The Power wasn't predicting a matriarchy—it was diagnosing the anxiety that any power reversal requires one gender to become monstrous in the ways we've always feared the other.

Allie's church crystallizes this, crystallizes the mechanism of reversal itself—she doesn't build a system of justice or governance, she builds a mirror.

Women develop the ability to weaponize their bodies through the skein, and Alderman's response is immediate: they become priests. They demand sexual purity from girls, control reproduction through shame and doctrine, and create hierarchies of worthiness based on how closely women conform to male-designed virtue. Alderman didn't invent female authoritarianism here—she borrowed it directly from the scaffolding of patriarchal control and handed it to women. The mechanism doesn't change. Only the hands holding it.

This is the novel's real argument, embedded in its structure: we don't fear power redistribution because we fear women. We fear it because we cannot imagine power itself being redistributed—only transferred. The possibility that women might wield authority differently, more justly, or without replicating the brutality of the system they're replacing, doesn't register as fiction to Alderman—it's unthinkable, so she doesn't think it. Tanya and Roxy don't build alternatives either. They become crime bosses, militia commanders, territorial enforcers—every ruthless configuration we've already seen.

The world Alderman constructs assumes power has a shape, and that shape is violence—gender is window dressing. What she's really saying is darker: we've built systems so thoroughly around dominance that we cannot imagine authority without cruelty. The book isn't about women. It's about what we believe power is.