When Did The Pussy Palace Become A Dojo?

In December 2025 Lily Allen released her album West End Girl. She wrote and recorded it in three days, not for release but as her journal. She invested in a studio and a producer to work through what had happened in her marriage to Stranger Things actor David Harbor and put all her pain, bemusement and loss of self into words and music as only she can.

She relased it quietly in December 2024 and it took off. Not because it was musically brilliant (which it is) but because it hit the heart of all the women who've been betrayed by men and what they stole from us.

The album pulled back a veil and revealed something very primal.

And very real.

The original pussy palaces were to the great goddesses in Egypt and Mesopotamia. The temple ran the granary (protected by cats), the textile production, the trade ledgers. The first writing in human history was not scripture or poetry, it was temple accounting. The goddess's house was simultaneously the city's bank, its trading house, its chamber of commerce and its supreme court.

Go deeper into the temple and you find the healers. The sacred women held the biological and pharmacological knowledge that meant the difference between life and death for every woman of childbearing age. Midwifery refined across generations. Herbal pharmacology tested in laboratory conditions. The management of fertility, childbirth, haemorrhage, infection. In a world where one in eight women died in childbirth, the temple was the difference between a mother coming home and a child growing up without one.

When you need the loo, you'll find a latrine.

And then there is the part that has been most deliberately, most viciously distorted. The Qadishtu, their name came from the Hebrew qadesh, which means holy not prostitute. That translation was a choice, made by men, to destroy what they could not understand or control. The Qadishtu were specialists in human sexuality as a civic, psychological, sacred function. They assessed leaders through sacred marriage as a genuine examination of a man's capacity for intimacy, mutuality, restraint. How he was in that room told you everything about how he would be in the throne room.

She taught him sexual etiquette and probably a few tricks his brides and concubines would thank her for later!

But the deepest function of the temple was the part that needed most urgently to be destroyed. Children born within its tradition did not belong to a father. They belonged to the community. The sacred women moved between cities, between peoples, ensuring the gene pool stayed diverse and healthy. A community's children were its collective wealth and its collective responsibility. This was extraordinarily sophisticated design.

And it made paternity irrelevant.

Which was the entire problem. Every system of female subjugation ever constructed — the veil, the honour killing, the witch trial, the child bride, the foot binding, the laws of Hammurabi, the Code of Manu, the Book of Leviticus — has at its rotten core a single anxiety. The terror of a man who cannot be certain a child is his. Remove that anxiety as the temple tradition did, by making it structurally irrelevant and the entire justification for controlling women's bodies, women's movement, women's knowledge and women's sexuality simply evaporates.

If that operating system had stayed, billions of women all over the world wouldn't be weeping for the children being murdered in cold, cold blood right now.

Because somebody looked at everything the temple had built. The stored grain, the copper surplus, the textile wealth, the trade routes spanning thousands of miles and made a different calculation. It had taken millennia to build. It could be taken in one season.

For most of human history, weapons were tools, a spear for hunting, a knife for skinning, a club for the occasional territorial skirmish. Conflict existed. It was local, limited and largely unprofitable. All that was required was the decision to mass-produce weapons from copper, organise men into armies rather than trading parties, and go and take it.

This was the birth of the military-industrial complex.

The archaeological record shows the consequences with brutal clarity. Mass graves, fortified walls, skeletal trauma at scale. All appearing almost simultaneously across the ancient world around 3,000 BCE, a thousand years after the birth of goddess-led cities. This was not the inevitable march of human nature. It was a strategic, organised, deliberate decision. And for a while it worked. And for a while it kept failing. Because anyone could smelt bronze, anyone could raise an army, and every empire built on pure force collapsed the moment a stronger force arrived, which was constantly.

Violence alone couldn't hold.

King Hammurabi solved the instability problem. Not with better weapons — with an idea so devastatingly effective it is still running the world today. Around 1750 BCE the Babylonian king claimed the sun god Shamash had handed him authority directly with no priestess intermediary, no character assessment. Then he carved it on a big black stone penis and placed it in the city squares.

The codification of the patriarchy was NOT subtle!

The stele of Hammurabi. The Louvre.

The 282 laws of the Code of Hammurabi didn't just claim divine right from a new fangled god of war, they institutionalised a caste system that made women the legal property of men who had no craft, no trade, no ability to build the wealth women had been accumulating for millennia. They couldn't create it. So they legislated ownership of the people who could. Conquest plus theology plus written law. It stuck.

And the clock stopped.

Knowledge doesn't add. It compounds. Every discovery multiplies the rate at which the next discovery becomes possible. The printing press didn't just spread existing knowledge, it turbocharged the rate of its creation. Germ theory didn't just save lives, it unlocked microbiology, which unlocked virology, which unlocked immunology. Pull any thread and you find ten more beneath it.

The mathematicians of Babylon were already pulling threads in 1800 BCE. Their clay tablets, still being translated, show quadratic equations solved with elegant precision, astronomical calculations of extraordinary accuracy, and a working understanding of the relationship between the sides of a right-angled triangle more than a thousand years before Pythagoras claimed it. Al-Khwarizmi formalised algebra in Baghdad around 830 CE — a genuine achievement, built on Babylonian foundations he explicitly acknowledged.

The gap between those tablets and Al-Khwarizmi is 2,600 years. That gap is not empty. It is full of what did not happen. The questions that were not asked. The threads that were not pulled, the floors that were never built because the people who had been laying them were reclassified as property.

Run that forward. The last thousand years alone gave us electricity, anaesthesia, germ theory, flight, penicillin, computing, space travel, the internet. Now imagine those discoveries made with a base two thousand years deeper. We are not behind where we should be by two thousand years. We are behind by everything that would have been built on top of those two thousand years. Every discovery that enables the next. The compounding interest of human ingenuity — stolen at source.

That number is incalculable.

So what would the world actually look like today if Hammurabi's masons had never picked up his chisel?

It wouldn't be a paradise, a world without conflict or the ordinary friction of human beings living alongside each other. It would be far more interesting. A world so far ahead of where we are that we genuinely struggle to see it from here. Which is itself the point. We are trying to imagine a destination from inside the wreckage of a detour. Or as we like to call it the Patriarchal Experiment.

Start with energy. The civilisations that never developed the logic of conquest never develop the extractive relationship with the earth that goes with it. You don't mine a mother. The Indus Valley cities were managing water sustainably across a million square kilometres four thousand years ago. That is not primitive — that is a philosophy of resource management so sophisticated we are only now, in existential desperation, beginning to rediscover it. A civilisation running that philosophy uninterrupted does not end up burning fossil fuels. It simply never goes there.

Medicine would be unrecognisable. The women who were burnt as witches understood plants, bodies, infection and fertility well enough that threatened men built an entire theology of evil around their knowledge. That knowledge, compounding from the temple pharmacopeias of Mesopotamia across four thousand uninterrupted years, would have given us what we now call modern medicine sometime around the fall of the Roman Empire.

But the reality is; men running the show alone meant it wasn't until 1850 that the male medical establishment 'discovered' the most basic instruction from women, one so obvious they wouldn't even have written it down, making it impossible to steal. Or even believed. In 1847 Ignaz Semmelweis suggested that surgeons washing their hands before delivering babies might reduce the catastrophic rate of mothers dying of childbed fever. He was driven from his post, ridiculed into breakdown and died in an asylum.

Yes, that is how much time we lost!

We would in all likelihood have reached the stars. The mathematics were already there in Babylon in 1800 BCE. Without the dark ages, without the witch trials burning the libraries, without the systematic destruction of accumulated knowledge — the compounding curve puts us somewhere our science fiction cannot even start to imagine.

And here is the thing that should make every man currently running the world on Hammurabi's operating system feel the ground shift beneath his feet. Every empire. Every theocracy. Every divine king, every manifest destiny, every master race. All of them translations of the same template — the one where a man who cannot build anything picks up a pen and writes himself into the centre of the universe.

So this International Women's Day is not a time for celebration, networking events or fucking cupcakes. It's time for the women of the world to stand up and reclaim what was stolen from us.

Instead of writing vapid posts or having a moan. Name what's been taken from you personally and for the very brave, name who stole it.

Think of it as a global "Who The Fuck Is Madeleine?" moment. The central question in Lily's album.

Because Madeleine, Magdalene, Mary, Miriam and Maryam all come from the same root — Magdala — from the Aramaic Maghdela, meaning a high place.

Tell your stories because the wars, depravity, misogyny, supremacy, rape, pillage and child abuse all come from Hammurabi's operating system and it is still running.

You feel it when your business is undermined, your expertise questioned, your anger called hysteria and your ambition was called a problem. Call the whole fucking thing out. Because this is not ancient history. It's the biggest mistake humanity has ever made. And we can turn it around.

Tell them the matriarchy's coming for them.

This scares the living crap out of them. Men who believe the world has only ever known patriarchy and believe it's blasphemy to even think their one male god, supreme, jealous, warlike, omnipotent is just a story manufactured by ancient Mesopotamian king. But it is.

They are terrified a system that is equal and as powerful as the patriarchy will turn around and do to them what they've done to women. But there has never been an equal and powerful matriarchy in western civilisation for over 3,000 years.

How can there be a definition?

It's simple. The matriarchy is a system. A matriarch is the most senior woman in the room. Men don't have to be fathers to be patriarchs, why should women? It is not a reversal of hierarchy its returning the world to its natural balance, And the best bit, we don't have to fight them at all. We just have to remind them.

I was talking to a man with these exact fears the other day.

I asked him what life would look like if the matriarch in his family ran the world.

He burst into tears.