The Wisdom Bar – “Everything You Know About Traditional Marriage Is Wrong”

Expert-led lectures in bars and creative spaces across NYC.

💭 Topic: “Everything You Know about Traditional Marriage is Wrong”

🎤 Lecturer: Azie Dungey

📆 Date: Wednesday, July 15th

⏰ Doors Open: 6:30PM

📍 Location: Midtown East (exact address provided in confirmation email)

What if "traditional marriage" isn't traditional at all? Turns out, the equal partnership we're advocating for in modern relationships? It’s actually more traditional than the gender roles we've come to associate with it — gender equity is the prototype.

For much of human history, women were valued for their contributions as much as men, childcare was shared across the whole community, and the idea that two people alone should raise children and meet each other's every need simply did not exist. It was a series of shifts over the centuries that narrowed everything down to the two-person household we now take for granted. And within that shift, we lost something essential.

Writer and cultural satirist Azie Dungey takes us on a journey through human history to reveal that our partnership ideals are closer to our ancient origins than the "traditional marriage" of 100 years ago — which, it turns out, was a blip.

Azie Dungey is a WGA-nominated writer for her work on Netflix’s Emmy-nominated comedy Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and has been a writer on shows such as Harlem (Amazon Prime), Girls5Eva (Netflix), Rutherford Falls (NBC), and Sweetbitter (Starz). She is best known as writer and star of her critically- acclaimed YouTube series Ask A Slave, a satirical critique of race and gender with over 2.5 million views. For this series she was featured on NPR, BBC World, MSNBC, New York Magazine, and The Washington Post.

A graduate of Tisch School of the Arts at NYU in drama and anthropology, she has been a visiting scholar to Yale, Brown University, Columbia, and was a Fellow-in- Residence at the Center for the Study of Democracy, St Mary’s College. Azie is African American and Pamunkey/Mattaponi (Virginia Tribes) and she is committed to confronting issues of race, history, and social injustice with grace, compassion, and humor.

We will explore:

The resistance, challenges, and social implications we face as we attempt to return gender equality back to its roots.
How hunter-gatherer societies define gender roles within marital partnerships and family system.
How traditional courtship roles centered the female desire, and women were considered the more sexually aggressive of the gender even into the age of antiquity
How the idea of the "nuclear family" (man, wife, children) developed only 150 years ago.
Agenda:

6:30pm – Doors open. Grab drinks and snacks before settling into a seat (first come first serve!)

6:50pm – Host welcomes and intros

7:00pm – Lecture begins

8:00pm – Q&A plus dedicated 1-on-1 time with the speaker. Grab another drink and chat about your thoughts with other attendees.

8:30pm – Event concludes