This week we are kicking off our 13 video series between YouTube and Substack. The video and following post are similar, but the videos will always go deeper.
Plus there is a BONUS exercise at the end of this video to help you start DECONSTRUCTING PATRIARCHY from your own inner world.
I decided, due to the uncertainty of Social Media (even though YT does not seem to be affected) to post the video here as well to ensure the world never loses the progress of Feminine Consciousness again.
If you want to support this work and ensure I can keep making these Educational CHANGE tools — please consider:
Watching, liking and subscribing on YouTube — to help me climb my way to 1000 subsribers and 4000 watch hours which helps me acheive monetization.
Paying for a subscription here at $5/month or $50/year. Eventually, I will have a few extra benefits for subscribers…but in general I want/feel like the world desperately needs this education available for free.
Hope you can join me on both places so we can all Deconstruct Patriarchy in a real way that will and can bring will change to our personal and collective lives.
Last week’s video - An intro to this season.
WHERE TO BEGIN?
A common mistake people make when they hear the word patriarchy is to assume it’s about blaming men.
However, this is not how I will be using this term.
Patriarchy is NOT about pointing fingers at men and letting women off scot free.
It is about understanding an invisible societal structure that impacts all of us, men included.
This invisible structure shapes everything: our religions, histories, stories, politics — all of it.
Since these structures influence our outer world, they also seep into our inner world — shaping how we think, what we believe, and how we interpret the world around us. Including how we understand the past, the present and our view into the future.
To continue Deconstructing the stories that no longer serve you, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Here’s the thing: we often take this structure of patriarchy as fact. A given.
We believe it’s always been this way—that patriarchy just is.
Most of us never question, “Is there another societal and political structure that humans can and have lived within?”
We have never questioned this simply because this foundation seems like the only one there ever has been.
We have inherited this “house” we live in (society/culture) from our ancestors. They built the foundation to this house, and it’s worked for millennia.
It has always been this way, right?
But what if patriarchy was not all there ever was?
What if societies used to operate differently?
What if knowing that could change the way we see not only the past, but the present and into the future as well?
The Invisible Foundation of Patriarchy
Imagine for a moment that the structure of society is like the foundation of a skyscraper—hidden beneath the surface but holding everything above it in place. Patriarchy, in this analogy, is the foundation. It’s the framework on which so many of our societal systems are built — from government to religion, relationships to economics…all the way into our inner world of thoughts and beliefs.
I always find it helpful to look at the etmyology of a word, such as:
Patriarchy comes from the Greek patriarkhia.
Pater = father
+
archy = govern or rule
At its core, patriarchy is a social structure where power and lineage is established and passed down through the male line.
Patriarchy therefore is not about individual men or women.
It is about how society is structured.
Here is where it gets tricky: like all societal structures — patriarchy has exceptions, cracks and layers that can make it difficult to see clearly.
Some women and marginalized people rise to elite positions — while some men find themselves at the bottom of the hierarchy.
Some women may be able to climb the economic and social rungs outside the home, but still find themselves in subservient intimate relationships.
However, the overall pattern of SOCIETY remains: power and lineagae flows through a male-dominated system and everyone is expected to fall into their assigned role based on birth, gender, race, and/or class.
Yes, you can personally not live withn a patriarchal home. Perhaps your community is equalitarian.
However, we all still live in a SOCIETY structured through patriarchy…and thus still will feel those effects in one way or another.
Before Patriarchy?
Again, most of us do not question this structure because it feels inevitable.
Yet, what if it is not?
According to historian Gerda Lerner, patriarchy was not always the default. In her groundbreaking book, “The Creation of Patriarchy” she traces how this system evolved over 2500+ years, starting around 3100 BCE. Before then, many societies operated more as partnerships — most likely matrifocal or matrilineal.
This meant power and resources passed through the mother’s line.
These societies, based on what anthropology can deduce, were more equalitarian in domestic and political realms; were inherently less violent; and did not prioritize men knowing their own lineage to the advantage of the entire tribe.
How Did Patriarchy Come to Rule?
According to Lerner, she explains ten “steps” that happened over this course of time that led to the firm foundation of patriarchy being almost invisible to our modern eye. Understanding these ten steps is foundational to see the “Patriarchal Lens” I will be talking about in future videos…and to be able to Deconstruct Patriarchy.
1. The appropriation by men of women's sexual and reproductive capacity occurred PRIOR to the formation of private property and class society. Its (the sexual and reproductive capacity) lies, in fact, at the foundation of private property.
PAUSE: Let’s break this down more:
a. that the FOUNDATION of patriarchy is the belief that others have a "right" to control another person, even if it is just through an organ of another person.
b. Private property — the ability to claim land for one family line — is also a bedrock of patriarchy.
c. This step alone ties a woman's sexual and reproductive capacity to a man through private property.
2. Archaic states were organized in the FORM of patriarchy (i.e. structure of society where everything goes through the male line). Thus from its inception the State had an essential interest in the maintenance of the patriarchal (male line) family.
3. Men learned to institute dominance and hierarchy over other people by their earlier practice of dominance over the woman of their own group. I.E. Slavery was born, but at first just via enslavement of women of conquered groups.
4. The earliest Laws institutionalized and enforced with the full power of the state women's sexual subordination. Women's cooperation in the system was secured by various means: force, economic dependency on the male head of the family, class priveleges bestowed upon CONFORMING and DEPENDENT women of the upper class, and the artifically created division of women into RESPECTABLE and NOT-RESPECTABLE women.
5. Class for men (on the other hand, is not based on their relation to their sexual production but) was and is based on their relationship to the means of production. Those who owned the means of production could dominate those who did not. For women, class is mediated through their sexual ties to a man, who then gives them access to material resources. The division of women into 'respectable' (that is, attached to a man) and 'not-respectable' (that is, not attached to one man or free of all men) is institutionalized in laws pertaining to the veiling of women.
6. Long after women's sexual and economic subordination to men (up to about 2000 years) women are still playing active and respected roles in mediating between humans and gods as priestesses, seers, diviners, and healers. Metaphysical female power, especially the power to give life, is worshiped by men and women in the form of powerful goddesses long after women's subordination in all other areas of their lives.
7. The dethroning of the powerful goddesses and their replacement by a dominant male god occur in most Near Eastern societies following the establishment of a strong and imperialistic kingship. Gradually the function of the controlling fertility formerly entirely held by the goddesses, is symbolized through the symbolic or actual mating of the male god or God-King with the Goddess or her priestess. Finally sexuality (eroticism) and procreativity are split in the emergence of separate goddesses for each function and the Mother-Goddess is transformed into the wife/consort of the chief male god.
8. The emergence of the Hebrew monotheism [which had merged from a pantheon > to a henotheism - i.e. the worship of only one god without denying the existence of other gods as in the commandment: there should be no other gods before me] takes the form of an attack on the widespread cults of the various fertility goddesses. In the writing of the Book of Genesis, creativity and procreativity are ascribed to an all-powerful God, whose epitaphs of 'Lord' and 'King' establish him as a male god, and female sexuality other than for procreative purposes becomes associated with sin and evil.
(What Ms. Lerner says later is that the new monotheistic male god ALSO acquires all the fertility power to create and birth life -- i.e. as we see in Genesis, which up until then, had always been attributed to goddesses.)
9. In the establishment of the covenant community the basic symbolism and the actual contract between God and humanity [in the creation story of Genesis, which happens to form most of Western world] assumes as a given the subordinate position of women and their exclusion from the metaphysical covenant and the earthly covenant community. Their only access to God and to the holy community is in their function as mothers.
10. This symbolic devaluing of women in relation to the divine becomes one of the founding metaphors [i.e. STORIES!!!!] of Western civilization. The other founding metaphor [i.e. STORY] is supplied by Aristotelian philosophy, which assumes as a given that women are incomplete and damaged human beings of an entirely different order than men [i.e. incomplete in development INTO men]. It is with the creation of these two metaphorical constructs [i.e. STORIES], which are built into the very foundations of the symbol systems [religious and sociopolitical language], that the subordination of women comes to be seen as 'natural', hence it becomes invisible. It is this which finally establishes patriarchy firmly as an actuality and as an ideology.
The Effects of Patriarchy: Who Really Benefits?
Reading this list — can you now understand why and how women have been playing “catch-up” to men for thousands of years? Of why and how the Bible could be such a contested hotbed of scripture about the value and worth of women (because it was created, as we will see in video #10, at the END of the 2500 years it took to “create patriarchy”)?
Patriarchy is more than a historical artifact.
It is a system that continues to shape our lives.
The truth is, it doesn’t just hurt women, people of color and other gender identities
It hurts everyone.
For men, patriarchy creates rigid expectations: suppress emotions other than anger and pridefulness; solve problems with violence; and conform to narrow definitions of success.
For women, it places the burden of unpaid labor, emotional caregiving, and societal expectations of perfection.
For everyone—regardless of gender—it drives a system of unnatural productivity through capitalism, an offshoot of patriarchy that pushes people to exhaustion.
Even the so-called winners of this system—elite men—suffer. The pressure to maintain power and status often comes at the expense of genuine connection and well-being in order to fulfill their god-given birth “right” role.
Furthermore for the men: When women stand up and say, “No more,” some men are left confused, feel they are now being oppressed.
Because the very systems and people that “benefited” them are stripped away — and they are left to see themselves as they truly are: helpless and powerless without those that gave them power.
They are left unsure how to evolve in a world where traditional roles no longer serve them.
No one is truly thriving under this system. Not the women fighting to reclaim their autonomy, not the men grappling with outdated ideals, and not the elites at the top of the hierarchy.
They might seem like they are thriving, but at what cost to their own humanity to keep their positions of power?
A New Way Forward
So where does this leave us?
In my view, understanding the history of patriarchy is not about assigning blame.
It is about finding hope.
If women helped co-create this system — then women and men together can co-create something new.
Patriarchy is not an unchangeable fact of life.
It is a story we’ve been telling ourselves — through our religious, spiritual, political and social stories — for thousands of years.
Like any story, it can be rewritten.
In future posts, we’ll dive deeper into how patriarchy still exists today. We will quesiton whether it’s “natural” for men to dominate and women to submit.
For now, I want to leave you with this thought: what if the certainty of the past is not as important as the possibilities of what the future can be by re-examining the possiblities of the past?
GOLDEN NUGGET: What can you glimpse as hopeful about the past and future after reading this history of the Creation of Patriarchy?
So much love till next week!
Holli
Ready to Deconstruct Patriarchy in your inner world?
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