femmenietzsche:

One surprising thing about secret societies is how visible they are. In the ethnographic record, they can be found almost everywhere. They’re particularly well documented across Melanesia,¹ the Amazon,² and West Africa.³ There are mixed-sex,⁴ and all female,⁵ secret societies, but the ones that physically coerce, ritually deceive, and violently punish outsiders and taboo-violators are often entirely made up of males.^6,7 These all-male secret societies are best described as “men’s cults,” because of their exclusionary nature and strong connection to male sex roles. They can be found among hunter-gatherer societies, horticulturalists, and agriculturalists alike, although many of those that have been described may no longer exist.⁸

The men’s cult is a conspiracy in plain sight. The “men’s house,” where the cult gathers, is often the largest structure in a village, built in a position of prestige at the center or top of a settlement. In villages across the Alaskan mainland and the islands of the Bering Strait, for example, the “kashim” (men’s house) was “the center of social and religious life,” wrote ethnologist Edward William Nelson.⁹ This is where most adult males and teenage initiates spend most of their time when not hunting or foraging. Among other things, it’s a ritual center for the men, where the cult’s sacred paraphernalia—often masks and/or musical instruments—is kept hidden from women and children.

The fact that men’s cults can be found across so many diverse small-scale societies may point to a deep historical origin. Archaeologists Oliver Dietrich and Jens Notroff have speculated that Göbekli Tepe, a site in Turkey around 12,000 years old, may represent a sanctuary for a men’s cult. Anthropologists D’Ann Owens and Brain Hayden speculate that secret societies (not necessarily men’s cults) may go back to the Upper Paleolithic, and argue that caves during the Upper Paleolithic were used to initiate elite children into secret societies.²⁵ In The Nature of Paleolithic Art, R. Dale Guthrie argued that adolescent boys made most Upper Paleolithic cave art.²⁶ Paleolithic art often consisted of hunting scenes, naked women, and phallic imagery, which seems consistent with the notion—difficult to test—that they were made as part of an initiation into a men’s cult.

By now everyone knows the secret reveal of the Stepford Wives is the wives are fembots

But NO, the twist is the Men’s Association isn’t an age-old thing but a collection of new suburban retreatists, cutting-edge animatronic engineers and all

That’s the trick