We're all - women and men - living in an inescapable cult that technically isn't

This is Deliberately Difficult & Laughing. The place for all women who are done with the “good” girl/woman/wife/mother performance. Unlocking how to: break down invisible barriers, show up with genuine authenticity, grow the courage to be disliked, whittle down perfectionism, and practice proper self-care.

Since August 2025, I’ve been delving into patriarchy and how “it” conditions all of us.1

The messages to keep women small and compliant.
The impacts it has on women.
The mechanisms that have kept it alive for six four millennia now.2

By December I couldn’t shake the sense that patriarchy looks like a cult.

But what do I know… I’m philosophically, psychologically, and sociologically inclined and have spent decades reading far and wide, but I have no formal training in them.3

I figured I’d ask AI, because… why not. And I’d get the start of an answer faster than trawling Google search results myself.

I asked both Perplexity and Claude (Sonnet 4.5) a simple (or so I thought) question:

Is patriarchy a cult? In other words, does patriarchy exhibit linguistic and behavioral patterns associated with cults and mind control techniques?

TL;DR: of both (paraphrasing): technically it isn’t a cult but it has overlaps making it something of a cult-like social order.

Hmm.

It confirmed the sense I couldn’t shake but I am quite suspicious of AIs and their propensity for sycophancy and hallucination.

I left it. Also because I didn’t quite know what to do with the results. Keep them private or write an article about it. And if were to write about it, would it serve anyone? What angle w/should I take.

Another close encounter of the third kind with “nasty neighbor” a week or so ago, sealed the deal on the decision to write about it.

The serving and the angle were still uncertain, but having decided to create an article on this topic, I set out to do what I always do before using anything an AI comes up with: have it checked by another AI in research mode.4

I picked Claude Opus 5 this time:

Pull the characteristics of and mechanisms used by cults to get and keep members complying and policing both other members and themselves from reputable sources and research (papers).

Report those in a bulleted lists - one for the characteristics and one for the mechanisms - adding whether your sources all agree or not and if they don’t, what they disagree about and why.

Then read both attached files.

Report what they got right and wrong, and what they missed in their assessment of patriarchy as a cult.

Finally, research why the general public doesn’t see religions as cults.

It worked for 15+ minutes. Produced one heck of a meaty answer. Standard Claude fact-checking answers are tough to process, so I had it put together a table with the characteristics / mechanisms, the arguments for and against, and a categorization of the consensus / disagreement on them.

Reading through that, especially the arguments of the dissenters, a pattern jumped out at me. They all centered around women’s agency, voluntary entry, and that a society is not a single leader or even a single institution like a cult has / is.

What they all ignored is that most cult members are consenting recruits, not born-ins: second generation cult members.

Born-ins never had a chance to dissent to their recruitment.

They were socialized (read: indoctrinated) into the cult long before they were able to question, let alone reject, the beliefs and norms handed them.

By the time they gain the skill to do so, they no longer don’t. The belief system has solidified into their subconscious and it would take a major wake-up call to shake the scales from their eyes.

Leaving a cult usually has a huge cost. Mentally, emotionally, financially, socially.

Not to mention that it’s hard to leave something behind that you’ve identified with and have been meticulously indoctrinated by.

It’s like pulling the foundations out from under your very existence.

That’s why it’s 10x if not 100x harder for born-ins who have no prior life to return to.

When it comes to the comparison between patriarchy and cults, what you need to realize is that

All members of any society are all born-ins.

None of us had a choice. None of us had any say in the matter.

Neither did those who handed us patriarchy’s beliefs and norms.

And while we are all free to change our beliefs and norms once the scales drop from our eyes, rejecting and no longer complying with patriarchal beliefs and norms,

comes with high mental, emotional, economic, social, physical costs.

What’s more, while leaving a cult is difficult, it’s possible. Leaving a society is too. You can move countries and trade one society for another. But given that virtually all current societies are patriarchal, there’s

no escape from patriarchy.5

What you can do?

See the rules and stop applying them.
Accept that other members will still apply them to you.
Find a way to bend the system and its rules in your favor.

Phrased differently:

Acknowledge the water we all swim in
and
learn to swim with the tide and the currents
without
contorting who you are and still getting what you want.

Those last two bits are what require bending the system and its rules.

It requires more than the usual “lean in” and “just [x]” types of advice that tend to backfire through the double bind of being too feminine and not feminine enough.

Does that mean we are stuck? Doomed?

No way.

There are ways. I’ve found a few. You can find yours. We can find more together.

The most challenging part is that all of them require growing the courage to be disliked. For women especially, as all messages we’ve been socialized with tell us explicitly or implicitly that being disliked is to be feared.

Just remember:

Courage is not the absence of fear. It’s acting in spite of it.

Live long and prosper.

If you’d like to read the table I had Claude put together on the arguments for and against each of the cult characteristics and mechanisms, drop a comment. And I’ll send you a link via DM.