The Story of Men, or at Least the One We Built

My Trail Notes From the Scene on Radio Men Podcast Series

I need to tell you something a little embarrassing.

I started listening to The Scene on Radio Men podcast series¹ back in the summer. It’s now winter. A podcast literally called Men. Twelve episodes about masculinity, patriarchy, and how we got here. And I’m just now writing about it.

I’m a man. On an adventure about love and fear. An adventure that specifically explores how love and fear shows up in the lives of men. You’d think a series called Men would have been the first thing I listened to and the first thing I wrote about.

It was not.

I listened to a few episodes early on. Then I drifted. I wrote about testosterone.² I wrote about movies and what they taught me about being a man.³ ⁴I wrote about capitalism.⁵ I wrote about prison.⁶ I wrote about money.⁷ I explored trail after trail on this adventure and kept circling around the one that was sitting right in front of me.

There’s something in that. I want to come back to it at the end.

First, let me tell you about the series.

John Biewen and Scene on Radio

If you’ve been following this adventure, you’ve met John Biewen before. He’s the creator, producer, and host of Scene on Radio, a two-time Peabody-nominated podcast from the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. Last fall, I wrote about his Capitalism series and how it cracked open questions I thought I already had answers to.

A few months later, I sat with John around a fire in Hillsborough, North Carolina. A Campfire Conversation about justice, fear, love, stories, and the systems we build to protect what we have. That conversation is out now.

John’s work has shaped this adventure in ways I’m still sorting through. When I finally sat down to finish the Men series, it felt like continuing a conversation I’d been having with him for months. Just this time, his co-host was Celeste Headlee, a journalist, author, and woman of color who brought a different kind of sharpness to every episode.

The series is twelve episodes long. It covers a lot. Rather than walk you through each one, I want to share what I heard. The big themes. The threads that stuck with me. And the questions I’m still sitting with.

Where Did This Patriarchy Thing Start?

The series opens with a question that sounds simple but isn’t. How did men end up on top?

For most of human history, the answer wasn’t obvious. Early human societies were far more egalitarian than we tend to assume. Men and women shared work. Roles were more fluid. The idea of one gender dominating the other wasn’t some universal starting point.

Then things shifted. Roughly 10,000 years ago, as humans began settling down, accumulating property, and building social structures, men began consolidating power. That leads to the question, “Why?”

The series explores several theories. Mel Konner, an anthropologist at Emory University, points to what he calls patriarchal conspiracies. Once men started accumulating property, they wanted to control who inherited it. That meant controlling women. Controlling reproduction. Controlling the line of descent.

Lisa Wade, a sociologist, adds another layer. In hunter-gatherer societies, there wasn’t much to pass down. Biological fatherhood mattered less when the whole community was raising children together. But once ownership entered the picture, everything changed. Men started thinking of women as property. Something to trade. Something to protect. Something to control.

And then there’s testosterone. The series doesn’t shy away from this. Celeste pushes John on it directly. Men are, on average, more physically aggressive. Testosterone plays a role. But as the series makes clear, testosterone isn’t a switch that gets flipped. It’s more like an amplifier. Social context shapes how it gets expressed. A man’s testosterone might lead him to punch someone in a bar, but it won’t make him swing at his boss.

I wrote about this last fall in The Testosterone Paradox. What struck me then, and what struck me again listening to these episodes, is how much we want a simple answer. Nature or nurture. Biology or culture. But it’s both. Always both. And the interplay between them is where the real complexity lives.

The series lands in an honest place on this. We may never fully untangle how much of gender is wired and how much is built. But as Mel Konner puts it, we are the first species with the potential to direct our own evolution. We’re not amoebas. We can choose.

The Machinery

If the first few episodes ask how male supremacy started, the next stretch asks how it kept going. The answer is machinery. Cultural machinery that got built over centuries and kept reinforcing itself.

This part of the series traces it through science, religion, law, and war.

In the 1700s, when Maria Winckelmann, a German astronomer, discovered a comet and later applied to be the official astronomer at the Berlin Academy of Sciences, the great philosopher Leibniz supported her. He said he doubted she could easily find her equal in the science in which she excels. The Academy turned her down anyway. Their reason? If a woman was their astronomer, people would laugh.

A few years later, they gave the job to her son. With Maria as his assistant. She was already doing the work. They just weren’t going to give her the title.

The series is full of moments like this. Doors that almost opened. Opportunities that almost happened. And then power stepped in and slammed them shut. Not because women weren’t capable. Because the men in charge were afraid of what it would mean if they let them in.

That fear shows up in different forms across different centuries. But the pattern is consistent. Every time male supremacy gets challenged, a new justification gets invented. “Science” was used to try to prove women’s brains were smaller. Medicine was used to argue women were too emotional. Psychology was used to pathologize any woman who didn’t conform. One theory gets disproved, and another one takes its place.

It’s an exhausting cycle. And it’s one that requires constant energy to maintain.

Who Gets to Be a Man?

One of the most important things the series does is show that masculinity isn’t one thing. It’s different depending on your race, your class, your sexuality, and your body.

Episode 8 digs into this directly. White men have far more latitude in how they express masculinity. When a white man expresses anger, it can read as courage or conviction. When a Black man expresses the same anger, it reads as threat. Asian men have historically been desexualized and feminized in American media. The series traces this through decades of Hollywood, from Long Duck Dong in Sixteen Candles to Crazy Rich Asians. The stereotypes aren’t accidental. They serve a purpose. They keep white masculinity at the center and push everything else to the margins.

And wealth multiplies the effect. A wealthy white man has enormous freedom in how he shows up in the world. That freedom shrinks the further you move from that center. These aren’t inherent differences. They are constructed ones. Beliefs that got handed down.

The trans experience adds another dimension. Episode 9 features a trans man who describes masculinity as reductive. The rules of manhood are mostly about what you can’t be. You can’t be caring. You can’t be kind. You can’t be vulnerable. The definition is built on exclusion, not expansion. And people who transition from female to male are joining what the series calls the boys club. People who transition from male to female are leaving it. And the violence directed at trans women is, in part, a punishment for that departure. For discrediting the idea that manhood is the thing everyone should want.

In my reflections on this episode, I wrote something that has stayed with me. What if gender was more of an art? An individual expression. Art is more beautiful with color, with diversity, with creativity. An expression of masculinity viewed through the lens of art seems like a much more beautiful world.

The Cost

The series doesn’t just examine what patriarchy does to women. It looks at what it does to men.

Episode 6 on warriors is where this hit me hardest. The series traces how, across virtually every culture, men have been designated as the ones who fight and die. One man can father many children. One woman can bear one child at a time. So culturally, men became more dispensable.

Think about what that means. We have decided, collectively, that it’s noble for men to die for a cause. That protecting others is their role. That their individual life is worth less than what it can be sacrificed for.

The emotional weight of carrying that is enormous. Veterans are significantly more likely to die by suicide. Deaths of despair among men are rising. The warrior archetype doesn’t just send men to war. It teaches them to suppress empathy, to shut down vulnerability, to see their own pain as weakness.

The military trains this into people deliberately. Soldiers are broken down and hardened. They are taught conditional empathy. Care about your fellow soldiers. Don’t extend that care to the other side. Because if you do, it becomes much harder to pull the trigger.

You can see how this template got exported from the battlefield into everything else. Into boardrooms. Into sports. Into fatherhood. Into how men relate to their own emotions.

Episode 10 brings this home through the story of a father watching his son go through middle school. The vocabulary of adolescent boys is a vocabulary of enforcement. Gay. Faggot. Pussy. Girl. Every term designed to punish any departure from the narrow definition of what a man is supposed to be. And this starts before boys can read. Before they even have the language for it, they are already absorbing the rules.

I never had children. And I wrote in my reflections on this episode that I had always wanted a daughter, not necessarily a son. At the time I didn’t think too deeply about why. Now I think I was sensing something. Society seemed more willing to let women be whole people than to let men be whole people. A daughter could be strong and independent and caring. A son would face a world that would punish him for half of those things.

I’m coming to believe that the patriarchy could hurt men more than it hurts women. I want to be careful with that. I’m not saying poor little rich boy. The harm to women is real and severe and ongoing. But the harm to men is often invisible because men aren’t supposed to talk about it. And what you can’t name, you can’t heal.

The Ecosystem

Episode 11 changed something for me. It starts with sports talk radio, which is an unexpected entry point into the patriarchy. But it works. Jim Rome, one of the most popular sports talk hosts in the country, turns out to be surprisingly thoughtful. He pushes back on callers who are racist, homophobic, or dismissive of women. In a space built on dominance and winning, there are these small moments of decency.

But the deeper insight comes from therapist Terry Real. He describes the shift that needs to happen as a move from dominant hierarchical thinking to relational thinking. From linear to ecological. When you make that shift, you’re no longer above the system. You are a humble part of it. And it’s in your interest to keep it clean and healthy.

Whether the system is a marriage. A community. Or the literal ecosystem of the planet.

This connected to something I’ve been learning from Michael Douglas at Maine Primitive Skills School. The traditional rules of wilderness survival are shelter, water, fire, food. Michael adds a fifth. Attitude. Because how you approach the situation changes everything. Surviving in nature isn’t about conquering it. It’s about collaborating with it. Being in tune with it. Letting the awe of it humble you.

The impulse to dominate, the series argues, is the same whether you’re dominating women, or the people who work for you, or the natural world. Feminists have been making this point for decades. But apparently it hasn’t been said enough. Because we keep acting as though we’re above the systems we depend on.

Why It Took Me Six Months

So, here’s the thing I promised to come back to.

Why did it take me six months to finish and write about a podcast called Men, WHILE on an adventure about men?

I think something happened to me over the course of this year. I started this adventure focused on freeing men from fear. That was the mission. That was the frame. And it’s still true. I believe freeing men from fear-based models of masculinity is one of the most important things we can do.

But somewhere along the way, my focus shifted. I became less interested in just men, and more interested in the systems that trap all of us. Disconnection. Community. What it looks like when people are pulled by love instead of controlled by fear. Not just men. Everyone.

The last episode of the series, Episode 12, is called The End of Male Supremacy. Celeste talks about wanting 51% representation of women in government. John starts to wonder about something deeper. What happens when the patriarchy comes down entirely? When there’s no strict definition of what women can be and what men can be? When people start showing up as their true selves?

Everything changes.

And that’s what I’ve been gravitating toward. Not just freeing men. But what freeing men makes possible. The ripple effects. The way it changes relationships, communities, systems, everything.

If we free men from these boxes, it doesn’t just benefit men, it changes the whole ecosystem. Because the patriarchy isn’t just a system of male power. It’s a system that keeps everyone small. That keeps everyone performing. That keeps everyone afraid.

And I think this is why the podcast kept slipping to the back of my queue. Not because it wasn’t important. But because my understanding of why it matters had expanded beyond where I started.

I started from freeing men from fear.

I’m landing somewhere closer to freeing all of us from the systems that were built by fear.

The Questions I Am Sitting With

I don’t have neat answers. But I have questions that feel worth sitting with.

If male supremacy is only about 10,000 years old, and humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years, what does that say about how natural it really is?

How do we help men see the cost of the current system without it feeling like an attack? Because the cost is real, and most men are paying it quietly.

What would an expansive definition of masculinity look like? One built on what you can be, not what you can’t?

If the impulse to dominate is the same whether it’s directed at women, other men, or the natural world, what does it look like to choose collaboration instead? Not as weakness. But as the more intelligent response to the reality that we are all part of the same system.

And the one that keeps following me: if we want to heal the world, and I believe we do, is freeing men from fear-based models of masculinity one of the most obvious places to start?

I think it might be.

Thank you for walking with me on this one. It took me a while to get here. But I think the long way around taught me something the shortcut would’ve missed.

1. https://sceneonradio.org/men/

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