They Built A Patriarchy Based On An Inverted Penis

“A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.”

This is a quote from Doug Wilson, the noted spiritual advisor to our Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, and the man platformed prominently by John Piper.

When people heard that quote it became an internet sensation. People unfamiliar with Wilson and his teaching were shocked. Wilson explained it was “simply a biological description.” Like he was just stating facts, not his opinion.

Hold on to that defense. We will come back for it, because I will show you how this has been used for hundreds of years by religious teachers just like Wilson promoting his view of women as inferior by some grand design.

A lot of people online have condemned Wilson, but he is not the origin of this type of teaching within the church.

Wilson and his contemporaries all do the same thing. They take shaky science, mix it with scripture, and tell the rest of us the result is what God demands. Junk science in a new wrapper is really all this is.

But this teaching also costs something. The cost never lands on the men who teach it, but the women keep paying the bill for their specific brand of theology.

It can cost them their physical safety in an abusive marriage. A right to be educated and realize their full potential. A lifetime of hiding their body with baggy clothes so men will not lust after them.

Yet, I do not doubt these men’s sincerity. Wilson and the other figures promoting patriarchy and male leadership believe they are relying on the Bible. They are actually relying on a man who died seven and a half centuries before Wilson’s church in Moscow, Idaho was ever founded.

Let’s look at him, then I will show you why these men are still selling it.

Before anyone on the internet made the case for male dominance as sacred, this blueprint was already in place.

For more than a thousand years, the best doctors in the Western world taught that a woman is a man turned inside out.

Galen, the most famous physician of the ancient world, said the female organs are the male organs, inverted and held within. In the medical consensus of that age, a woman’s anatomy was an inverted penis.

The organs stayed inside, the doctors explained, because women lacked heat. Men had enough fire to finish.

Women were the unfinished ones.

Women were labeled as a biological mistake.

Physicians believed this into the 1600s. They drew the anatomy charts that way.

*A word to the wise, don’t Google search this for images like I did. Ick…

Aristotle supplied the other half.

He taught that a woman is a misbegotten male. The male seed aims to produce a son, as its own perfect likeness. A daughter is what happens when nature misses.

Inverted.

Unfinished.

Misbegotten.

That was the settled science of its day. And was used to build a theology you may recognize in our time.

As a black man in America, I can tell you from experience that when people in authority label you and your kind as lesser, they have no obligation to treat us as equals.

All of this landed on the desk of Thomas Aquinas, one of the church's greatest minds. In the 1200s Aquinas took that science and set it next to scripture. That combination still plays off each other.

Nature proves women are lesser. And lesser can be treated as such. In their view, because women are lesser, they cannot lead men. If Aquinas had a radio program it might be called “Focus On The Genitalia.”

This is the same argument Wilson and others who promote patriarchal teaching run today.

Ranking by anatomy keeps the men who wrote the order in control. Funny how that always works.

The version we are getting today is just propped up on social media, megachurches, and inside the current White House administration.

Mark Driscoll built an arena-sized church on a cruder version. Driscoll once invited his followers to swap mocking stories about “effeminate anatomically male worship leaders.” Follow the logic of the insult. To him the body is the credential for his belief. Fail to perform masculinity with your frame and your voice, and your fitness to lead God’s people is void.

James Dobson and Focus on the Family radio show ran a more palatable version, which is why it reached the most homes. Bringing Up Boys told millions of parents that boys are hardwired for risk and aggression, and that the wiring is “not only biological but theologically mandated.” Bringing Up Girls explained our daughters with a statistic. Girls’ brains, the book says carry 15 percent more blood flow. Trying to establish a biological difference in gender roles.

Junk science comes back to our theology.

Three famous men. Using three versions of the same playbook.

Aquinas pointed to anatomy theories.

Wilson points at body parts.

Dobson pointed to hormones and brain scans.

Notice how, just like Aquinas, each man carries his version of biology over to scripture to prove the bigger point. Men are designed to lead, women to follow. Nature wired it that way.

It is the inverted penis theory rebranded.

Once you see the original, the modern versions stop looking like Bible teaching and start looking like product updates. Like soft drink companies using new cans to look fresh to consumers.

The proof gets traded out every few centuries for whatever people trust at the moment, while the hierarchy stays in place.

Which brings us back to Wilson’s defense. When people pushed back on his patriarchal teaching, he said the sentence was “simply a biological description.” Just like those before him, he used biology he believed nature had settled as his proof. When we hear these defenses, all we are really hearing is inverted penises.

This cannot be passed off as one pastor’s quirk or a male social influencer.

In June 2026 the Southern Baptist Convention passed the Truth and Unity Amendment, 6,028 votes to 2,026, and a male-only pastorate became constitutional law in America’s largest Protestant denomination. The men in that hall argued from qualification verses, not biology, but their certainty that this is simply how God assembled the world is an inheritance. Aristotle's biology paid into that estate for centuries.

The men in this story built platforms, denominations, and careers on this teaching. Yet it is women who are always the ones being charged.

Tia Levings, who I follow on Substack, wrote a memoir about where this teaching lands when it walks through a front door. A Well-Trained Wife tells what happened inside her Christian patriarchy marriage, the submission that was preached as protection and lived as something else, and what it took to get herself and her children out. Read her comment sections on any given week. Women keep answering with their own versions.

Beth Allison Barr has told her story in print too. Her husband lost his ministry job for questioning whether women must stay silent. The theology did not just cost her a seat at the table, it cost her family its source of income. Its identity.

And in 2022, the Guidepost report showed what the leadership of the SBC did while its churches preached male headship as protection for women. Leaders kept a private list of hundreds of abusers in their ranks and stonewalled the survivors who came asking for help.

None of these women were harmed by Galen. Not one of them ever read Aquinas. Yet, this theory affected their lives anyway. Through a husband’s certainty, a committee’s silence, and a church that called this patriarchal system holy.

What happened when medical advancements finally forced people to give up the theories? Once anatomists opened actual bodies and looked, the inverted penis was finished. No doctor teaches it today as science caught its own mistake and fixed it.

The church has done something different though…

It casts doubt on science that contradicts its ‘biblical principles’. Then as it does now, stayed with the old teachings and used that as tradition it needed to defend. Which is one of the reasons we see the church in America today speak against education. It would force it to evolve. Instead the defenders of the patriarchy today are still preaching and believing in their newest version of inverted penises.

Men as ordained rulers has stayed mandatory teaching long after the science behind it was torn down.

Nobody in that convention hall last June for the SBC stood up and cited Galen when they voted to not allow women to be pastors. That would put them in leadership over men. The certainty had been handed down so many times that it no longer has to defend its source as a flawed theory.

What do we know about all of these men still preaching their belief of women as inferior? They don’t trust women to vote on their own, to work outside the home, or to seek higher education.

These men are all just a bunch of dicks.

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So I just called some of the most revered names in church history a bunch of dicks. Given the source material, I consider that medical terminology.

But there is a reason I can joke like that, and the reason is what this section is actually about.