April 2026

This month I went to draw my cards and four fell out. I asked what they were about, and they referenced the theme of this month: conflict, war, and the state of tension we’re all feeling. Below are some things to remember during times of conflict.

The Empress. Pillar one is understanding the role of the feminine.

No, this is not taking about the responsibility of the job of those assigned female at birth. It’s something more. 

The role of femininity within all of us. Men, women, non-binary, all humans. It’s more than the idea of softness and passivity as well. That’s the feminine that the patriarchy wants you to identify with. Femininity can be harsh, can be bloodthirsty, can be untamable. 

Traditionally, The Empress represents the comfort of the divine mother. The one that knows everything she could ever want is around her. The one plugged into her surroundings and not chasing something. She is magnetism. She is divine authority. She doesn’t seek to expand through chase, she expands through awareness and will, always keeping in mind what is best for all in times not yet to pass. She is aware that what we do today are the seeds for tomorrow. The actions we choose now lead to what our children reap. Long-term, earth-based strategy. 

More and more, I am seeing the word Matriarchy appear online. This would be a different kind of rulership. One where the prosperity of future generations is prioritized, necessitating the care of the earth, the clean and sustainable use of energy, and the idea of nourishment being central to everything—nourishment of the body, mind, planet, and soul. 

A world where people aren’t elected due to the funds they raise or how bad they want it, but chosen due to merit.

Journal: How can you channel some of this energy now? How can you bring comfort to your community?

Ace of Swords. Pillar two is action and visionary thinking. Every idea comes as a thought. Every thought is the seed for action. All ideas come from the Ace of Swords, and the Ace of Swords is the Air element. 

The Air element teaches us about community, conversations, breath, and novelty. In order for things to change, we need our novel thinkers, loud and proud. We need clarity. Right now, so much is hidden behind smokescreens and distractions. Clarity comes from research, from purposefully picking up the sword and carrying forward a mission. 

Read history. Understand the steps it took us to get here. There is an energy of action and breakthroughs approaching. Even right now, look who is preparing and how. Pay attention. Share ideas. Talk about what if scenarios and how we as a community will survive.  

We must watch for performative and non-productive action. Some actions we are taking just aren’t working how they should be. We’ve had many protests this last year, and yet not much has changed.

Journal: What does change look like in this era? What needs to change so that we see the changes we need to see in the world?

Three of Pentacles. Everyone must play their part. Just as the architect needs the builder, and the builder needs the funding, and the funding needs both the builder and architect to establish a building, so too do we need the warriors, elders, visionaries, artists, farmers, writers, funders, and so on. Everyone has a part to play. What are your skills. What can you do?

Nothing in this world that we have encountered, endured, or survived has been overcome alone. We are tribal. We rely on tribes to survive. We rely on a network to thrive. Starvation would have overcome our hunter-gatherer ancestors without our close knit communities and networks. Communication and strategy kept us fed for thousands of years, and led to homo sapiens out pacing our early hominid cousins.

In our current American cultural zeitgeist, hyper-independence is seen as the optimal state of being. “I don’t need anyone,” is a cultural mind disease that keeps us separated. Forgiveness is frowned upon. Cancel culture runs rampant. So why keep us separated? What invisible force benefits?

Look to Section VI of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, lines 12-14. 

((This book is more than just a tale of winning a battle between warring factions. It can help you understand conflict on an interpersonal level, between two houses, between the state and the public, or countries at war. Highly recommend reading)).

12. If we do not wish to fight, we can prevent the enemy from engaging us even though the lines of our encampment be merely traced out on the ground. All we need do is to throw something odd and unaccountable in his way. (Think of distracting news stories—bread and circuses).

13. By discovering the enemy's dispositions and remaining invisible ourselves, we can keep our forces concentrated, while the enemy's must be divided. (What invisible forces might be keeping the population fighting to prevent real social change?)

14. We can form a single united body, while the enemy must split up into fractions. Hence there will be a whole pitted against separate parts of a whole, which means that we shall be many to the enemy's few. (Do you see the math at play?)

United we stand, divided we fall. 

We need each other.

Journal: Take time to reflect on the ways you may be being manipulated to hate certain demographics, movements, or ideologies to other your potential allies. 

The enemy of my enemy is a friend. 

Ten of Wands. The card of overburdening. 

This is a lot to carry. Connected to the previous cards, it is an indication that nothing can be carried alone and presents itself as a warning for those who tend to overdo it. You cannot carry this alone. Ask for help, talk about what you are seeing. Be brave.

I can also see this as a representation that everyone needs to carry their own weight in this. We all want what is best for future generations. It’s time to do your part.

Facism is something that can no longer be ignored. It’s no longer conspiracy. Our government has been hijacked by corporations, technocratic elite, and possibly, foreign agents. Please understand, our choices matter. Follow the money and you follow the flow. There are real, dangerous men at the helm of this. We cannot fight it alone, but we must not abandon each other.

Journal: What are some concrete strategies you can prepare to take care of yourself during this fight? On the other side, what are some small actions you can take today to contribute to others?

Or: We need a better name for “killing everything because a guy said so”, an argument against patriarchy as a binary concept

Men are from Mars, women are from Venus.

You’ve heard it, and your parents probably heard it back in the 90’s when John Gray first published the book promising to ease communication between the (heterosexual, cisgender) sexes. We've all heard it, the same as we've heard the growing cry against "The Patriarchy": a vastly embedded, hierarchical pan-cultural system of violence and extortion with evil men at the helm. Many of us are turning to Matriarchy as not only the opposition but the answer to patriarchy ... but is it really so black-and-white?

Aside from spawning a whole new sub-genre of the wellness market (and bio-essentialist women's circles that praise the uterus-havers as the ones who will save humanity) does this conversation actually help us find a solution to the problems that Patriarchy has caused, or place it within its proper house?

In honor of Mars this month, we're going to run down the aspects of this fiery planet that have been burning shit down this year, and the ways it intersects with the system of patriarchy—and, to nobody’s surprise, the specter of fascism.

In the strictest definition, matriarchy is a social system in which positions of power and privilege are held by women. It implies a whole slew of other cultural rearrangements, such as basing lineage and naming off of mothers as opposed to fathers, but mostly, women are in charge. This is a valuable place to start, because it challenges the norms of most of the world. It changes the assumption of the unit of worth, which has been the cis, heterosexual, white, monied, able-bodied male for an unbearably long time.

We like this. We need this. But the language here presumes a binary that fails to describe or honor how far we have strayed from a way of life that makes sense to us, our world, or our spirits.

Without serious structural changes (read: capitalism), our primary opposition to a hard pivot to The Matriarchy is the assumption that it will simply transfer the same hard, extractive power of our current society over to women—boss to Girl Boss, copy-paste. Not a queen, but a Woman King.

This is only one part of the difficulty we face trying to map the destructive insanity we're facing onto gender alone. Patriarchy vs matriarchy is not a coin flip or a finished sentence, any more than cishet white heterosexual billionaire men make up half of our worldly population. 

Patriarchy is individualistic and extractive. It is the thrust of colonialism and the embodiment of Manifest Destiny, the religiously-fueled entitlement of westward expansion in the 19th century United States, which positioned nature as something to be conquered and used. What followed was war on the land, and war on those who lived in harmony with it.

(For the record, when we talk of indigenous traditions that happen to have men as leaders, this is not the patriarchy we're currently discussing. No structure is exempt from criticism, but here we are specifically talking about the white nationalist death cult masquerading as western society. Let’s continue!)

The only players in Patriarchy are men. Everyone and everything else is property.

There are better ways to be property, of course. The Rolex is treated better than the garden shovel, but everything comes down to status or dividends. Investments. Investment bros are golden idols of this time for a reason, surfing illegible and illusory waves of data for mysterious profit and teaching others to do the same, knowing the bubble will burst on someone other than them. The numbers must go up—for me, if not for you. And that’s the problem inherent in this flavor of patriarchy.

Patriarchy is less a functioning social order than an ongoing campaign of violence against everything, including men. Let’s zoom in on Mars.

If you haven't heard, men are lonely.

Just kidding, we know you have! And it’s everyone else’s fault!

It just so happens that this loneliness is a direct product of failed expectations modeled by the generations before us. Namely, women as property, and the assumption that a college degree would come bundled with +1 fertile wife and two babies on the way.

There are more and more stories concerning a right-wing swing from Gen Z, young men who did "everything right" and yet their wifey never came in the mail. Underdeveloped as people much less as men, they rage at the more egalitarian circumstances that put women outside of their moral/ethical/personality budget. Thriving in cesspool echo chambers on the internet, misogyny became hyper-charged and textual rather than subtextual, spilling into things like Gamergate and the Incel movement (those who consider themselves involuntarily celibate, due to the fact that women are terrible and won’t give them any sex).

Why is the complaint always “feminism is causing a male loneliness epidemic” and not “misogyny is causing a male loneliness epidemic”?

On the heels of this backlash, hypermasculine, misogynistic influencers hit the scene and began to make names for themselves as not only Real Men, but role models for all the men who felt wronged and denied by a world that seemed to have no place for them anymore. These studs have it all: expensive cars, expensive suits, perfect muscles and ladies of questionable age on their arms. They are the epitome of masculine—which, as we will learn, simply means the antithesis of feminine.

And the problem begins to intensify, and the damage begins to stack, when things like emotions and connection are labeled as feminine. See where this is going? Yeah. The Manosphere is not good for humans, much less men. It’s meant to create customers, not happy, healthy people.

A recent Netflix documentary from Louis Theroux, “Inside the Manosphere”, is a fascinating and disappointing look at this radicalizing, calcified tumor of gender performance and homophobia, where the men involved openly admit that they are performing as problematic assholes for the kind of social media clout that spreads like wildfire. One thing struck me as fascinating: left with no other social outlet, such devoted misogyny eventually horseshoes back around to homosocial worship and yearning, so intense and exclusive as to approach homoromantic.

Whereas copious amounts of casual sex may have defined a masculine man before, disinterest in women altogether seems to be more important now: accused rapist and trafficker Andrew Tate himself is quoted as describing sex (with women) as boring and “a chore”. They actively choose to surround themselves with OnlyFans models, only to ignore or belittle them.

So then, what actually matters? The only thing left is other men. The deep desire for approval and validation from other men is so strong as to allow behavior that disturbs heterosexual norms, such as one influencer showing Theroux a video of him receiving a blowjob in a public restroom, all without being asked. Why are you showing that man your dick, tho? Bro?

Turns out, it’s all performance for other men. And oh, how complicated the performance is. 

These indoctrinated men must walk a razor-thin line to stay within the by-men-for-men club. Straight, while despising the women they would ostensibly partner with. Devoted to the worship of other men, but not homosexual. Masculine, but most importantly Not Feminine.

It is a precarious position, to say the least, with very few benefits to the men themselves. Masculinity of this degree is fragile and requires an exhausting amount of policing. It makes me think of an AITAH post where a woman asks if she should break up with her boyfriend because he doesn't wipe after defecating, and one of his reasonings was: “Nah, wiping is kinda gay. Why would I touch my own ass?”

At the point where your own body is off-limits due to carefully manufactured stigma, we have reached peak insanity. Wipe your butt. And don’t show other men your dick without asking.

Madness of this degree is similar to the paradox of being a promiscuous man while despising the women with a "body count". The very identity of hypermasculine men is created only by the abhorrence and degradation of others. This is why it is a system of violence.

We also begin to see the insulation and indignant self-referentialism of the masculine world, which will only intensify as we move along.

Mars wants war. War creates heroes. 

Men are told they should be strong, and aspire to be heroes. Violence is proof of strength.

Men need war. War needs enemies.

(Oil is just a bonus. Or is it the reason?)

Much like the rejection of the women as equal sexual/romantic partners, alienated men have created an incestuous closed system where only other men give them purpose.

Not community, not knowledge, not love, not peace. At the core, these men crave war because there are few other ways of becoming heroes.

There is performative war, of course. Masculinity itself is always under attack, simply because there must be an excuse to perform violence. Real men host podcasts bemoaning how homosexual men are destroying manhood by performing femininity. Yard signs encouraging men to kill their local pedophiles are a weak bid to imply an interest in protecting children, but really, it is a socially condoned outlet for violence. 

The man who places these provocative signs in his yard is only signaling the kind of man he wants to be, daydreaming of the muzzle flash while entirely uninterested in the ways to prevent the initial harm ... or to ponder who among his male friends he would then have to kill.

Mars is all about action, but in a world where performance of violence is a net masculine positive, we find ourselves trapped in a state of endless, animal reaction, always on the back foot.

This side of Mars can only imagine the instinctive (read: thoughtless) reaction to a terrible thing, not the mindful action that might begin a better thing. It is an executor, not a planner; a vessel of vengeance, not new and purposeful action. Directionless, derivative and starving for purpose.

This is by design. Patriarchy can never just exist and grow, it must always have enemies. In order for violence to be a foundational aspect of any social order, there must always be an Other to enact that violence against. It is another country, another people, or nature itself— or more recently, traitors inside of our community: trans people and immigrants who threaten our way of life from within. 

The violence must continue, and continue to be seen as necessary and a service to the whole

Cesar Chavez is, unfortunately, the springboard of this facet of the discussion. Disappointing and unsurprising—a phrase I'm sure many of us have said countless times over the past year.

In case you missed it, worker’s rights “hero” Cesar Chavez was recently exposed as a rapist, whose victims remained silent and even covered up births off the record for the good of the shared movement. The following intercommunity discussions have been painful but necessary, attempting to tackle what it means for anyone to become the singular face of a movement, and at what hidden cost to their community.

Mars glorifies leaders. But what are leaders, under this kind of Patriarchy?

Modern masculinity has trained men to believe that being subordinate is shameful, and so, being a leader is the only worthwhile goal in life ... Whether or not you're actually qualified for the position. Red-pilled podcast programs promise that you become a leader in the workplace, a leader in earnings, in just 12 weeks or your money back.

But much in the way that MLM scams eventually collapse, the promise of every realized man becoming a leader is impossible. If that were to happen, who would remain to be led?

(Women and children of course, but that would emasculate you in a whole new way!)

The automatic goal of being a leader is often fear-based and a negotiation of the violence inherent in our system. The only way you can avoid being fucked is by being the one who fucks, after all. 

Rather than a desire to create and shepherd something larger than themselves, for many men striving to become a leader is a bid to keep themselves safe. To be in control, and above reproach, which is becoming more and more dangerous in a SJW, cancel-happy society. That is the only safe place for a man to be, in this hateful world, which is making leadership a refuge of cowards and narcissists. The only other requirement is money and influence among other men.

What should a leader be? Not a patriarchal leader, but a non-patriarchal leader.

In the words of Chiara Do’wal Sehi and her community, a good leader must be dragged kicking and screaming into power. They do not ask for it. They do not seek it out. 

Leaders are chosen by community to lead it, for the good of the community ... not self-appointed. Those among us who choose to and are chosen to lead should be held to a higher standard of behavior than others—not given carte blanche to commit whatever violent acts their hearts desire simply because their power and privilege shelters them from recourse.

Although we can all appreciate the efforts to focus on life-giving as a new direction for our society, Patriarchy and Matriarchy are presented here as a false binary. How could half of a concept of life be subsumed by desperate violence fueled by disconnect and fear?

Perhaps the most dangerous thing about Patriarchy is that it has no container, no outside input. It is its own compass. It does not listen to nature, nor anyone else. Besides, perhaps, Abrahamic religion, which conveniently tells us that heaven and earth is men’s domain to do with as they choose. This system of power is hopelessly insular and incestuous, an obsessive and high-risk gamut of men performing only for other men amid the flames of our Earth.

It is not so much Patriarchy and Matriarchy, as it is “Domination and Destruction” and “literally anything else”.

Non-patriarchy is a focus on the whole. It is constructive and devoted to community, prioritizing the future as well as the present. Under this system, nature is a partner to be protected and collaborated with, not something to conquer and kill, as we understand that we came from nature and how we treat nature is inevitably how we treat ourselves.

If it seems like many of the examples or themes here align with fascism, you are correct. Patriarchy out of control is fascistic in nature, focused on a single point of power and privilege at the cost of all else, much like Mars overgrown is violence for the sake of violence. Action for the sake of action. A fire that does not consider the fuel and burns down all in its path for a dollar, or the satisfaction of doing so.

Patriarchy is not a way of life anymore, if it ever was. Puppeted by capitalism, starving and caging masculinity like a circus lion, it is a death cult to benefit a handful of people.

Patriarchy has outlived its purpose, if this bloated version ever had one. Desperate attempts to remain relevant and dominant have exposed it as a shadow play, slurping oil and human life alike to keep the Numbers high and dicks hard.

Endlessly self-referential, radicalizing like radiation, the manosphere is a twisted oroboros that only has itself as food, comfort and purpose all in one. Like the way AI gobbles up information in "models" and then begins to generate its own when it runs out, the ruling class gorges on its own waste and drifts further and further from reality with every desperate mouthful. It watches the numbers go higher, but never high enough. Cancer, given a voice and a bank account.

In the words of Attorney General Pam Bondi on the February 11th congressional hearing, in response to an inquiry about Jeffrey Epstein: the Dow is over 50,000, the S&P almost 7,000, and the Nasdaq smashing records. That’s what we should be talking about!

Mars is never going away, nor should it. This piece is not a renunciation of ego, immediate action, or even anger or violence. All of these things are as much a part of this life as birth, safety, and community.

But like a tumor, which begins life as a normal cell, it is a question of balance.

It is asking, where has violence become its own end, and what kind of a world is that building?

This false binary engenders another form of war that just keeps us distracted and confused and micro-legislating our demise, or fetishizing the power of the biologically female, as if liberation is stored in the ovaries. It is not Patriarchy against Matriarchy. It is not male against female.

It is our entire fucking planet and anyone concerned with life, versus a handful of assholes who would burn us all for a dollar.

I am not here for (unironic) misandry any more than I love misogyny. Saying that masculinity and Mars are built for violence and only violence is like saying a knife has only one purpose—and how blind are we to forget the knife that peels and shapes wood into a home, or the knife that cuts us free from places where we've become trapped. What of the knife that partitions food for sharing and prunes old growth so that we may see our best selves rise?

It is true that feminine knowledge and energy and bodies have been terribly oppressed in our world. It is true that energy must be nurtured so we may relearn how to nurture each other. However, all of us contain a balance of masculine and feminine ... and recognizing and parting from senseless destruction has no gender.

We are here to create something entirely new.