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There is a lie so old it has worn a groove into the collective mind, deep as a riverbed, and most of us were born already standing in it.
The lie says one sex is more than and the other is less than. The lie says superiority and inferiority are real positions a person can stand in, instead of stories told to justify who eats first and who serves the meal.
No gender is superior.
No gender is inferior.
And here is the part we skip past too quickly:
No gender is even equal, if by equal we mean identical, interchangeable, measured against the same yardstick.
A river is not equal to a mountain. It is not lesser, either. They are not in competition. They are doing different work in the same body of earth. The moment we put masculine and feminine on a scale at all—even a scale meant to balance them—we have already accepted the frame that created the wound.
Sovereignty, not symmetry, is the medicine.
Patriarchy took this simple, ancient knowing and broke it on purpose. It needed a hierarchy to run on, so it manufactured one, and then spent millennia insisting the hierarchy was nature itself rather than a story with a founding date. The harm runs through everyone caught in it—women crushed under the claim of male authority, and men hollowed out by the demand that they perform dominance instead of wholeness, that they sever from feeling, from the body, from the very ground that could have held them.
And here is where the lie gets clever. From that severance, a new story was born: women decide from emotion, men decide from logic, and logic is the superior tool. Watch what this story conveniently erases: that men—not women—commit the overwhelming majority of the world’s violence. The murders. The rapes. The crimes of passion. The suicides. Against women, against children, against each other, against themselves. This is not a “logical” pattern. This is grief and rage with nowhere sanctioned to go, dressed up afterward in the language of reason because reason was declared the manly virtue and feeling was declared the weakness.
So women ask for the most basic thing a body can ask for: safety. Not to be hunted. Not to be hurt walking home. And so often the answer is dismissal—not all men—as if a chorus of exceptions could undo a pattern. We bring the numbers, because apparently our lived terror needs footnotes to be believed. We prove the proof. And still, for too many, the response is not reckoning but anger.
Not all men. We know. But enough that a woman, asked honestly, will say she’d feel safer alone with a bear in the woods than with a man she doesn’t know…and that this is not an insult, it’s a data point, and the fact that it lands as an insult tells its own story.
Why the hurt feelings instead of the harder work?
Often, it is projection. A man who has never let himself imagine being preyed upon cannot imagine the daily calculus women run before dark. And underneath that, something patriarchy planted long ago: a quiet contempt for the feminine itself—in women, yes, but also in other men, in any man who feels too much, bends too easily, leads with the heart. “Locker room talk” survives because contempt for the feminine has been made to look like camaraderie.
So what do we do with all this?
We stop asking the wound to explain itself to its own source, and we start rebuilding the older pattern—the one where masculine and feminine were never ranked, only different rivers feeding the same delta.
That means men doing the unglamorous work of confronting other men, in the room, in real time, not after the fact in private apology.
It means naming locker-room cruelty as the seed of larger violence rather than its harmless cousin.
It means grief work—real grief, not performance—for what patriarchy cost men too: their tenderness, their tears, their birthright to feel without shame.
It means women holding the line on truth without softening it to manage a stranger’s discomfort.
And it means all of us returning to the body, to ritual, to land-based ways of living where worth was never a competition because no one had yet invented the scale.
Harmony was never a fantasy. It was the original instruction, before the lie arrived and called itself history. We are simply finding our way back.
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