Okay, before I start,
if you want to go research the legitimacy of what I'm about to say,
please do.
There is a significant body of archaeological and anthropological evidence
behind all of it. This video is in a dissertation.
It's a conversation starter.
So let's start. Patriarchy is not natural.
I wanna say that again. Patriarchy is not the natural biological order of things.
It is not inevitable. It is not hardwired into us.
It started somewhere, and we actually know roughly when and we know why.
For the vast majority of human existence,
hundreds of thousands of years,
men did not know that they had a role in creating life.
Think about what that means.
The only visible, undeniable,
observable truth of human creation was the woman.
She bled. She didn't die.
Her body grew new humans. She was,
by every observable measure,
the origin of life. And men knew it.
We know that they knew it because of what they did about it.
Male initiation rituals from the Neolithic era
involved men cutting themselves to simulate menstrual bleeding.
They were trying to access what women had.
In Norse mythology, Thor gains enlightenment
by bathing in the menstrual blood of the primal matriarchs.
In Greek mythology, the gods drank menstrual blood,
called the supernatural red wine of Mother Hera,
to sustain their power.
The oldest calendar ever found is a bone marked with lunar cycles,
tracking a woman's menstrual cycle.
Women invented time keeping by charting their own Bodies.
For thousands and thousands of years,
this was the order of things.
The feminine was sacred. The mother was the centre.
Creation was hers. Then,
Roughly 10,000 years ago, through the domestication of animals,
through watching livestock breed,
men made a connection.
They understood for the first time that they had a role in creating life.
And something shifted almost immediately in the archaeological record.
You see it. Ownership,
naming rights over children,
control over women's bodies.
Patri. Patrilineal,
linial inheritance, the accumulation of land and wealth.
Male gods steadily replacing female ones.
War as a tool of dominance.
And here's the part that I really want you to sit with.
Writing wasn't invented until around
3400 B C, by which point patriarchy was already fully in place.
Which means that virtually everything we call history,
every text, every religious document,
every law, every story,
was written inside the patriarchal era.
The world that existed before
it didn't get to write itself down.
It was already gone. So this is what I'm saying.
Patriarchy did not come from nature.
It came from a thought.
A thought born out of thousands of years of watching women create life
and having no role in it. No equivalent power,
no equivalent mystery.
And when men finally found their small piece of that process,
they didn't integrate it. They inflated it.
And then they took over everything.
That is not biology. That is great insecurity.
With a huge army. And we Have been living inside of that story ever since. So,
so long that most of us have never been invited to question it.
Well, I'm inviting you to question it now.