I always find it kind of weird that matriarchal cultures in fiction are always âwomen fight and hunt, men stay home and care for the babiesâ because world-building-wise, it makes no sense
think about it. like, assuming that gender even works the same in this fantasy culture as it does in ours, with gender conflated with sex (because letâs be real, all of these stories assume that), men wouldnât be the ones to make the babies, so why would they be the ones to care for the babies? why is fighting and hunting necessary for leadership?
writing a matriarchy this way is just lazy, because youâre just taking the patriarchy and just swapping the people in it, rather than actually swapping the culture. especially when there are so many other cool things you could explore. like, what if itâs not a swap of roles but of what society deems important?
maybe a matriarchy would have hunting and fighting be part of the manâs job, but undervalued. like taking the trash out or cleaning toilets: necessary, but gross, and not noble or interesting. maybe farming is now the most important thing, and is given a lot of spiritual and cultural weight.
how would law work? what crimes would exist, and what things would be considered too trivial to make illegal? who gets what property? why?
how would religion work? how would you mark time or the passage into adulthood? what would marriage look like? if bloodlines are through the mother, bastardy wouldnât even be a concept - how does that work?
what qualities would be most important in a person? how would you define strength or leadership? what knowledge would be the most coveted and protected? what acts or roles are considered useless or degrading?
like, you canât just take our current society and say youâre turning it on its head when youâre just regurgitating it wholesale. you have to really think about why things are the way they are and change that.Â
THIS IS SUCH A GOOD POST THOUGH.
I think what really bothers me about the whole âmen take care of the children and tend house because theyâre not in chargeâ thing is that it reinforces the idea that traditionally feminine work SHOULD be undervalued. That thereâs no way anyone could see raising children and think, âwow, what a valuable contribution to societyâ. Even though families are what societies are MADE of, and if you ignore the welfare of your children the society falls apart in a generation or two.
Imagine if women were seen as the ideal political leaders BECAUSE theyâre the ones best suited for raising young children. What if it was assumed that government positions were sort of scaled-up households, and that only a leader who saw their subjects as their children could be fair and compassionate enough to rule effectively? What is a village, or a country, but an extended family?
On the one hand, the ability to use physical force effectively is super important for a low-tech society, and thereâs always the threat of hostile military takeover, either from outsiders or via internal revolt. On the other hand, a society where all the men want to rebel is probably not a society thatâs being run at all effectively, and there are other ways of maintaining control (ie religion, cultural traditions, propaganda, etc). Women could be the more educated groupâin some ways thatâs even intuitive, since a non-magical preindustrial society is one with a high infant mortality rate, which means it has to have a high birth rate to compensate, which means women will be pregnant a lot. If they have trouble consistently working physically demanding trades, why not assign them to jobs that require more mental exertion? Why not a society where all the lawyers are female, all the doctors are female, all the historians and most respected poets are female? If you keep that up for long enough, eventually that gets seen as an inherent sex difference, and men donât exert physical force because holy shit theyâd have no idea what they were doing once they gained power.
It doesnât have to be these specific differences, of course. But I think thatâs the thought process that most of the best worldbuilding comes fromâwhy are things this way? How have they stayed this way? Just saying âwhat if women could tell MEN what to do!â is so boring compared to asking why we value the things we value. Besides, fictional societies that are created without asking why things are the way they are are not going to stand up under close scrutiny, whether they play into or subvert our expectations.
This is such an excellent addition to my post, @apprenticebard, I am rubbing my hands together with glee.
(Not aliens, but goes along with some discussions on how cultures might differ.)
Not to mention this is similar to real world matrilineal societies. Writing matriarchal societies as patriarchal but with roles reversed is just⌠Inaccurate, dumb and boring.
#i have been thinking about this lately #when you genderflip or racebend known tropes and narratives #itâs never 1:1 #itâs a domino effect that forces you to rethink a lot of âobviousâ things (via @bidonica)
