Is Everything We Know About Women A Lie?

Welcome! I’m Ash BG, a toddler mum, writer, and founder of You Wanted This, a publication about modern motherhood, the mental load, and what relationships really look like after kids. I’m also the founder of Tether: The Mental Load App that helps make the invisible labour in your household visible. If you’re new here, I’m so glad you could join us. Pull up a chair. You don’t have to pretend you’re fine here.

“Have you guys seen this?”

It was a message that popped up in my girls’ group chat late one night. I was about to get into bed and should not have been scrolling, but I couldn’t help myself. Once I watched this video about decentering men that a girlfriend share with me, I couldn’t stop.

Within minutes, the group chat was with flooded with:

“Wait… is this an option?”

“We all have to to do this!!”

“Every woman, everywhere, needs this immediately.”

The more I read and the more videos I watched, the more I couldn’t help but ask myself, why did we all have to be told that this was even an option? Why did it feel so radical to suggest that a woman’s world not revolve around men?

The answer, as it turns out, is not psychological, but historical. And the history is a great deal more complicated (and more recent) than I initially realised.

The myth that is the patriarchy

There is a story that we’ve been told for as long as I can remember, and that is that men lead, women follow. Men go off to battle and the women wait at home. Men built civilisations, while women brought up the kids. Men are dominant and women are submissive.

And I’m only just now realising that this is all just… bullshit.

Archaeological and anthropological research suggests that the majority of human society was organised around principles that were vastly different to what we are seeing today. Hunter-gatherer societies were relatively egalitarian when taking gender into consideration. Food was shared, decisions were made collaboratively, and status was fluid. The rigid, formalised male-dominance that we have come to know and hate is actually very new. In fact, it doesn’t appear in any records until the advent of agriculture which was only 10,000 years ago.

Yes, that’s right. The patriarchy is only 10,000 years old, compared to the 300,000 or so years of human existence. That’s only around 3% of our history.

So no, the patriarchy is not the “natural state” of human society. It’s a recent development that is tied to the accumulation of property, the need to establish paternity over inherited land, and the political systems that emerged in the wake of both.

We often think about the patriarchy in terms of power, but now women are starting to realise the impact that it also has on our attention. Bad Woman wrote about this recently, stating that patriarchy is not just a hierarchy of authority, but a hierarchy of attention. And I cannot unhear it.

It’s the realisation that women all around the world have been expected to organise everything around the men in their lives. Their needs, their approval, their emotions, their careers and, of course, their comfort.

And the invisible labour that attention requires may be mere moments at a time, but it adds up to hours each month. All the tiny calculations that a woman makes to manage, anticipate and accommodate are perhaps the patriarchy’s most elegant extraction. Not to mention that because it’s invisible, unlike physical labour, it’s been able to go unchecked for thousands of years, until now when it has started popping up in group chats around the world and women have started to say, “Wait, what the fuck?”

I think about my friends who are all intelligent, capable, self-aware women who are all collectively having the same realisation, reflexively responding to the concept of decentering men as though it were a revelation rather than a return to something primal and ancient. And I think about what it took for us to get here. Generations and generations of enforcement have meant that a woman’s right to her own attention feels like a radical idea.

What the history actually shows

I was stopped in my tracks while reading Katie Jagielnicka’s viral piece titled “Archaeologists keep finding women where men are supposed to be.”

I gasped when I learnt about Birka, Sweden, in 1878 when archaeologists excavated a burial site that had all the markers of a high status Viking warrior. There were weapons, two horses, a full set of gaming pieces that indicated a strategic military command. For 140 years we assumed this grave belonged to a man. It didn’t.

In 2017 a DNA analysis confirmed the remains were female.

One. Hundred. And. Forty. Years. We just accepted that because there were weapons that clearly belonged to a warrior and obviously warriors are only male???

Then there are the Scythians who were nomadic people of the Eurasian steppe whose culture flourished from the 9th to the 4th century BCE, where nearly 42% of their elite warrior burials belong to women. Many show battle injuries and weapon usage that is consistent with violent combat. One burial that was discovered in 1988 was initially assumed to be a boy, but later they found out it was a 13-year-old girl.

The Journal of Roman Archaeology recently published research from Tamar Lewit who found that the Roman vilica, which was long described in historical scholarship as a domestic worker or housekeeper, was actually a female farm manager overseeing wine and olive oil production, as well as bookkeeping and commercial sales. So why did we assume that they were domestic workers?

Then there is my favourite fact, and one that I think my fellow Substack writers would appreciate, and that is that the first named author in recorded human history was actually a woman. Enheduanna was a Sumerian high priestess who wrote hymns and poems around 2300 BCE.

Then there is the first novel in world literature which was written by Murasaki Shikibu in 11th Century Japan, The Tale of Genji.

The first algorithm intended to be processed by a machine was written by a woman: Ada Lovelace in 1843.

The structure of DNA was mapped by a woman: Rosalind Franklin.

The material that became Kevlar was invented by a woman: Stephanie Kwolek.

And then there’s the fact that when computing was done by women, it was called clerical work and paid accordingly. When men entered the field, it became technical, prestigious and, naturally, all of a sudden paid well.

Why have so many scholars and historians tried so hard to dismiss the evidence of women throughout history? It is almost as if we can’t make sense of a history unless the women in it are powerless and invisible.

Men need to be needed

Olivia Barbulescu (Feral Woman) shared a story earlier this year about asking a man at her gym to move some heavy weights and it led to an entire conversation about men no longer being needed.

She asked a man at the gym to help her and he leapt up immediately. He looked genuinely happy to be chosen. She posted about the interaction online and men flooded the comments to talk about how they loved to be needed. They talked about how valued and chosen and seen it made them feel.

Her argument was that the shift from being needed to being wanted is actually an opportunity for men. Now they are being chosen freely, not depended on out of necessity. Surely that is a stronger foundation for love because it means men can locate their value in who they are rather than what they provide?

The men weren’t so sure and the piece has been heavily criticised online by, surprise surprise, lots of men.

Why was this concept too drastic for them to accept? Is it because they had built their entire legacy around being needed? They were the providers and the protecters, and now there is no one to provide or protect because women provide and protect for themselves (oh and there’s the small factor of the men being the ones we actually need protection from).

So what was the system that produced that identity of a man who needs to be needed, trying to protect? Could it be a world in which women’s survival genuinely depended on being chosen?

For most of recorded patriarchal history, women could not own land, sign a lease, open a bank account, or travel without male permission.

So perhaps men were never actually needed, but instead women were forced to have to rely on them because of the laws that had been put in place by men to force women to choose them.

Therefore, submission is not a personality trait, but a survival strategy, and one that was enforced by law. The myth that women are submissive was always just a cover story to take away our power and make sure the men felt needed. This was perhaps one of the patriarchy’s greatest achievements: making us feel small, but then making it feel like it was our nature all along.

It’s not.

What has the myth cost us?

The Viking warrior in Birka had her weapons attributed to the man beside her for 14 years.

Rosalind Franklin had her DNA research used without her knowledge or credit and died before the Nobel Prize was awarded to two men instead of her.

Hatsheput, one of ancient Egypt’s most successful pharaohs, had her image systematically removed from public record after her death.

Women brewed the beer that sustained medieval communities for centuries and then when it became profitable, the men took over.

Women were the original computers, doing complex mathematical equations by hand before machines appeared to do it for them. And then, of course, when programming became lucrative, they were pushed out and the field was rebranded as masculine.

The pattern is so obvious that looking straight at it might burn your eyes. When women’s contributions are acknowledged, they are called natural, domestic and unremarkable. But as soon as those same contributions become economically valuable or politically significant, they are reclassified as male-dominated territory and women are forcibly removed.

And if you think this is all in the past? Think again. Why is it that restaurants are full of male chefs, yet at home mostly women cook? Could it be because when it’s profitable all of a sudden men are passionate about it but if it’s not paid then it automatically becomes a woman’s job?

Why are women still doing the majority of unpaid labour at home? Uncompensated and underappreciated.

The erasure continues, and it will not stop until we dismantle the patriarchy.

What do we do now?

I keep going back to the group chat and the answer seems pretty clear: we decenter men.

But what does this look like when we have been so thoroughly conditioned to orbit around them our entire lives? From childhood, through adolescence and marriage and motherhood… the centering feels more like personality than programming at this point.

But it doesn’t have to.

You don’t have to remove men from your life, you just have to remove the expectation that your life should be organised primarily around theirs. You can love a man and build a life with him without mistaking the colonisation of your attention for love.

I don’t know who needs to hear this but love is not the ongoing extraction of your labour, your cognitive bandwidth, your ambitions, your sense of self and your service for the purpose of someone else’s comfort and convenience.

Stop letting them use your brain. Stop revolving your life around them. Stop making yourself small for them.

Submission was always a myth. You don’t need to dim your own light anymore.

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With gratitude to Olivia Barbulescu (Feral Woman on Substack) whose essay “Men Aren’t Needed Anymore, and They’re Struggling to Adapt to Being Wanted” (January 2026) informed this piece. And to Bad Woman, whose essay “Decentering Men: What It Actually Means (And Doesn’t Mean)” (August 2026) provided the framework of patriarchy as a hierarchy of attention.

Additional sources: Jagielnicka, K. — “Archaeologists Keep Finding Women Where Men Were Supposed to Be.” The Noösphere, 2026. Lewit, T. — “Not Just a Housekeeper.” Journal of Roman Archaeology, 2026. Hedenstierna-Jonson et al. — “A Female Viking Warrior Confirmed by Genomics.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 2017. Saini, A. — The Patriarchs (2023).