Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to Skeptical Sunday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Today I'm here with Skeptical Sunday co-host, writer and researcher, Jessica Wynn. On the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.
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Chapter 2: What are the world's most famous matriarchies and how do they function?
Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Now, today on Skeptical Sunday, we are talking about matriarchy, not patriarchy, the word you hear all the time on the internet. We're talking about matriarchy.
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 matriarchy looks like globally, but I do know what it looks like when I lose an argument at home. Now, to help me think through it is writer and researcher Jessica Wynn.
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 matriarchy somewhere on earth right now?
There are places routinely described that way, like the millions of Menangkapau 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 matriarchal. 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.
OK, 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?
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Chapter 3: Is there evidence for a prehistoric golden age of matriarchy?
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 Qasi. So it's a group called the Singkong Rimpe Timi. 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 laughed, but hold on. So this so-called matriarchy has men in charge of religion and politics, and those men are complaining. 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 or even oppressive.
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 at 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 insolent or something like that. And they subtitle it. It's just, have you seen this? It's actually crazy.
Oh, I remember it for sure. I mean, it's a wild clip.
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Chapter 4: How does patriarchy impact men's health and well-being?
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 rites. 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 and 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 are 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 it 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 Mesuo 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 Mesuo practice what's called oxia. Translated, it means walking marriages. So a woman and man 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.
Wow.
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Chapter 5: What alternatives to dominance-based societies exist?
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 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. Right.
you're just the guy who comes over after they go to bed.
Yeah, you're like a sperm donor or whatever. But the thing is, and I think about that, and I'm assuming the guys 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.
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.
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 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.
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Chapter 6: How do matrilineal societies affect health outcomes?
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?
Yeah, pretty much. China's legal and economic systems are built around nuclear families and formal marriage. And the Mosuo 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 Mesua are heavily marketed as the last matriarchy, which causes this huge influx of tourists expecting to see something exotic going on.
So 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. 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 where marriage is the foundation of everything.
Yeah, now 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. OK, so you don't get to opt out. You just play a different role. Yeah. OK.
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Chapter 7: What critiques exist regarding the concept of matriarchy?
OK. 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 them?
Exactly. 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.
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Chapter 8: How can we redefine societal structures for better well-being?
Bold claim. OK, so the guy who invented the idea of prehistoric matriarchy 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, Friedrich Engels, the German philosopher and co-author of the Communist Manifesto, he connected the idea of matriarchy to capitalism.
Of course he did.
OK, 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 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.
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.
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. I feel like you're making enemies. All right.
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