Twitter user describes what living in a matriarchy would be like for men

Editor's Note: This article was originally published on May 18, 2021. It has since been updated.

Gender inequality is one of many societal flaws that we are yet to eradicate even in this day and age. Despite tireless efforts to balance the gender scales, some—mostly those benefiting from the way things are right now—continue to trample down every attempt at progress. Determined to demonstrate just how overdue we are for gender equality, a couple of years ago, one Twitter user painted a clear picture of what the world would be like if matriarchy replaced patriarchy. Instead of appealing to people's sense of morality or laying out endless statistics and research on the matter, writer A. R. Moxon put things into perspective by simply reversing gender roles.

"Try to imagine men's reactions, if it was known for a fact the next 45 presidents would be women, and after those 240 years, a man running was considered 'identity politics.' We would lose our entire minds. We take women's patience far too much for granted," Moxon tweeted. "Try to imagine men's reactions, were it known that of the next 113 SCOTUS justices, only 4 would be men, and none of those would be appointed before 2205, and even then women's complaints about male appointees would be 'why don't they just appoint the person best qualified?' My God."

Moxon went on to effectively illustrate just how ridiculous it would sound to men if they were put in a position of going through some of the injustices women have been subjected to for centuries. From not being able to vote for decades to being denied the right to a college education, the author painted what I imagine would seem a pretty dystopian scenario for men but is already the reality for women. "It came to me naturally. I wrote it as the Democratic presidential field was starting to come into focus, and a lot of the narrative was driven by the fact that many of the candidates for nomination were women," Moxon told Bored Panda of how he came to write the now-viral Twitter thread.

"The way that it was talked about struck me as something both so predictable as to be mundane, and also extraordinary the moment I lowered my received framework to really hear what was being said," he continued. "A plethora of viable nominees should be standard and expected; after all, women make up roughly half the U.S. and world population. Yet, here it was, being presented as this extraordinary thing—because it was. It hadn't really been seen before. Even a single viable female candidate in the field was something that would have been unprecedented as recently as 20 years ago. And of course, a lot of the narrative was being driven around the idea that the nation just wasn't ready for a woman to run, and worry that a female nominee wouldn't be able to win."

"And it just hit me that this is the sort of narrative that women still have to endure. It's not something men would accept quietly, either; men would lose their minds at the unfairness of it all! Women absolutely should be enraged at the unfairness of it all, too! We should expect to see anger and frustration and a refusal to put up with it any longer! So there was a lot to play with in demonstrating those ideas, just by reversing the dynamic to let people who don’t see just how dramatically unfair dialogue is around women to actually see it," he added.