Warning! Article Contains Adult/Sensitive Content!
Get Off
Certainly this exposé does nothing more than shine light on areas worth exploring. There are no quickies in the quest for sustainable change, but exposure opens the door. It invites us to get off this crazy ride and take a hard look at where we’re really going. It invites us to take the conversations out of scathing social posts and open real dialogue in a way that might produce results. It invites us to look deep within ourselves for any thoughts, emotions and beliefs we carry that make us complacent and complicit in creating a culture of fear. It invites us to move beyond perpetual victimization of whatever the world creates and, instead, take responsibility for the world we want to create.
Years ago I wrote an article, “From the Hen House to the Lions Den,” in response to how a university handled a situation where a single man attacked three women in a sorority house. Here’s an excerpt:
As women, as a society, we’ve tried to treat sexual assaults and violent attacks as something that’s wrong with the perpetrators. No doubt, something’s wrong with people who use violence as a means of expression. But I for one am not willing to sit around and wait for their rehabilitation or therapy sessions to kick in. The fact that our first reaction isn’t outrage tells me where we stand as a society. Another example, a few weeks ago I was scouting out self-defense and personal safety classes here in Dallas and was told to my face, by a man, that if a man wants to physically take something from a woman, he’s going to win every time. This is what men believe. And worse yet, this is what women believe.
How did we get here? How did a sorority house full of women become a hen house instead of a lion den? How did we become a society of women who freeze and cower in the face of opposition instead of becoming enraged and calling on our internal power to save us? Have you ever seen a woman in rage? What happened to hell hath no fury? We can become outraged when someone cheats on us, tear up the seats of his car, burn down his house, but when someone steps into our personal space we forget our natural state as survivors. As a society, our response has been to pat victims on their backs, offer them support groups, and secretly pray it doesn’t happen to us.
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Well, it has happened to us. It’s happened to each of us because every time we allow something like this to pass without understanding the impact it has on us as a whole, we reenact the powerlessness all over again. Every time we have a group of young women who don’t know they have the right and the strength to fight back we lose. I’m tired of hearing that there’s nothing we can do about it. This sit and wait and hope the next “1-in-3” isn’t you is ridiculous. I for one say bring it on. Let a man try to walk into a house I live in and take anything from me while I’m there. I might not kill him, but guaranteed he’s gonna be hurting. Until we adopt this attitude that we are dangerous, no one else is going to believe us. Until we take back our homes, our apartments, our sorority houses, our neighborhoods, our schools, our bodies, no one’s going to do it for us. Think about it, how tempted would a man be to walk into a sorority house if the last man who did it got his ass beat?
Make no mistake about it – I’m not blaming the victims here. No one has the right to blame women who have been victimized in the past. I’ve been victimized in the past. And the sad thing is, I don’t need anyone to ask me what I could’ve done differently in the situation to prevent it. I asked myself that question for years.
I don’t know a single victim who doesn’t ask herself that question. So by us keeping our mouths shut and not bringing that conversation to the forefront, we’re not doing anyone any favors. Trust me, you can’t heap any more distress on a victim of sexual assault than she heaps on herself. So why not do something productive? By all means, let’s acknowledge that total and complete blame lies on perpetrators of these crimes, but so what? I’ve got news for you, the people, typically men, who commit these crimes aren’t cringing with fear because we think they’re bad people. But let them get the crap beat out of them once or twice and they might rethink their hobbies.
It’s not possible, right? It’s not possible for women to overpower men, right? Of course it is. We’ve come so far away from our inner warriors, we’ve forgotten who they are. If I was a conspiracy theorist, I would be able to provide all kinds of reasons why women are convinced they’re powerless. I’d be able to point to a patriarchal system and years of oppression. But, again, who cares? That does us no good right now. What does help us is acknowledging that we’ve been doing ourselves a disservice by cuddling and coddling our fear and making ourselves feel okay about being scared. By all means, be afraid, not that you might get attacked, raped, or killed, be afraid that you’ve given up years of your life to the belief that you’re somehow “less than” or weak. And then get over it. We have a point to make and some hobbies to change. Because until we stop squawking about the big bad fox invading the hen house and start lamenting the fate of the poor fox that was stupid enough to step into the lion den, we only have ourselves to blame. Truly, call it what you want, but we’re the only ones who can change this. And we’re powerful enough to do it.
While that came through in my own I-am-woman roar moment, the parallels aren’t lost on me as I recently found myself gifted with an opportunity to mentor three young ladies, ages 9, 11 and 12, as an unfortunate adult male introduced them to the unevolved masculine. He chose to proposition them with promises of beer and other alluring suggestions while they skateboarded at a park. Since Neva was one of those three youngsters, the story unfolded in a truly miraculous way. The only detail that is really important here is that Neva is incredibly savvy and possesses a high degree of both divine awareness and worldly knowledge. She’s been observing and deconstructing adults since birth and coaches many through their own childhood traumas. However, the world still sees her first as a child, its own form of objectification, giving her an opportunity to rewrite what we think we know about children. (This is why I recommend we start entertaining the idea that these young people might just know more than we do.) This doesn’t mean the results were only possible because Neva’s existence challenges societal standards, it means the results are possible. And societal standards should be challenged.
The result of the exchange was three young people realized their power, as individuals and together, and three young females saw through male insecurity posturing as power, witnessing the feminine emerge triumphant. They saw through the bravado to the desperate and pathetic machinations beneath. They will never believe the trumped up lie that penis equals power. They will remember that standing up and standing together as women positions us as so much more than bodies. This is not a battle cry, it is a reclaiming of all that is and all that always has been. It is recognizing within ourselves and each other the inherent divine power that created us, courses within us and strengthens us beyond anything the world can throw our way.
But this only works if we allow that same divine power to reimagine even that which we see in our male counterparts. We cannot make the mistake of objectifying all men as the unevolved archetype, or even any man as solely evil. If we want to be seen, accepted, loved and cherished in our complexity, we must open these dialogues to include that same space for everyone. While the evolved feminine triumphed over the unevolved masculine that day, there was also a very confused, untrained boy buried deep within the man who has no idea that what he did was questionable, at best, because he saw scenes just like it played out in front of him since birth. Perhaps this was his first encounter with something different. Perhaps he was a little surprised by these three young women who took exception to his assumptions.
Perhaps many men are a little surprised when they encounter women deviating from their scripts.
Perhaps unevolved men the world over are scratching their heads wondering what’s going on and if they should start to take this rebirthing of true feminine power seriously.
Perhaps they should.
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The Final Countdown:
Sound a death knell for the unevolved masculine.. (Continue Reading)
About the Author: Tonya Dawn Recla
