Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays explore common topics from different perspectives and disciplines to uncover unique insights and solutions.
Today’s topic pairs with a previous essay, Damn the Patriarchy, and continues the exploration of the male and female structures that have been developed over the millennia to guide human social systems. It’s a deep look at history, archetypes, and societies to help uncover the good, the bad, and the ugly of who we are.
Out of the gate, you’ll want to buckle in for this one because it’s necessarily longer, darker, and deeper than many topics I write because there are so many layers to tease apart. To set the baseline, we recently explored the positive and negative inclinations of the Patriarchy and, in doing so, uncovered elements of the shadow feminine. Consider this part two of the exploration because, too often, it feels like we’ve oversimplified our understanding of men and women where:
Patriarchy = everything wrong with everything in the world
Matriarchy = everything right with everything in the world
The problem with that definition is that both have positive and negative manifestations. As we covered in Chaos and Order, these are represented as:
The Good Mother, Gaia, Mother Earth | The Devouring Mother
The Good King | The Absent or Tyrannical Father
It’s really easy to ‘dunk’ on the shadow patriarchy when you only compare it to the healthy matriarchy. Similarly, it’s hard to discuss the challenges with the matriarchy if we aren’t willing to appreciate the feminine shadow. Where it gets interesting is that both men and women love to view females as vulnerable, yet gentle; compassionate, nurturing, and caring. That’s because those are healthy and positive behaviors of women and elements we should value.
The weirdness is that we have a hard time discussing the positive attributes of men without knee-jerk bringing up the shadow, while inverting this tendency with women, where we have a hard time discussing the shadow attributes without bringing up the glowing positives. Today we’re going to stare at the shadow of the matriarchy, not to diminish women but because it’s impossible to understand the balance if we aren’t willing to face the bad and the ugly.
Let’s lead with a hand grenade: Many people believe that mothers are naturally the best nurturers, and, without fathers, without the ‘patriarchy’ to pollute their perfection, they’d raise wonderful children. The key problem with this idea is that the statistics don’t bear it out. It’s always been known that children raised in a household with both a mother and a father do far better than other configurations…
But did you know that households with only a father outperform households with only a mother? Especially among girls?1
Did you know that women perpetrate the significant majority of child abuse, infanticide, filicide, and more?2
I need to pause and point out how this has been on display recently regarding the murder culpability trial of Lindsay Clancy, who killed her three children. Holly MathNerd has highlighted the convoluted defenses and the inability to accept that women, even mothers, can act in terrible ways, which counteract the axiomatic belief that “mothers love their children”3 4
Further, did you know that rates of intimate partner violence and divorce are highest among lesbians and lowest among homosexual men?5
Another pause here because the Amber Heard vs. Johnny Depp trial was nearly as polarizing as the Clancy trial, where the dirty laundry of female-perpetrated domestic violence was laid out in the open.
And with the pin pulled from that hand grenade, let’s look at why. First, a baseline: Without rehashing too much from the Two Rules for Life, men and women are optimized through evolutionary biology for different things.
The female is optimized for creating new life.
The male is optimized for creating resources that support new life.
As such, there’s a natural bifurcation in behavior between males and females. While you’d think this would be patently obvious, I’ve spent quite a lot of time writing about reclaiming and reempowering the feminine because modern, Western society has generally accepted that to be a successful woman you must be indistinguishable from a successful man, a topic we explored in depth in Rediscovering the Goddess.
This has led to a ton of issues in our current culture, not the least of which is the inability to see the shadow of the matriarchy, let alone properly understand what the matriarchy actually is anymore. Let’s start by looking at the ugly matriarchy:
The Ugly Matriarchy
We like to think that we know what a Patriarchy really is. It seems so clear and obvious. One of the first that comes to mind is Muslim cultures. How horrible it is that those men force women to wear a burqa! The truth, however, is much more complicated as Sotiris Rex wrote in Islamic Feminism & Muslim Matriarchy. Here’s the thing: if men were to have their way, most of us would rather have women walking around naked all the time. I can’t find a category on PornHub for burqa sex, and they have a category for everything. So, who enforces the burqa?
Well, that’s where we get back to the fact that it’s not a Patriarchy as you might think. What we see in Islam includes a coercive matriarchy, where the women are the covert enforcers of standards, and the men are the overt enforcers. Sotiris goes in depth on the nuanced twists and turns, and, as much as I’d like it not to be true, I can’t disprove any of it. Islam isn’t the patriarchy we think it is, and women enforce the burqa in part because it protects older women from intrasexual competition with younger women and, therefore, protects the resources they’ve accrued with their husbands.
It only gets crazier from there, where things as terrible as rape are seen by women as enforcement mechanisms to punish those who violate the matriarchal rules that enforce the status quo, which ensures compliant women are provided the resources they desire. Since that feels like a second grenade, I recommend you pause here and read Islamic Feminism & Muslim Matriarchy. It was tough for me to put aside my own biases, but the more I stared at it, the more I couldn’t unsee it.6
Similarly, The Handmaid’s Tale has bugged me for years. I expected it to be an open/shut case of patriarchal overreach and oppression, but came away unable to shake the undercurrent that it, too, has a strong matriarchy. Like Islam, it’s enforced by the patriarchy, but I need to point out that the men don’t like it.
Just consider that the Commander breaks the law to take his Handmaid, Offred, to a club so he can treat her like a human before having sex to fulfill his wife’s desire for a child. This is a crime he hides from his wife, as she’d certainly turn him in. Further, the women who fail to follow the rules are policed by women, and it’s the driver, a man, and his male friends who eventually save Offred and her child.
The book is also an insane female flex of fertility where the Handmaids from all socioeconomic statuses “cuck”7 the wives of powerful men. The book celebrates female fertility and weaponizes it against authoritarian cultures. The Testaments, its sequel, doubles down on how it was the women who operated and enforced the situation. In fact, the women in the book, like the Commander’s wife, are the characters with the most power.
The novel is very gray if you read beyond the superficial. The only way you can say it’s a patriarchy is if your definition is everything wrong with everything in the world, and the matriarchy is the opposite. This reality is the ugly side of the matriarchy that needs to be faced so we can understand the bad side.
The Bad
Stepping away from the worst inclinations, we get into the messy middle where, as certain careers are dominated by women, matriarchal structures emerge; often, the soft-power constructs, and men, in those fields, are similarly subject to the feminine rules. However, when the rules change from competition to consensus, the perceived status and real-world potential for resource creation are reduced. Something Anuradha Pandey writes in detail in Elite overproduction, managerial feminism, and the death of mobility.
If the negative inclinations of the matriarchy aren’t recognized and tempered, systems that used to drive transformative yet rough-and-tumble innovation transition into nurturing yet often suffocating maternalism, which Anuradha also explored in The feminist script for success: compliance disguised as merit.
This is affecting the corporate world as well as what we see in the excess in our education systems, and even extends to healthcare as Hannah Spier, MD recently explored in The Disorders of a Feminized World, where, to briefly summarize a detailed analysis, “We have confused compassion with endless nurturing and created a strange pact between misplaced maternal instinct and the patient who wants to be carried [not cured]” driven by “compassion that has lost its masculine counterpart,” resulting in “A feminized medical culture [that] does not only feel sorry for the sufferer. It increasingly changes the diagnosis away from illnesses that demand radical responsibility, uncomfortable self-examination, and the possibility that the pathogen keeping someone sick may lie within the mind. Away from agency and toward rescue.”
This also extends to mental health where, as we explored in Personality or Pathology, the empathetic response toward different people conflates healthy personality with pathology while allowing actual pathologies to thrive. This is where the current infection of Neurodivergency with Cluster B pathologies has taken over the zeitgeist.
Nathalie Martinek PhD, is another critical voice and recently put together a fantastic compilation essay titled Peer support no woman asked for: A field guide to female aggression and the foundations of coercive control, providing resources to help identify female covert aggression and control tactics that underlie toxic matriarchy.
Even looking into history, the author of that LinkedIn post where we’ve extracted the inaccurate definition of matriarchy and patriarchy we started with mentions the Iroquois Confederacy as a great example of a matriarchy. The problem is that it’s a 1900s romanticization and flat-out wrong. A simple analysis of just the Iroquois shows it was both a late-emerging confederacy of previously warring tribes, they celebrated cannibalism, and were perpetually at war with the Algonquins as the Iroquois pushed to expand. The same is true for most societies described as matriarchal and worse: where the violence isn’t overt, it doesn’t take much digging to find the same covert violence we’ve been exploring.
I need to add here that, while we’ve explored some pretty dark places, the shadow matriarchy is not pure evil. It’s the inclination toward the shadow. Just as I can behave in a way that tilts toward the masculine shadow, I know wonderful women and mothers, who aren’t ‘witches’ yet still, slowly, suffocate their children. This manifestation is best seen in helicopter moms and the coddling we see in recent generations.
What we observe happening is an unbalanced matriarchy needing to understand its own shadow and appreciate the yin and yang relationship of the healthy patriarchy. Thankfully, the shadow has a name: The Devouring Mother.
The Devouring Mother
Behind both the bad and the ugly of the matriarchy is the Devouring Mother, a classic archetype baked deep into our myths, legends, and fairy tales. It’s also one of the most catastrophic manifestations of normal, healthy, and necessary feminine strengths. The devouring mother is what happens when the core functions of motherhood are misdirected and misapplied.
A few examples from history include Demeter in the Persephone myth, the witch in Hansel and Gretel, the Slavic Baba Yaga, Mexico’s La Llorona, Hindu’s Kali as the devouring mother, Babylon’s Tiamat in the Enuma Elish, Coatlicue and Cihuacóatl in the Aztec mythos, Japan’s Yama-uba, the mountain witch. Malay’s Penanggalan, the Philippines’ Aswang, Grendel’s mother in Beowulf, the Queen in Snow White, Mother Gothel in Rapunzel, and the list goes on. Clearly, it’s a well-known concern, and systems were put in place to limit the impact of a devouring mother.
But what is it? Simply put, it’s the shadow side of care, protection, and nurturing. She is the mother figure who loves by controlling, protects by limiting freedom, and keeps others dependent instead of helping them mature. It’s also any relationship or system where comfort, safety, or affection prevents growth, independence, and selfhood. Karina Schneidman MBA, MS nails this in her essay Mommy Dearest, where she writes: “Single mothers, or mothers who serve as the head of the household instead of the father, often become overbearing, controlling, and overly involved in their children’s lives.”
“The devouring mother is not a symbol of care. She is a symbol of engulfment—of a parent who smothers development and prevents the child from becoming independent.”
- Jordan Peterson
In another essay, Karina encapsulates this well as “Motherfriends” who “…validate indulgence, excuse irresponsibility, and turn caregiving into a social Broadway show. Parenting has become less about raising children and more about curating a circle, trading empathy for entertainment, and building a severe co-dependency.”
Katherine Hurl in Devouring Mother Feminism and Her Perpetual Motion Machine, describes it similarly: “The devouring mother’s need to perceive herself as a kind benefactor and to be perceived by others as a good helper is put first before the actual needs of the vulnerable person the helper claims to aid.” (emphasis hers)
Another element to consider is that it’s a gradient shadow, not a binary black or white, and there are many very well-intended mothers who exhibit devouring inclinations, which is best described as the helicopter mother. The behaviors still result in devouring the child’s agency and resiliency, just not as obviously.
It’s also exceptionally hard to tease out because it’s covert, unlike the obvious pathologies of the Tyrannical or Absent Father archetypes, and it uses the language of nurture and care instead of the language of power and structures. That’s what makes the Devouring Mother so hard to identify until it’s too late.8 It’s why she can hide in plain sight in The Handmaid’s Tale and Islam while the overt and masculine power structures take the blame, but this isn’t healthy for the patriarchy or the matriarchy.
The Healthy Matriarchy
Now that we’ve stared into the shadow, let’s pull back and remember that we’ve explored many essays here on the positive feminine, such as Rat Race Feminism and Breaking the Cycle. Before we shift gears too hard, let’s ensure a few key elements to embrace in understanding the healthy matriarchy:
Women have a shadow. They can do terrible and nasty things.
Chaos is a feminine archetype for a reason, and that’s a feature, not a bug, in our complex social evolution, which, as we investigated in Chaos and Order, creates antifragile systems.
Women are not men, and they do not act the same way, nor do they have the same goals, aspirations, or desires, which is something we uncovered in Rediscovering the Goddess.
The healthy matriarchy is one that absolutely understands the Devouring Mother and creates systems that contain her. Just like the Patriarchy exists to restrain the masculine shadow, a healthy matriarchy doesn’t empower the shadow but partners with a healthy patriarchy to create an environment where true celebration of the feminine directs the collective energies toward the creation of new life and its successful maturation. At its core, the Healthy Matriarchy helps us become fully separate, capable, and self-directed. In a word, she inspires agency.
The key strength of a healthy matriarchy is that it’s about healing divides, not defeating enemies, and, through that healing, she can transform her relationships and community. This is the nature of the Heroine’s Journey we explored through the movie Encanto, where Mirabel faces down the dark feminine traits and helps her relatives overcome and redeem the strength of the feminine goddesses.
Synthesis
Balancing the healthy matriarchy against the shadow desires of the Devouring Mother is never complete, as evidenced by the bad and the ugly examples we started with. However, until we are able to stare at those examples and appreciate the shadow, we’ll constantly blame everything else and solve nothing.
Yes, Women have agency, and women have a shadow. The devouring mother lurks everywhere, and if we pretend otherwise, excuse the behaviors, or, worse, celebrate the shadow as is too often the case in modern feminism, we risk destroying the very systems that keep us happy and healthy as individuals and as a society. The Devouring Mother is the Matriarchy’s shadow, and understanding it helps uncover both the positive and negative of who we are so we can learn to grow and mature.9
What do you think? What examples do you have of the shadow matriarchy?
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Further Reading from Authors I Appreciate
I highly recommend the following Substacks for their great content and complementary explorations of topics that Polymathic Being shares.
Goatfury Writes All-around great daily essays
Cyborgs Writing Highly useful insights into using AI for writing
Educating AI Integrating AI into education
Mostly Harmless Ideas Computer Science for Everyone
The Shepard Scale - Kit Perez - Counter Intelligence Insights
My 2 Cents - Karina Schneidman MBA, MS-MFT
Supporting Sources
Guttmann, J., & Lazar, A. (1998). Mother’s or father’s custody: Does it matter for social adjustment? Educational Psychology, 18(2), 225–234. https://doi.org/10.1080/0144341980180207
Lee, S. M., & Kushner, J. (2008). Single-parent families: The role of parent’s and child’s gender on academic achievement. Gender and Education, 20(6), 607–621. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540250802415132
Lee, S. M., Kushner, J., & Cho, S. H. (2007). Effects of parent’s gender, child’s gender, and parental involvement on the academic achievement of adolescents in single-parent families. Sex Roles, 56(3–4), 149–157. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-006-9157-1
Santrock, J. W., & Warshak, R. A. (1979). Father custody and social development in boys and girls. Journal of Social Issues, 35(4), 112–125. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.1979.tb00816.x
Supporting Sources
Mariano, T. Y., Chan, H. C. O., & Myers, W. C. (2014). Toward a more holistic understanding of filicide: A multidisciplinary analysis of 32 years of U.S. arrest data. Forensic Science International, 236, 46–53. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.forsciint.2013.12.019
Paulozzi, L. J., & Sells, M. T. (2002). Variation in homicide risk during infancy—United States, 1989–1998. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 51(9), 187–189. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5109a3.htm
Snyder, H. N. (2001). Child abuse reported to the police. U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/187238.pdf
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Administration on Children, Youth and Families, Children’s Bureau. (2025). Child maltreatment 2023. https://www.acf.hhs.gov/cb/data-research/child-maltreatment
Wilson, R. F., Klevens, J., Williams, D., & Xu, L. (2020). Infant homicides within the context of Safe Haven Laws—United States, 2008–2017. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 69(39), 1385–1390. https://doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm6939a1
Josh Slocum takes this a step further, where he points out the absurdity by describing how it would look if men reacted to a man killing his whole family the same way ‘Clancy Girls’ are defending Lindsay. It’s pretty incredible how difficult it is for people to accept that the feminine has an equally bad shadow as the masculine, just different.
In 2020, a friend’s wife and I were having a discussion where I pointed out these stats, and she claimed it couldn’t be true. When I pulled up the FBI statistics, she refused to believe them to be true because they violated that axiomatic statement.
Supporting Sources:
Andersson, G., Noack, T., Seierstad, A., & Weedon-Fekjær, H. (2006). The demographics of same-sex marriages in Norway and Sweden. Demography, 43(1), 79–98. https://doi.org/10.1353/dem.2006.0001
Chen, J., Khatiwada, S., Chen, M. S., Smith, S. G., Leemis, R. W., Friar, N. W., Basile, K. C., & Kresnow, M. (2023). The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey: 2016/2017 report on victimization by sexual identity. National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Kolk, M., & Andersson, G. (2020). Two decades of same-sex marriage in Sweden: A demographic account of developments in marriage, childbearing, and divorce. Demography, 57(1), 147–169. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-019-00847-6
Office for National Statistics. (2025). Divorces and dissolutions in England and Wales: 2023. UK Statistics Authority.
Ponkilainen, M., Einiö, E., Kühn, M., & Myrskylä, M. (2025). Same-sex and different-sex couples’ divorce risks: The role of cohabitation and childbearing. Journal of Marriage and Family. https://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.70027
Statistics Netherlands. (2021, March 31). 20 years of gay marriage in the Netherlands: 20 thousand couples.
Walters, M. L., Chen, J., & Breiding, M. J. (2013). The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey: 2010 findings on victimization by sexual orientation. National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
If you want another mind-bender, check out Grow Some Labia’s article on how both modern feminism and the matriarchy justify female gentile mutilation in her essay, Academic Betrayals: When Sanitized Language Sanctions the Mutilation of Girls
If we want to be specific, this is Cuckquean because it’s the direct female equivalent of a cuckold or “cuck,” which is a woman’s infidelity. In this case, Cuckquean is the handmaid’s flex on the wife.
This is why most cultures, and especially tribal cultures, had male rituals that ripped a boy, often violently, from the tender embrace of his mother and initiated them into the order of manhood, a topic we explored in Becoming a Man. It seems harsh, but when the risk is infantilization, this makes more sense.
This aligns well with the description of a matriarchy we proffered in Damn the Patriarchy:
Matriarchy organizes society around: → Nurture — dependency is protected and developed into competence → Enculturation — transmitting values, identity, behavior, and tradition → Socialization — teaching language, manners, values, identity, and the norms required to live with others → Integration — weaving individuals into families and communities through relationship, mediation, inclusion, and care