the sexual tension between pop culture and matriarchy

hot divorced aunties, the rise of the unbothered woman and other signs of revolution

On a blindingly bright Thursday in July last year, I threw a backpack over my shoulder, grabbed my daughter and my camera, and boarded a train to the Netherlands. The destination was a matriarchal festival — one I had boldly invited myself to after deciding, with absolutely no prior experience, to produce my own docu-series featuring the stories of mothers around the world. I had no idea what to expect and I could not have possibly anticipated how profoundly this event would alter the trajectory of my life. For four days, I experienced what the world could look like if it would be centered around the well-being of children, instead of the bank account of pedophiles and ugh, it was delicious.

Since then, I’ve struggled to describe the state of the world without sounding either naïve or apocalyptic. The closest metaphor I’ve found is this: we are living inside a bruised fruit. Much of it is soft with decay, but if we collectively carve away the rot, we may discover that the seeds are still intact.

I spent a lot of time at that festival surrounded mostly by older women and a rather spiritual atmosphere and while I enjoyed the softness of it all, I kept wondering how these conversations could travel much further, if we changed the way we talked about them. How can we make this ancient knowledge — the way we lived as human beings long before patriarchy even became a thing — feel sexier and more relevant to a younger generation? How can we stop seeing matriarchal societies as slightly utopian anthropological curiosities and start seeing them as living case studies? And, most importantly, how can we use their very existence as proof that better social structures are possible and let that fuel our courage to build them in our own lives?

I couldn’t help but think that if we stripped away some of the aesthetic language and spoke more plainly about power, economics, and social organization, these ideas might resonate far beyond spiritual circles. Currently, the closest political language we have to matriarchy is feminism and I stand on its shoulders, always. However, feminism has largely been forced to work within the orchard patriarchy built. Matriarchy, on the other hand, doesn’t pretend the orchard was ever healthy to begin with. It acknowledges that much of it is bruised, that some parts simply cannot be saved. Instead of fighting over the least rotten fruit, it asks us to take the damn seeds and cultivate an entirely new farm.

Ever since that festival, I’ve been looking for signs in the wider culture, small pieces of evidence that people in my generation are already drawn to this way of living, even if they don’t yet have the language for it. The more I paid attention, the more I noticed that many of the trends we’re seeing right now actually reflect values that feel distinctly matriarchal.

So here’s my curated list of cultural shifts and pop-culture trends that I believe mirror matriarchal principles. These are small proof points that many of us are, perhaps unintentionally, building lives that center care, community, and relational power — without yet being able to name it. Or to put in the words of Gen Z, #hopecore.

1. The Collapse of Marriage as a Default Life Goal

See, I love love. I’m the type of woman who balls her eyes out at weddings. And I know three or five people who are genuinely happy in their marriages and that is beautiful and in many ways, sustaining a loving partnership in this world is radical in itself. What I don’t love is the institution of marriage and how it has been marketed to us as the ultimate measure of a life well lived. My problem with marriage as the default life goal is that it’s a profoundly uncreative standard. Out of all the ways a human life could unfold, we decided the ultimate achievement is legal proximity to a man? Surely we can imagine something more interesting than that.

In 2026, marriage is clearly far from the ultimate life goal for, I’d say, most people in my generation, not only because spending your life savings to celebrate being legally bound to a man seems like a dumb fucking idea to many of us, but also because it feels spiritually conservative. We’re clearly witnessing the slow decline of the idealization of the patriarchal nuclear family in pop culture and that shift is very matriarchal. Gen Z is all about chosen family, having a child with your gay bestie, communal living and partnerships that don’t require merging identities or sacrificing autonomy. If that sounds radical, it’s worth remembering that entire societies have organized themselves this way for centuries. In one of the world’s largest matrilineal societies, the Mosuo of southwest China, people practice what are often called “walking marriages.” Essentially, romantic relationships do not require cohabitation, legal contracts, or the merging of households. Women choose their partners, and men visit at night. If a woman no longer wishes to maintain the relationship, she can simply tell her partner to stop visiting her bedroom. Period.

2. Intergenerational Female Solidarity Becoming Aspirational

Think about how “cool, single older women” have become aspirational archetypes instead of cautionary tales. A generation that was raised on the warning — whatever you do, just don’t dare ending up an old spinster rotting in your apartment with cats, dying alone and unnoticed — has now rebranded her into the “hot divorced auntie in silk robes vacationing in Capri.” Not only do we find inspiration in these older women, we’re finally listening to them. The advice of our TikTok grandmas is taken seriously and I couldn’t be more happy about it. No one gives a single fuck about the advice of 20-year-old self-proclaimed life coaches anymore. We want wisdom shouted at us by a 60-year-old woman with a cigarette in one hand and a margarita in the other. Sixty is the new twenty, so to speak.

And surprise, this shift in the perception of older single women is inherently matriarchal. In many matriarchal societies, grandmothers are among the most important members of the community. They influence major decisions and are often the heads of households. What pop culture is doing, perhaps unintentionally, is rehearsing that hierarchy shift. From treating youth as the peak to understanding that power ripens.

3. Female Friendship as the Central Love Story

Matriarchal cultures have historically centered relationships among women as the sole stable relational core, and so does my generation, poco a poco. If you have two eyes and a few brain cells, you can clearly see the shift everywhere. You can see it in the way women have started treating friendships as sacred infrastructure rather than optional extras. In the way we fly across continents for each other’s birthdays but cancel dates without a second thought. We’ve basically realized that romantic partners come and go, but the group chat remains. Increasingly, the love and emotional literacy we experience in our female friendships has become the standard, one most men are neither accustomed to nor equipped to meet. We’ve realized that the average friendship between women would qualify as a very rare, very exceptional heterosexual relationship.

Every time my best friend tells me something her current situationship did right for once, we both chuckle because we know it’s something we would do for each other without even mentioning it.

4. Children Raised Without Male Authority Being Normalized

A shift I personally like to pat myself on the back for contributing to — at least in my small corner of the internet — is the rebrand of single motherhood. For decades, single mothers were framed as cautionary tales. Overwhelmed. Undesirable. Financially unstable. The ultimate social failure in human form. At best, fuckable. What we’re seeing right now is that single motherhood is becoming a flex — even a status symbol in some ways. As more women gain financial freedom, they no longer center their desire to raise children around the presence of a man. Instead of performing the mental gymnastics of finding the perfect partner, some are simply dropping dollar bills on a sperm donor. In fact, the number of single mothers by choice has increased by 60% in recent years. I could write an entire essay on its own about de-centering men from motherhood, but I’ll leave you with this: choosing solo motherhood is one of the most radical acts of bringing back matriarchy we can participate in, as it shifts the foundation of the family away from male authority and toward maternal continuity. The more women de-center men from motherhood, the more we challenge the entrenched belief that stability and parental authority depend on a male presence. In fact, it sure as hell can come from you and the community you intentionally build around your child.

5. Creators building community-first brands instead of product-first brands.

Think about how before 2020, every influencer seemed to be launching the thousandth skincare line or clothing brand. The formula was predictable. Build an audience. Monetize with a product. Scale. Exit. While this is obviously still a thing, we’re definitely witnessing a wider shift where creators with established platforms have stopped selling shit their audience doesn’t need anyways and started building rooms. Meet-ups for strangers. Run clubs.
Dinner nights in borrowed spaces. Co-living experiments. Group trips. Book clubs. You name it.

As a marketing girlie, this is an interesting shift for me to witness as it clearly shows that consumers no longer identify themselves by which products they own, but in what kind of rooms they belong. While this shift is not anti-capitalist, it is certainly post-individualist. It softens our late stage capitalist obsession with accumulation and replaces it with participation. A run club at 7 a.m. creates no tangible product, yet it generates something far more valuable: shared discipline, mutual accountability, inside jokes, shirtless men to drool over. A dinner night in a borrowed space produces no scalable asset, but it produces memory, trust, and relational depth.

Matriarchal systems have always understood that social cohesion is infrastructure. The courtyard, the kitchen, the communal table aren’t side notes to “real” economic life. They are the fucking center of it. Decisions are made exactly there. Resources are redistributed exactly there. Children are raised exactly there. Culture is transmitted exactly there. When we now witness creators pivoting from “buy this” to “come sit with us,” some of them are, whether consciously or not, rebuilding that infrastructure.

6. The Subtle Art Of Not Giving a Single Fuck

Alysa Liu winning a freaking gold medal at the freaking Olympics is one of the best recent examples of the subtle art of not giving a fuck — and excelling precisely because of it. The clips of her iconic performance are all over my For You page, and I’ve watched every single one at least 20 times. The energy she transmits as she floats so gracefully across the ice is contagious and shows the world that, in the end, it really comes down to how much fun you can have.

So what does that have to do with matriarchy? Everything. Patriarchal success, written by white boomer men in suits and perpetuated by alpha bros in tank tops, is usually framed as sacrifice. Grind harder. Join the 5 a.m. club. Push through pain. Nose strips, my personal ick. Suppress emotion. Win at all costs.

Alysa stepped away from the sport when it stopped feeling right and came back on her own terms, for the fun of it, which is very matriarchal considering that matriarchal systems disrupt burnout logic entirely. Worth is not measured by how much you can withstand, but by how well you can sustain. Productivity is not extracted at the expense of life, it is woven into it. When we’re watching pop culture finally celebrate a version of excellence that is not tortured, not hyper-disciplined to the point of a mental disease, but embodied and self-directed, we are certainly witnessing a value shift in real time.

Conclusion

So why did I spend over 20 hours writing this weird-ass essay connecting pop culture to matriarchy, you may wonder? Because I hear a lot of complaining, but see little action. If we’re waiting for matriarchy to arrive politically, we will wait forever. The odds of a collective uprising where we all overthrow our governments and start organizing society in a matriarchal way are close to zero. Even if we did, most people wouldn’t even know their place in the revolution.

I personally believe the best we can do is educate ourselves on matriarchal knowledge and start implementing as much of it as possible in our own lives, gradually divesting from patriarchy in the process. Seeing the signs in pop culture, I’d say we’re on a better path toward it than we were five years ago, and that’s maybe all we need to hear right now. I take solace in seeing proof every day that more and more people are connecting the dots and implementing change instead of waiting for permission. Agency is a beautiful thing.

We’re on the right path, we just have to keep at it and turn up the volume.

Ps: If this essay resonated, the Matriarchal Study Club is where these conversations continue. It’s a structured space to study matriarchal systems, discuss their modern applications, and actively implement them in our own lives. We’re done waiting for the world to change. From now on, we’re busy reimagining how to live inside it. Join us!!