Is Fairy an Option?
Reclaiming the ancient wisdom of tending, observation, and collaboration as the blueprint for how women might build from their true nature.
Is Fairy an Option?
What Women Might Build If They Built from Their Own Nature
There’s a moment most women remember — somewhere around age five or six — when the thing they wanted most was wings. Not the ambition of wings — not the Wright brothers’ engineering problem — but the fact of wings, and what you’d do with them: tend things, know things, fly between the living world and something just beyond it. We called it wanting to be a fairy. Adults smiled. We grew up and filed it away.
But what if that instinct wasn’t escapism? What if it was the earliest, most honest signal of what we’re actually built for?
I want to take that question seriously — not as poetry, but as something close to a hypothesis. When you start pulling on the thread of what women have historically been, biologically tend toward, and are most naturally equipped to do, the fairy archetype keeps resurfacing. Not the Disney version. The older one: fierce, wild, intimately connected to living systems, and more than a little frightening to anyone who depends on things staying small and manageable.
We Were the First Scientists
Here’s something that doesn’t get said enough in the history of science: before there were laboratories, before peer review, before the word science existed, someone had to figure out which berries would kill you. In nearly every documented hunter-gatherer society, that job belonged primarily to women.
Gathering isn’t passive. It is systematic observation accumulated across generations and passed down in what we would now call knowledge transfer. It is hypothesis and field testing under the most rigorous possible conditions — where error meant death. A 2018 analysis in PLOS ONE examining skeletal remains from 63 hunter-gatherer sites found that roughly 27% of big-game hunters were female — more than previously assumed — but plant knowledge, medicinal knowledge, and ecological mapping remained overwhelmingly female domains across cultures.
Here’s where biology becomes particularly interesting. A significant proportion of women — estimates in peer-reviewed literature range from 12% to 50%, depending on the population — may possess a fourth type of cone cell in their eyes. Most humans are trichromats, seeing color through three cone types. These women are tetrachromats, perceiving distinctions in hue that are literally invisible to most others: subtle gradations between shades that, in a foraging context, could mean the difference between ripe and toxic, or between a healing compound and its poisonous cousin.
The evolutionary interpretation is striking in its simplicity: women who couldn’t make those distinctions may not have survived long enough to pass on their genes. The tetrachromat lens could be the biological record of fifty thousand years of botanical science, written into the genome of roughly one in eight women alive today.
And then there are the tattoos.
Ötzi the Iceman, a Neolithic man preserved in Alpine ice for over 5,000 years, carried 61 tattoos. The majority are located precisely at acupuncture and pressure points that modern practitioners use to treat arthritis and lower back pain — the exact conditions his skeletal remains show evidence of. Someone knew where to mark the body. Someone understood pain as having addressable geography long before any formal medical tradition existed to teach it.
Cross-cultural anthropological records consistently find women as primary herbalists, healers, and midwives in pre-industrial societies worldwide. The word witch, when stripped of its fearful overlay, often meant simply a woman who knew things about plants and bodies.
A Different Hormonal Lens
Women and men are not the same biochemical system, and pretending otherwise doesn’t serve anyone.
Men produce testosterone primarily in the Leydig cells of the testes, with the adrenal cortex as a secondary source. Women produce androgens only from the adrenal cortex — a single source, calibrated differently. This is not a deficiency; it is a distinct hormonal architecture that shapes a different default relationship to the world.
Testosterone is strongly associated in the research literature with status-seeking, competitive, and territorial behavior. The neurological pathways it reinforces are often oriented toward hierarchy and resource defense. Women’s hormonal environments, shaped more by estrogen and oxytocin cycling, are associated with what Shelley Taylor’s landmark 2000 paper termed the “tend-and-befriend” response: under stress, women more consistently move toward coalition-building and caregiving rather than fight-or-flight.
This does not mean women cannot fight. I know from personal experience that isn’t true. As a child, I studied martial arts. As a teenager, I trained with weapons, played combat video games, and listened to music built on controlled aggression. I wasn’t alien to that world, and I wasn’t bad at it.
What I noticed — testing myself honestly — was something more specific: I had no appetite for a fight that had no answer to What is this for? I wanted capability. I wanted to be able to protect. The just fight — the necessary fight — I understood viscerally.
The men I was close to often seemed to carry a different restlessness. They factionalized easily. They fantasized about hierarchy, wealth, and class distinctions in ways I found alien. I couldn’t fully relate to women trained so thoroughly into conflict avoidance that they couldn’t hold physical ground. But I also couldn’t relate to men whose restlessness lacked an ethical rudder. I lived in that in-between space for a long time before I understood it as a position, not a failure.
I once wanted to become a police officer. I was told I was too short. So I took my restlessness to philosophy instead and arrived at a conclusion I still stand behind: peace is what you win with war, and it should be enjoyed. Capability in service of something beyond itself — that is the distinction.
Tending as Technology
Here is what I believe is the underexamined civilizational contribution of women: we have been raising things since before history had a name, and raising things is one of the most technically sophisticated activities a human can perform.
The domestication of animals — one of the most transformative technologies in human history — did not happen because someone invented a device. It happened because someone spent enough time with a wolf, a wild grain, or a goat to understand its nature and imagine a different relationship. That requires patience, observation, and a willingness to extend care before any return is guaranteed. It is, in other words, a tend-and-befriend project applied to other species.
The fairy archetype, at its philosophical core, is a being who knows the living world with intimate precision and tends it toward flourishing rather than extraction. She does not dominate. She collaborates. She accelerates growth. She is the bridge.
Remarkably, this is what the most advanced ecological thinking is attempting to reconstruct after centuries of extraction-based relationships with natural systems. Regenerative agriculture, rewilding biology, and mycorrhizal network research — the cutting edge of sustainability science — resemble what women have practiced for tens of thousands of years.
Liberation as Return
The question the title poses deserves a direct answer.
Not fairy as costume. Not fairy as the diminishment of women into something decorative or whimsical. But fairy as archetype: the woman who understands living systems at depth, who tends rather than extracts, who sees the spectrum others miss — sometimes literally — who accelerates evolution through relationship rather than domination, who fights when a moral threshold is crossed and not before, and who builds homes that grow more beautiful with every generation that inhabits them.
Women have spent much of recorded history being asked to inhabit values and roles built from someone else’s nature. The Enlightenment’s rationalism, the Industrial Revolution’s productivity worship, the modern era’s competitive individualism — these frameworks are not neutral. They were shaped by specific hormonal, social, and experiential defaults.
Liberation may not mean women excelling at the existing game. It may mean asking whether the game itself reflects what we would have chosen.
The little girl who wants to be a fairy is not fleeing reality. She may be the only one in the room who remembers what we are actually for.
