entire structure.

51:58Jessica Wynn: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.

52:05Jordan Harbinger: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.

52:14Jessica Wynn: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-led 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 slash some sort of woke college class that I'm trying to sift through here. We have to be looking at power dynamics in society as, I can't believe I'm about to say this, but gender fluid. So what is the vocabulary for that is what we have to figure out.

52:43Jordan Harbinger:We could lean into some kind of genderless archy, I guess.

52:48Jessica Wynn:Sure. How about Barbie archy? Not the movie, not the female version of the doll, but you know how they have that smooth, featureless Ken doll situation down there with no confusing parts?

53:00Jordan Harbinger:Yeah, a private partless philosophy. 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.

53:36Jessica Wynn:They can tell when you walk over because of your heels.

53:38Jordan Harbinger:They could tell by what shoes you were wearing. So it was this really particular thing of, oh, my gosh, like I have to wear soft-soled shoes for my audition. Otherwise, they'll know I'm a woman and how horrible that would be. Don't wear any perfume or anything.

53:52Jessica Wynn:Yeah.

53:52Jordan Harbinger: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.

54:10Jessica Wynn:So how did that? Did it work? Did they end up with like a 50 50 ish split in the orchestra?

54:15Jordan Harbinger:It was upsetting how much it worked, how many more women got seats in the orchestras. Yeah.

54:19Jessica Wynn:Wow. Okay. Just curious. I think it's hard for people to not look at the matriarchy, patriarchy conversation as 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, sheesh, I've used the word patriarchy more than I have in my entire life during the past hour.

54:38Jordan Harbinger:The vocabulary is uncomfortable, you know, but it doesn't have to be. I think the vocabulary is uncomfortable because the definitions are pretty wishy-washy. You know, 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.

55:05Jessica Wynn:OK, 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.

55:14Jordan Harbinger: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.

55:25Jessica Wynn: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?

55:31Jordan Harbinger:Well, for one, I mean, we touched on it earlier, but what these systems cost men. So conversations about feminism, you know, we want all these allies, but we also need to include what masculinity does. It causes emotional isolation. It does mean shorter lifespans, higher suicide rates. Those are separate issues, but they come from the same structures that disadvantage women. They're just the other side of the same coin.

55:59Jessica Wynn:And the matriarchy conversation almost never really goes there.

56:03Jordan Harbinger:Yeah, because it's framed as a conversation about women's liberation, which it is, but it points at something bigger. A social arrangement that probably doesn't look like women on top any more than it looks like men on top.

56:17Jessica Wynn: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?

56:28Jordan Harbinger:Okay, sure.

56:28Jessica Wynn:Don't say reverse cowgirl, Jordan. Don't say it. I knew that's what you wanted to say.

56:32Jordan Harbinger:I knew it. 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.

56:46Jessica Wynn:Okay. And the project doesn't need to dig up some weird golden age of feminist Amazon whatever with pyramids to justify it.

56:54Jordan Harbinger: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.

57:07Jessica Wynn:The problem is so many people are turned off by an 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.

57:21Jordan Harbinger:They want to be better than other people. I know. I mean, now we're getting into the philosophy of power being applied and whatever social norms were raised in. So that might be a conversation for another episode, maybe. Maybe.

57:35Jessica Wynn: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 I just, we never actually talk about anywhere. When I was talking about this topic with you pre-show, no resources came up easily. That wasn't something ridiculous or sci-fi based. So while 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.

58:09Jordan Harbinger:Ask her who's on top.

58:10Jessica Wynn:Yeah. Oh, God. 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 slash deals. I'm at 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 nevermetjessicas. And this show is created in association with Podcast One.

58:44Jessica Wynn:My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Tata Sidlowskis, Robert Fogerty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Our advice and opinions are our own, and I might be a lawyer, but I'm 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 doled out today.

59:13Jessica Wynn: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 invisible can get and why fear, misinformation, and neglect are making it worse. My background was in wildfire remediation, floods, hurricane cleanup. So my career was traveling around to hurricane harvey and california wildfires like wherever the most toxic disasters were that's where i would go the reason that i got into jasper making these air scrubbers is because the machines that we would use on the job site were these big large industrial machines and when you would compare that to little air purifiers in the store i was able to see like these little things don't work basically let's make the world's first air scrubber design for your home so now i'm kind of on a mission to just talk about air quality anyone who's thinking about water and hasn't thought about air.

1:00:13Jessica Wynn:My mission for the next 20 years is to increase people's awareness of the air that you breathe. In the mold industry, they have two sayings. One is the mold rush, and the other one is mold is gold. A lot of people get triggered by mold, but it's become a very fear-induced industry because there is a dark side of the mold industry. Not everybody's a bad actor, but you have to be quite careful when you're navigating it. People often go into debt of hundreds of thousands of dollars, rip their homes apart, move into apartments or homes that were moldier than their first home, and debt and stress, and then they get much more sick.

1:00:48Jessica Wynn:So I've been seeing this increasing at a large scale, and that's why as a mold remediation guy, how would we do mold removal? We'd remove the physical mold and we would scrub the air. It was very simple. The average indoor air is five to ten times dirtier than outside. When you turn your bedroom into a clean air sanctuary, your body can heal itself if you get out of the way. If you think clean air is a given, check out episode 1246 with Mike Feldstein. It might completely change how you think about the air you're breathing right now.

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