When I was a grad student, it was commonly accepted that patriarchy emerged with the rise of domestication and agriculture.

The theory goes something like this: as we moved from hunter-gatherer societies, men needed to organize and increase labor for their livestock and farms, so they brought women’s bodies under tighter control to breed them and produce that labor. According to this theory, nomadic societies were more equal because men and women brought in roughly equal caloric intake from hunting and gathering activities, respectively, without the need for a regulated labor pool. And so the idea goes that our natural state is actually one free of patriarchy, perhaps even “matriarchy,” before we were corrupted by agriculture, property ownership, capitalism, etc.

Yet for every feminist scholar who claims to have found this or that example of “matriarchy,” if you dig deep enough into the footnotes, you’ll almost always find the definition twisted beyond all recognition.

A commonsense definition of “patriarchy” would be a system in which the levers of economic, political, social, religious control are dominated by men. The examples of matriarchy cited by feminists are almost always:

• matrilineal societies in which family descent is traced through females, conferring greater status to women and authority within the family (but doesn’t imply that they rule over men in society),

• societies in which women have a great degree of sexual freedom and may engage in polygyny with multiple men, breaking with Western taboos (but still don’t rule over them),

• societies in which rights, powers, and obligations are more equally divided (but never one in which men have fewer rights/powers and more obligations),

or some similar situation where women at best are on par with men.

And these are largely theoretical examples that lack intellectual rigor. Cases where an anthropologist who made a book out of her dissertation, who spent some weeks embedded in some remote isolated tribe and now claims to have found signs of gender equality, which then get twisted beyond all recognition into “matriarchy” by gender studies scholars and historians downstream.

The truth is that there aren’t, to my knowledge, any real-world examples of societies—current or historical—in which women have dominated men. At most, women have achieved parity.

There are some early signs that women are actually pulling ahead of men in key areas, like education and salary (among 18-24 highly educated young people in some Western societies). Yet even then, there’s no sign that I can tell of the same kind of aggressive will to dominate the other gender that we’ve seen in men for millennia. If anything, successful young women seem to use their status to defend equality or their independence, neither of which equate to dominance.

Sometimes they use that newfound voice to inadvertently amplify patriarchal values. How many pop songs do we hear today where “empowered” women tell other women to discard men who don’t have enough material means to take care of them? It’s even become fashionable to claim that being a feminist should include defending a woman’s “right” to submit. And if the countless boss bitch lurkers on this subreddit are anything to go by, many secretly crave a competent, trustworthy, capable, safe, and loving man to take over.

Competent. Trustworthy. Capable. Safe. Loving. These are the qualities of the Good King, the wise patriarch craved by countless women (and men) throughout history in narratives from every culture and continent.

Folk tales that talk about good kings are especially significant because oral folklore, as opposed to written histories controlled by men, is generally understood to have been transmitted largely by women for women. Feminists read subversive instances of “female agency” into these stories. But the real headline is generations of women wishing for good men to rule over them, not for the abolition of male rule altogether.

Even modern democratic societies—where we rotate kings out every few years and bind their power tightly with a straitjacket of institutions, laws, and norms—emerged as pragmatic agreements among ambitious men to minimize needless bloodshed. Democracy itself points to patriarchy.

I think that patriarchy is inevitable as long as us men have these bodies, these hormones, and are inclined to dominate. Every generation struggles with and learns this lesson. It’s up to us to make the best of it to create harmony, love, peace, and joy.