 Patriarchy is a word that can be used in different ways to mean different things. The normal sense of it or the sense that I usually use is a system in which women are objectified and become objects or even property, either fully or partially. So patriarchy is part of a larger movement, a larger historical movement, toward the progressive objectification and propertization of more and more things. So land, for example, ideas, animals and plants, I mentioned intellectual property already, and then other people. Once the idea of property is born, then it's under the impetus of a monetizing economy. More and more things enter the realm of property. So I think it's kind of a natural historical development. It happened all over the place, independently. It arose independently in pretty much every culture that took the road of civilization, any culture that developed social classes and division of labor and a mass society. Kind of the same things happened everywhere. They began building pyramids and monuments. They began having slavery. They had patriarchy. I mean, it happened in China. It happened in India. It happened in Greece. It happened in the Americas, everywhere. So on the one hand, I see it as a part of a larger process that is hopefully, I believe, is in a moment of metamorphosis, transitioning to a post-patriarchal world, and at the same time, ultimately a world where not just women, but all of the things that we've objectified are brought back into the realm of the sacred. And so that's kind of one way to understand patriarchy. But maybe you might understand that as a shadow of patriarchy. I'd like to think about, whenever I think about any of the sick, dysfunctional institutions of our culture, whether it's something like patriarchy or the police or lawyers or the military or something like that, I like to think, what is their next incarnation? What about them could have a place in a more beautiful world? So is there something valid and beautiful about patriarchy that could exist alongside matriarchy, that seeks the elevation of the male principle to its highest expressions in a way that people would look up to it with so much respect that it would exercise the archical function, the ordering function onto the world? So it would be no longer about exerting dominance over lesser subjects that are accorded a lesser degree of humanity, and it would be no longer about doing the same to the world and exerting dominance over everything. What would it be then? And this gets into very, very sensitive territory, because after thousands of years of toxic, brutal patriarchy, any hint that there is such a thing as a masculine principle is met with great suspicion, because it seems that once you start saying that men are different from women, then you're setting the stage for male domination over women. Different in what way? Better, stronger, smarter, whatever, like more suited to something and not something else, like you're setting the stage for domination. So right now we're in a stage where any enunciation of a essential gender difference is decried as essentialism. And the understanding in vogue today is that gender, masculinity, femininity are cultural constructs and not real. And maybe that is a necessary stage as we deprogram from the old story of gender and have not yet entered into a new story of gender. Maybe we need to be in a place where we say, oh yeah, yeah, it's not even real and to be suspicious of any attempt to essentialize masculinity or femininity or any attempt to say, here's what it is and here's what it isn't for fear that that will just lend itself to the continuation of this toxic patriarchy that we've been living in. So yeah, maybe that's a stage and maybe I shouldn't even try to question that. But I guess from what I've said, it's pretty clear that I do think that the archetypes of masculine and feminine are more than just cultural constructs, that these archetypes are beings in and of themselves that are translated through different cultures in different ways, but are not human inventions. Just like all of our stories, indigenous people often have confirmed this or resonated with this in my conversations with them about gender. They're like, yeah, we don't make our stories. We didn't invent gender. So in that view, the question then becomes, what does gender want to become as our civilization changes? What is a new story of masculinity or a new story of femininity? And it's maybe premature to really venture there too much, or maybe I'll just say that I'm nervous to do that just because all of a sudden here I am, the white male proclaiming that I am different because I'm male or something like that. And maybe it's not quite time for that. But I feel like a lot of men, speaking from my own gender, that a lot of men are really seeking some kind of positive expression of masculinity that isn't just an abandonment of masculinity, and it isn't the feminization of masculinity, but that embraces and develops qualities that feel core to who they are, not only as human beings, but as men. So that I could go on and say, I could add a lot of disclaimers. For example, that men and women both carry masculine and feminine principles, that there are exceptions to the binary division, that any binary actually admits to exceptions that do not necessarily invalidate the binary, and that the exceptions can illuminate the binary itself, and can remind us not to turn it into yet another totalizing paradigm, totalizing categorization of the world, to hold our categories lightly, but to be able to use them where they are useful. But right now, there's just so much pain and trauma and grief and rage that needs to come out, that some of this theorizing about a healthy masculine and a next incarnation of patriarchy that's alongside matriarchy and so on and so forth, like a lot of times that can just become an escape valve from really facing the rage and pain and hurt and grief and trauma that women have been experiencing and are still experiencing. So a lot of this is not about an intellectual understanding of things. It's about allowing healing to happen, allowing the stories to be heard. I think that's the first priority. Once the stories have been heard, once some of that rage and grief has been cleared, then the field will be clear for the emergence of a healthy story of a man. Right now, maybe kind of premature. There's really important work to be done. So I think that the Me Too movement has a really, there's something really healthy about it because it's allowing hidden things to come to light. And then it can also be turned toward perpetuating the status quo, like so many other healing movements. It can become about find the bad guy, attack the bad guy, tear them down, arouse rage against the perpetrators and destroy those people, dehumanizing the perpetrator in the same way that patriarchy has dehumanized women. My friend Pat McCabe, who's a DNA woman, AKA Navajo and student of the Lakota Way, she shared this vision with me that I've heard to speak on it publicly. So I'll share it here that many men and women have found very powerful. She had a vision where she's a Native American person and the soldiers are coming. And they're coming to kill and to commit genocide. And their faces are like masks. They're like their stone. They have no expression. They're not even coming with enmity and hatred. It's just like this cold, soulless killing. And she asked in this vision, she asked the spirit, what happened? How did this happen? And she got taken back to the witch hunts, where an archetypal wound was inflicted on women for sure when they were dragged off, dragged off all the herbalists and storytellers and so forth and burned them at the stake. And she said, it also inflicted an archetypal wound on men, because in her view, a core imperative for men is to protect the precious women. That a man, this is something I've noticed too, that it's in men's nature, maybe with some generalization here, to give your life to protect the mother of your children, because they can get along without you, maybe, but they can't get along without their mom. And so you had the Aurora theater shooting, where four of the people who died there were boyfriends who stepped in front of their girlfriends to take the bullet. Like this is something that is second nature to a healthy masculine. And so here in the witch hunts you have, and that was my addition to it. Pat didn't talk about the Aurora shootings, but I'm just kind of fleshing this out a little bit. So you have, during the witch hunts, for every woman who was dragged off and burned at the stake, you had their fathers, their husbands, their sons, who were helpless to stop it, and who were even made to watch. And she says that that wound to the masculine has been passed down, generation after generation after generation. So what I take from this, there's a lot of healing to be done. In fact, nobody has benefited from the patriarchy. Sometimes I think that men have been hurt even more than women. Women, at least, can still cry. They're still allowed to cry. But for men, the cutoff, like the cutoff that has to happen to survive that archetypal wound, and it wasn't just the witch hunts. This has been happening everywhere where so-called civilization has reigned in one form or another. The cutoff that's necessary to survive that is profound. This is not to play into what Lauren called the victim Olympics and to claim, well, men have suffered just as much as women, so therefore, nothing needs to be done. Therefore, there's no injustice to repair. I'm not saying that, but I'm saying that if you are realistic about healing the world, serving the next step of healing, you got to understand the situation. The situation is that everybody is living in a legacy of trauma that's been transmitted culturally, transmitted genetically. And we're not going to have real healing if anybody goes unhealed, perpetrators and victims, both. So what do you want to do? Do you want to be right? Do you want to enjoy the social dominance that comes from being a recognized victim? Or do you want to heal? Heal the world.