Status Updates From The Patriarchs: The Origins...

I’m sorry but this section about how tourists love patriarchal Pompeii and not matriarchal Chatalyhuk because they’re looking for validation from their patrilineal forebears is fucking stupid. Tourists like Pompeii because it’s the site of a bunch of dead bodies, bathhouses, and graffiti preserved in volcanic ash. 🙄

Enjoying this bit on the mongol empire and their patrilineal if not wholly patriarchal society—like, women moved in with their husbands’ families but were not treated as inferior, limited to the domestic sphere, or otherwise suppressed due to some “natural” instinct. Like it’s ok to be physically different but still equally capable. Crazy, huh?

Ok so now we’re on one of my favorite subjects which is using ancient dna to track human migration through the millennia and the dna proves people from the Eurasian steppe traveled into Turkey right around the time chatalhuya (sp) abandoned matriarchy, meaning the lady we just disproved for her theory early Europe was goddess-worshiping until the damn Russians ruined it WAS, in fact, right???

This chapter is a rollercoaster? We start with the unearthing of Catalhoyuk and a figure of a goddess and everyone agreeing the people here were matriarchal. Cool. Then an anthropologist went ham comparing every remnant of the culture to a divine woman, got famous with feminists, and becoming a laughingstock. Oof. Then we’ve decided we don’t actually know if any figurines are female so they don’t matter. Ok…

Narrator is back on her yelly bullshit. I don’t really want to DNF the book because of the narrator but damn I’d like for publishers to see that shitty narrators result in low-rated books, so producers or sound engineers can be like yo, you’re making the audio clip, dial it the fuck down.

The author did a really great job pointing out the ridiculousness in saying that women’s subordination is natural when women have always fought it—if it were natural, we wouldn’t resist it. I really wish she would bring it home by pointing out the hypocrisy in saying subordination is natural while also saying matriarchal societies are too close to nature, savage, and dangerous—ie, Is nature good, or not??

We are out of the introduction which allows for a lot more heated editorializing so I no longer have to turn my earbuds down when the narrator gets loud. Now I’m learning about how US forefathers were influenced by the Shoshone tribe when creating a model of democracy, but managed to leave out the matriarchal nature of said tribe when writing that only men were created equal. Interesting and infuriating.

This feels wildly unfeminist to write, but the narrator’s voice is annoying as shit. Like why are we yelling.