The Matriarchy Fantasy Feels Like a Sedative

Okay. I’m just going to say the thing I’ve been thinking about for a while. Maybe this makes me a bad feminist. I’m okay with that.

The matriarchy fantasy feels like a sedative.

I know that sentence may land like a slap. Stay with me for a moment.

I understand why it’s appealing. After thousands of years of living inside patriarchal systems that organize the world around domination, extraction, and the devaluation of care, it makes perfect sense that many women feel relief imagining a society that centers nurturing, children, community, and the well-being of the collective.

Of course that vision feels good.

But the more I watch the conversation unfold, the more it begins to feel like a psychological balm rather than a structural analysis. People get energized by the image of a care-centered society while unconsciously avoiding the far harder question of what would actually have to change for that society to exist.

Systems like cis-hetero patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy are not simply external structures waiting to be replaced with something kinder. They live inside us. They shape how we understand authority, usefulness, gender, intimacy, and power. They organize our identities, our relationships, our expectations of one another in ways that often feel natural until we start looking closely at them.

And this is where the conversation tends to slip back into the same trap.

A lot of the argument for matriarchy rests on the idea that women are inherently more caring, more empathetic, more morally suited to organize social life. The hierarchy flips, but the essentialism stays intact. The same logic that once confined women to the role of caretaker becomes the justification for why they should lead society.

Women are not inherently anything.

Women can be deeply attentive and relational. Women can also be ruthless, cruel, and fully capable of abusing power. Growing up inside the same systems shapes everyone, however the conditioning lands differently depending on race, class, gender, and position within those structures.

Okay. Now let’s really get uncomfortable.

This is also where the conversation about power tends to disappear entirely. Because when I look at the current wave of matriarchy discourse, it is overwhelmingly white. And we all know where white feminism tends to lead when power is left unexamined. Nowhere. Absolutely nowhere. White people are famously avoidant about talking about power for a very simple reason: we already have it, and we are rarely eager to give it up.

It’s also worth naming that none of this critique is new. Black feminist thinkers have been pointing to these dynamics for decades: Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Angela Davis, Patricia Hill Collins, and many others. Much of the conversation about power, labor, and the limits of white feminism has already been mapped out in that body of work. If someone calls themselves a feminist and hasn’t spent time with Black feminist thought, there’s an entire layer of the conversation that’s still missing.

So the conversation stays at the level of values — care, nurturing, stability, community. Which all sound beautiful, but still leave the underlying structure untouched.

Which brings us to the question that I’m always thinking about.

If society is organized around care, who is providing that care?

Historically the labor of care has not floated freely through society like some shared human instinct. It has been extracted. From women. Especially from women of color. From poor women. From immigrant women. From people whose economic survival depended on performing the very nurturing labor that others romanticize.

Care has always had a workforce.

So when people start talking about a society organized around care without also talking about labor, power, and extraction, I find myself wondering what exactly is being proposed, because if we tried to build that society tomorrow, with the same conditioning still running through our bodies and institutions, it seems likely that we would recreate many of the same hierarchies and harm under a different banner.

And I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to replicate this shit.

Historically, power has never shifted simply because people imagined a more compassionate arrangement. Power moves when something disrupts it. When structures are forced to reorganize and the cost of maintaining the existing hierarchy becomes too high to sustain.

This is part of why the current matriarchy conversation feels like a sedative to me. It generates emotional momentum without asking the far more uncomfortable question of what anyone is actually willing to disrupt in their real lives.

If the system remains intact while women continue performing the same emotional labor for partners, bosses, families, and institutions, then the structure of power has not moved at all. Care and empathy simply become another language through which the existing arrangement stabilizes itself.

And performance has never moved power. Performance is one of the ways power swallows movements whole. The matriarchy movement is no different. Which raises a much harder question than the fantasy of a care-centered society.

What are you actually willing to destabilize?

What are you actually willing to disrupt in your life?

What are you actually ready to confront around identity, role, and how you are seen?

Not in theory. Not in a comment thread. Not in a vision of a future society. Not in a book club discussion. Not in a podcast conversation. Not in slogans.

In your real, actual life.

That is where power can actually begin to shift on a structural level.

And the moment you start measuring movements by what they are willing to disrupt, a lot of things that sound radical suddenly reveal just how familiar they are.

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Alexandra Winteraven (they/them) is a queer, nonbinary somatic depth psychotherapist working at the intersection of somatic process, depth psychology, structural analysis., and cultural emergence. Their work focuses on interrupting inherited patterns at the level of the body, where the psyche continues to organize itself despite insight.

They are known for naming incongruence with clarity and care, and for working with people who are no longer able to live inside familiar shapes. Their approach is relational, embodied, and uninterested in performance or bypass. Their work supports internal structural reorganization rather than symptom management, and is oriented toward honesty, the cost of real change, and collective transformation.

If you’re curious about working in a 1:1 somatic depth container with Alexandra go here.