Thank you so much for sharing that . Extremely interesting
Thank you very much, Zevon, for your kind words.
I thought that this thread about the Female Led Community in Denmark where I grow up in the 1970s was long gone and forgotten.
But somehow you found it, and I am glad that you found it to be interesting
By the way almost all of the girls and us boys who grew up in our community are still living in female led relationships, and so are our daughters and sons.
It proves to me that this kind of relationship between wife and husband are both durable and liveable.
There are even some men from outside our small community who have married some of our sisters and daughters and moved in among us to live with them in a female led way, because they have been very fascinated by our independent, clever, strong-willed and yet very caring and loving young women.
Some of our Danish friends who have read this thread have criticized me for writing too much about how it was for me to grow up in a female-dominated society as a boy, and too little about my life in the same society as an adult man as my beloved wife Larissa's husband.
They may be right about that.
But I did it for two reasons:
Firstly, children are rarely mentioned in descriptions or discussions of Female Led Families.
Secondly, our life in "our little Matriarchy", as I sometimes call it, is only understood on the basis of the upbringing that the adults who today live in it had in our female led society as children. And this applies to both girls and boys alike.
Some of those who have responded to my thread here in Denmark said that it is unfair that the women owned, and still own, our houses, and that it was also not fair that the women jointly owned the surrounding fields and orchards, as I have told many times.
Among us, the women have always owned everything. We men have owned almost nothing.
How can you explain or defend that?
Firstly it back in the year 1970 actually was a group of radical leftist Danish feminist women, who bought the houses and the surrounding lands, which were quite cheap at that time.
But the reason for sole female ownership among us of course goes deeper than that.
Our mothers strongly advocated women's emancipation from patriarchy.
At that time, it was the prevailing view among feminists on the left that this emancipation process had to be achieved by women becoming more or less like men:
Women ought to have paid jobs and pursue careers just like the men did.
Women should wear clothes similar to men's clothes.
And their children should be institutionalized in nurseries and kindergartens.
Old female virtues such as motherhood were looked down upon because they stood in the way of women's full participation in the labor market, which was the only way of making women economically independent from their husbands, thus overthrowing the patriarchy.
As said our mothers had the same goal, but they had a fundamentally different point of view:
To be able to give birth to children and to be the ones who primarily took care of the children was for them what defined the female gender, and what made women the most important gender.
When I reached puberty my mother used to speak a lot with my three year younger dear little sister Ida and me about the differences between the genders, always stressing the superiority of the female sex.
She used to compare our small community with a tree:
Women and girls were the trunk of the tree.
Their men and boys being the leaves of the tree. They were it's helpers so to speak.
But as mom always stressed:
As the leaves could not survive without the trunk, so would the trunk not survive without it's leaves.
Therefore women and men, girls and boys were of equal importance, but had different roles to play.
And I still clearly remember, how mom used to stress her argument with a lot of examples from the Animal World, where the female animals are mostly the ones who choose who they want to mate with, and where it is also the female animals who foremost take care of the young animals.
Some people have noticed, that I almost always speak of Ida as my dear little sister. But this is not a convention. It is deeply felt.
Strictly speaking Ida and I are half siblings, because our mother had many lovers, who did not live with us for long, so we do not have the same father.
There is a strong resemblance between us although. For example we both have black hair like our mother had.
And because we as children lived alone together with our mom, there was a very strong bound between us. And there still is.
I know that the word "slave" is used by many to describe the relation between a man and a woman in a Female Led Relationship, but I have to say, that this word has never been used among us, because the young men who were the lovers of the women in our Female Led community were always free to leave - and many of them did - and some of them even came to visit us afterwards.
This kind of liberty a slave obviously do not have. The concept of slavery is about exploitation, and among us the girls and women have always worked every bit as hard as have the boys and men, the only difference between us being that the females always owned everything in common. This they did, not in order to exploit or enslave the men, but in order to guarantee the women's economical independence.
Our feminist mothers did not want to be dependent on a man's income.
If their husbands or lovers left them, they could always rely upon the solidarity and help of the other women of our community, exactly because they owned everything IN COMMON.
This was their way of overthrowing the patriarchy, without having to live more or less in the same way as men traditionally do in our industrialized, capitalist society.
Our very community-oriented way of life has, among other things, as a consequence, that the competitive mentality that is so prevalent in our society at large, is completely absent among us.
Competition creates continuous change. Sometimes for the worse, but often for the better.
The fact that our small Female Led Community has changed very little over the years and that we are so conservative in the sense of being bound by tradition, is due I think to our lack of the competitive mentality which is such a great driving force for change.
We still live very frugal lives, just as we did back in the 1970s with home spun clothes, made by the women and their daughters, and all that.
Like back then, we walk or ride a bike, or use public transportation.
None of us has ever owned a car. (But here you should remember, that Denmark is a very small country).
We almost never travel abroad, and our children and grandchildren have never attended kindergarten.
Our grandsons have long hair just like we had when we were boys, and by the way we still have long hair ourselves.
Just like it was for us back then, our boys are only allowed to wear briefs here in the summertime when they are at home, and I myself only wear shorts as I write this.
Boys and men still sleep naked, and our boys are still expected not to masturbate and to obey their teenage sisters, who on the other hand are expected to live up to their responsibility in the same way as my dear little sister Ida was when mom gave her authority over me on her thirteenth birthday.
Last but not least I want to say that I do not consider our way of life as better than other peoples way of life.
I only write to demonstrate, that a Female Led way of life is sustainable. I certainly do not want to imply, that all people ought to live in this way.
Neither do the other women and men of our Female Led Community, because being a tiny minority ourselves, who luckily have gained the acceptance of our neighboring communities, we know that respecting others is a precondition for being respected yourselves.
It must be said to the praise of the capitalist societies, which our mothers were otherwise so opposed to, that precisely in them it is possible for small, odd minorities such as us to live according to different norms than the majority.