Twitter User Shows What Living In A Matriarchy Instead Of A Patriarchy Would Be Like

Change takes time, especially when it comes to entire societies changing the way they think and live their lives. But it never stops people from at least trying to make these changes come faster.

Gender inequality is one of many problems that have been around for millennia at this point. Slowly, but surely, people have been on a mission to make it a thing of the past, though, and one internaut wrote a strong piece to illustrate just how much we’re overdue for gender equality.

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A. R. Moxon, Twitter user and author of The Revisionaries with whom Bored Panda got in touch, not too long ago took to Twitter to explain a fresh side of what gender inequality really looks like. But, instead of appealing to people’s sense of morality or using statistics or something, he decided to flip it all around.

So, try to imagine that instead of having had a 240-year history of 45 male presidents in the United States, you’d have 45 female presidents, and then a man running would be considered “identity politics.”

Or, in such a world, try to imagine that of the next 113 SCOTUS justices, only 4 would be men. Or imagine being a man and not being able to vote from now until 2170. Or being allowed into colleges for around 100 years. Or having to wait 100 years to have 6 men elected to a 100-member senate. The list goes on.

Moxon effectively puts a lot of things into perspective by doing this gender flip, switching from patriarchy to matriarchy, and thus showing just how ridiculous the situation looks. And it’s as ridiculous in reality.

"It came to me naturally. I wrote it as the Democratic presidential field was starting to come into focus, and a lot of the narrative was driven by the fact that many of the candidates for nomination were women," explained Moxon the origins of this thread. "The way that it was talked about struck me as something both so predictable as to be mundane, and also extraordinary the moment I lowered my received framework to really hear what was being said."

"A plethora of viable nominees should be standard and expected; after all, women make up roughly half the U.S. and world population. Yet, here it was, being presented as this extraordinary thing—because it was. It hadn't really been seen before. Even a single viable female candidate in the field was something that would have been unprecedented as recently as 20 years ago. And of course a lot of the narrative was being driven around the idea that the nation just wasn't ready for a woman to run, and worry that a female nominee wouldn't be able to win."

"And it just hit me that this is the sort of narrative that women still have to endure. It's not something men would accept quietly, either; men would lose their minds at the unfairness of it all! Women absolutely should be enraged at the unfairness of it all, too! We should expect to see anger and frustration and a refusal to put up with it any longer! So there was a lot to play with in demonstrating those ideas, just by reversing the dynamic to let people who don't see just how dramatically unfair dialogue is around women to actually see it."

Parts of it were wrapped into satire, pointing out the times particular genders were judged based on things like stereotypes, particular people and their actions and, even more ridiculously, their genitals.

“I know, these are crazy hypotheticals. Insane. It would never happen. It would be insane to treat a gender that way. But if it did, wouldn’t it matter? Wouldn’t it need correction? Man. We’d need to rethink everything,” concluded Moxon.

One person asked Moxon what he was trying to accomplish with this, who elaborated that he was trying to point out what today’s state of affairs is, trying to take away the focus for an otherwise male-focused society and to break men out of a self-defensive stance.

But despite gender inequality being an age-old problem, a lot of progress has already been made. "Obviously there's been a lot of progress. A century ago ideas many of us take for granted—including the right of women to vote—were controversial or novel," elaborated Moxon. "However, just the fact that this thread could be useful or instructive rather than nonsensical shows us we've got a long way to go."

"One of the things that writing the thread helped me unpack is that true equality isn't just a matter of representation by numbers; it's the fact that there have been centuries of male-dominated discourse and policy that have resulted in underlying structures built without the benefit of female voices. It's very difficult to truly achieve equality until we're willing to look at those structures and willing to reimagine them and actually change them. And by 'we' I mostly mean men."

But, as is with many social problems, putting an end to gender inequality isn't easy at all. And part of the problem is the lack of willingness, as elaborates Moxon:

"I think the biggest obstacle to actually making change is wanting to. There's a gravity to status quo that creates its own momentum and is difficult to overcome, but all the more so when it's resisted—and it is being resisted. When something isn't equal, and it benefits you, there's an instinct to not want to change it. This is why you see such open hostility from people who are committed to that status quo, with everything from outright scorn, to deflection, to false equivalencies, and even, from people who might not want to be perceived hostile to equality, a certain practiced confusion about the nature of the inequality, even to the point of claiming that it's men who are now the threatened and downtrodden group. It's just when you reverse it that you see: no, actually it's very clear who is on the privileged end of this, and it's pretty clear such a state wouldn't be acceptable to them."

Twitter liked this take on gender inequality, prompting many tweets in response. Some were sad that this is the way it is, despite us living in a rather progressive time. Others debated the issue, adding their own take on it. Regardless, the thread managed to garner a modest 8.9k likes with a sizable handful of retweets.

You can check out the rest of the thread here. Or buy his book here. Or buy his signed book here. Regardless, before you go, let’s have a chat! What are your thoughts on this? Have any other analogies to bring the point across of how much gender inequality there is in today’s society? Let us know in the comment section below!