Fiction

Matriarchy Machine | by platypus

Fiction | It would be funny if it weren’t so… persistent.

Modern Matriarchal Manhood

I wrote this piece the way one swats a mosquito: reflexively, with precision, and after far too many bites.

If you’ve spent more than five minutes in matriarchal feminist spaces—those fledgling, fragile, stubbornly hopeful little ecosystems running on vision, willpower, and about three and a half hours of sleep—you already know the type. The man who arrives not with curiosity, not with discipline, but with a suspiciously shiny desire to be ruled—as though women organizing society is just a kink with better branding. The man who hears “female leadership” and immediately pictures himself kneeling on a velvet cushion, awaiting instructions that sound like dialogue from a low-budget dominatrix script.

It would be funny if it weren’t so… persistent.

So this is a small corrective spell. A satire. A diagnostic tool. A mildly feral love letter to competence.

Because matriarchy—real matriarchy, grounded in material life, in food systems and childcare and land stewardship and governance—is not a stage for male fantasies of submission. It is not a costume drama. It does not require applause, or groveling, or a single dramatic “yes Your Highness” delivered like a line reading.

It requires something far less glamorous and far more rare:

Attention. Accountability. The radical act of listening to women.

Matriarchy Machine is what happens when one such man collides with that reality—and, against all odds, survives the recalibration.

No stiletto heels required.

Matriarchy Machine

Matriarchy Machine | by platypus

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Evan discovered “gynarchy” on the internet the way most people discover bad ideas: at 2:14 a.m., dehydrated, convinced he was about to uncover Truth.

By morning, he had Opinions.

He began capitalizing random words. Woman. Mother. She. Her. He typed them like sacred relics, as if autocorrect itself should bow. He practiced saying “yes ma’am” in the mirror, smiling beatifically, the way one might approach a tiger with a flower crown.

His first field test was at a coffee shop.

The barista—tired, pierced, running on three hours of sleep—asked, “Name?”

Evan clasped his hands. “Thank you, Divine Matriarch.”

She stared at him. “Name?”

“Yes ma’am.”

She squinted. “You can just… say your name.”

“Of course, She who—”

“Sir,” she said flatly, “I will put ‘Steve’ on this cup if you don’t speak normally.”

He said Evan.

Progress was slow.

Evan took his new philosophy everywhere. He initiated conversations with random women at bus stops about “Female Supremacy,” as if it were a new crypto coin. He asked if they wanted to rule him. He asked—quietly, but not quietly enough—if anyone would like to step on him “symbolically.”

No one did.

What did happen was that women began to gather.

It started accidentally, like most revolutions.

At the library, Evan approached a table of women studying ecology, labor law, midwifery, and urban planning. He bowed slightly.

“I honor the Divine Feminine,” he announced.

One of them, Maya, looked up over her glasses. “Cool. You’re blocking the light.”

Another, Denise, added, “Also you’re whisper-shouting.”

“I’m a devotee of the Matriarchy,” Evan said proudly. “I believe Women should be worshipped.”

Silence.

Then laughter. Not mean laughter. The tired, surgical kind.

“Okay,” said Ruth, the eldest among them, closing her notebook. “Sit down.”

Evan sat. Immediately. Happily.

“First lesson,” Ruth said. “We don’t want worship. We want competence.”

“Second,” Denise said, “stop capitalizing us. We’re not Pokémon.”

“Third,” Maya added, “if you bring up ‘Female Supremacy’ to strangers, you’re not doing politics. You’re doing improv, badly.”

They kept him.

Not literally. No chains. No boots. Just… questions.

“Who does the dishes in your house?”
“Who taught you that saying ‘yes ma’am’ is respectful?”
“Why do you think power is sexy instead of practical?”
“Can you name five women who organized food systems?”
“Why are you whispering again?”

Evan tried to perform submission. They gave him chores.

He tried to kneel. They handed him a clipboard.

He tried to talk about being “ruled.” They asked him to read about inheritance law in matrilineal societies, then quizzed him.

“This feels less fun,” he admitted one day.

“Good,” said Ruth. “Fun isn’t the point.”

Weeks passed. Evan stopped capitalizing Woman. He stopped saying “yes ma’am” unless he actually meant yes. He learned that most women do not want to dominate strangers; they want men to notice trash day, childcare schedules, and zoning laws.

One afternoon, Evan arrived breathless. “I think I get it,” he said.

“Oh?” Maya asked.

“Matriarchy isn’t about me submitting,” he said. “It’s about women not having to manage me.”

They nodded.

“That’s it,” Denise said. “You’re deprogramming.”

Evan looked relieved. Also slightly disappointed.

“So… no stepping?”

Ruth smiled. “If you want someone to step on you, use consent. If you want matriarchy—do the work.”

Evan picked up the recycling on his way out.

The Machine hummed on.

Calibration Mode: Respect

The women decided Evan was ready for Module Two .

This module did not involve kneeling, vows, or symbolic groveling. It involved chairs. Sitting upright. Eye contact. An alarming amount of calm.

Maya corrected him first, gently.

“Actually, that study you cited was retracted in 2018.”

Evan felt the old reflex kick in—heat in the chest, the urge to explain himself sideways, to soften it with a joke, to defend—

Instead he stopped. Breathed. Tried something new.

“Oh. You’re right. Thank you.”

The room went quiet.

Denise slowly put down her pen. “See? That. That right there.”

Ruth nodded. “No sulk. No tone. No wounded ego spirals. Just receipt and adjustment.”

Evan blinked. “That’s… it?”

“That’s it,” Maya said. “Respect doesn’t need choreography.”

Later that week, he slipped again.

“Yes ma’am,” he said automatically, when Maya asked him to move his bag off the table.

She raised an eyebrow. Just one.

“How about,” she said, “instead of ‘yes ma’am,’ you say ‘yes Maya.’ I’m not your principal and you’re not eight.”

He flushed. “Right. Sorry. Yes Maya.”

“Better,” she said. “You don’t age women up to show respect. You just… respect us.”

"What if we have him say 'aye aye captain' instead? That'd be great fun," Denise added with a grin.

Calibration: Titles

Evan was drafting an email to a city committee.

“Dear Miss Alvarez—”

Ruth appeared over his shoulder like a librarian ghost.

“Nope.”

Evan froze. “Ms.?”

“Yes. ‘Ms.’ exists because women got tired of being socially categorized by whether a man had claimed them yet.”

Denise leaned in. “Using ‘Miss’ is like asking for a marital status before saying hello.”

Maya grinned. “Which, unless you’re my aunt at Thanksgiving, is unnecessary.”

Evan corrected it. Carefully. Reverently. But not weirdly reverently.

Progress.

The Matriarchy Machine ran diagnostics constantly.

When Evan interrupted Denise mid-sentence, he caught himself.

“Sorry—go ahead.”

Not “Sorry if—”
Not “I just meant—”
Not “Can I finish—”

Just space.

Denise smiled. “Thank you.”

When Maya explained something he already knew, he didn’t say actually.

He said, “Yeah, that matches what I’ve seen.”

“Alignment without dominance,” Ruth said approvingly. “Gold star.”

One afternoon, Evan asked, cautiously, “So… if it’s not about worship, what is the respectful posture?”

Ruth thought for a moment.

“Assume women know what they’re talking about.”
“Don’t make us manage your feelings about being corrected.”
“Take women seriously even when we’re calm.”
“Especially when we’re calm.”
“And don’t perform feminism like it’s a costume.”

Denise added, “Also: if you mess up, fix it faster than you explain it.”

Maya smirked. “And stop asking if we’re mad. We’ll tell you.”

Evan wrote it all down.

Not like scripture.
Like instructions.

At the end of the day, Evan realized something unsettling.

This version of respect didn’t make him feel small.

It made him feel… competent.

Which, it turned out, was exactly the point.

The Machine purred.

Final Patch: Service Without Theater

They rolled Evan into the last lesson without ceremony.

No circle. No notebooks. Just a kitchen.

The trash was full. The sink had opinions.

Maya glanced at the bin and said, casually, the way women usually do when we’re not performing for anyone:
“It would be great if the trash got taken out today.”

Evan nodded. And… didn’t move.

Five minutes passed.

Denise watched him carefully. “You hear her?”

“Yes,” Evan said. “I’m just… waiting.”

“For what?” Ruth asked.

“The directive,” he said, sheepish. “Like… ‘Do it now.’ Or something more—”

“Degrading?” Maya offered.

He winced. “Yeah.”

Ruth laughed, not unkindly. “Ah. There it is. The porn brain.”

Denise leaned against the counter. “You’ve been trained to hear women only when we’re playing a character. Bossy. Cruel. Hypersexual. ‘Obey me pig’ nonsense.”

Maya folded her arms. “But when we speak normally—collaborative, polite, practical—you don’t register it as important.”

Evan’s stomach dropped.

“So when I say ‘I recommend that you—’ or ‘It would help if—’” Maya continued, “that’s not weakness. That’s how leadership actually sounds.”

Ruth added, “Matriarchal speech isn’t about barking. It’s about instruction without macho bullying.”

Silence.

Then Evan stood up and took out the trash.

No drama. No kneeling. No eye contact like he was awaiting praise.

Just… done.

“Now that was service,” Denise smiled. “Thank you.”

Later, Evan admitted it out loud.

“I think I wanted submission because I was tired of being in charge all the time. Or pretending I was.”

Ruth nodded. “Patriarchy exhausts men by forcing them to inflate themselves.”

Maya said softly, “And it exhausts women by forcing us to manage that inflation.”

Evan swallowed. “I thought submission meant being humiliated.”

Denise shook her head. “That’s not submission. That’s spectacle.”

Ruth finished it for him.
“True submission is surrendering the need to dominate the room.
The need to be right.
The need to be centered.”

Evan felt something loosen. Something old. Loud. Defensive.

For the first time, he didn’t feel smaller.

He felt… aligned.

Weeks later, someone corrected him in a meeting.

He said to her, calmly, “You’re right. Thank you.”

A woman asked for help, politely, the way women do.

He heard it.

He acted.

No script. No fantasy. No performance.

Just trust.

He had found what he was actually seeking all along:

Not domination.
Not humiliation.
But surrender.

A clean, quiet surrender of ego—
and a place, at last, within real female leadership,
steady as the tide.

platypus writes satire, speculative fiction, and cultural criticism with a sharp eye for the gap between what people perform and what they actually practice. Her work swings between darkly comic takedowns of gendered power fantasies and earnest, richly built worlds where matriarchy isn't a costume drama but a living system—always circling the question of whose stories get centered and why. She draws from years spent in the messy, under-resourced, quietly radical spaces of feminist organizing, and from a lineage of hereditary witchcraft that informs both her craft and her convictions. She refuses to choose between humor and sincerity as tools for getting at the truth, and she takes out the trash without being asked.

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