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Loving or hating our bodies

I am not a Sunday morning inside four walls
with clean blood
and organized drawers.
I am the hurricane setting fire to the forests
at night when no one else is alive
or awake
however you choose to see it
and I live in my own flames
sometimes burning too bright and too wild
to make things last
or handle
myself or anyone else
and so I run.
run run run
far and wide
until my bones ache and lungs split
and it feels good.
Hear that people? It feels good
because I am the slave and ruler of my own body
and I wish to do with it exactly as I please 
~Charlotte Eriksson, You’re Doing Just Fine

There is a lot of talk about body love and body acceptance out in the social media world. It would seem that we are supposed to love our bodies no matter what, no matter how we feel they betray us, no matter what has been done to them.

Love is a strong word, a powerful emotion. And frankly, I don’t know that I will ever love my body. In early February Ijeoma Oluo wrote on IG about whether she could accept the love of another if she didn’t love her own body (you can see her post here). The post came at a time that I really needed to read it, as I was going through a particularly bad patch of hating my body. 

I don’t know if it’s true that we are unable to truly accept the love of another if we don’t love our own bodies. I think there may be a bit of chicken and egg there, in that having someone love us, including loving our bodies, may help us to love our selves, including our bodies, a bit more. 

But what I do know is that there are definitely times in my life when I hate my body. I hate it’s shape and size, I hate its stretch marks and cellulite, I hate how its aging, I hate how it aches and hurts and doesn’t seem to be able to move in ways I want it to, in the ways it was once able to. It’s not every day. And there are also days that I love certain parts of my body, but never the whole all at once.

While part of my complex relationship with my own body is due to our societies emphasis on what bodies “should” look and move and be like, it is also true that part of my hatred and anger stems from the abuse my body has endured, and how it has responded to this abuse. 

I live with an “unspecified autoimmune disorder,” which means that I have several “markers” of various different autoimmune disorders, but not enough in any one particular one to state “Oh, you have X”. This translates to doctors sometimes don’t know what to do me, and any “treatment” I do is a lot of trial and error and mostly done on my own. This means that sometimes I have chronic pain, but sometimes I don’t. It means that I have a blood clotting disorder that I need to manage. It means my endocrine system needs a lot of support. And it means that what this managing and support looks like can literally need to change from day to day.

I know that my autoimmune issues stem from the abuse my body experienced, Iexperienced, as a child. I know that the sexual and physical and emotional abuse all have had their long lasting impacts. I know the whys and how my body is the way it is.

But that doesn’t mean I like it. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t infuriate me. That doesn’t mean there aren’t times when I hate that my body feels the need to be impacted, to respond, to cry out about the pain it has endured.

And.

My body has survived horrible things. It has kept me alive for over 47 years. It has birthed two babies. It has run two half marathons. It goes on hikes, it snuggles my children, It functions in all the ways it needs to to not only keep me alive, but also so I can raise my children, do my work, and now enjoy my life.

So. There we are. The both-and of it all. Yes there are times that I hate my body and there are times when I am in awe of and grateful for it. But love, I don’t know that I’ll ever get there, and who knows, maybe I will.

In doing my own work of processing the trauma from my childhood, I have been able to come back into my body, to learn to tolerate the uncomfortable times as well as the pleasurable ones.

Because when we are dissociated, when we are disconnected from our bodies and from the here and now, it is true we are able to avoid the discomfort our bodies often express, but it is equally true that we don’t experience the pleasures that we can also have.

Coming back into our bodies, sounds so straight forward. In some ways it is, but in others it’s not. We are each complex beings and our journeys to trauma processing and being able to tolerate all the sensations and emotions we experience can be complex too. There is forward and back. There is progress and regression. 

Coming back into our bodies is not the same as loving our bodies. We can be present in them and not love every part of them.

And.

With time, we can learn to be grateful for what our bodies have endured and still kept us alive. We can learn to be in awe of all our bodies have done and do. We might even begin to start to like certain aspects of our bodies, both its physicality and its functions.

And maybe, we learn to love our bodies as part of our whole Self, an integral and necessary part of who we are.

Maybe.

We’ll never know though until we begin the journey.

/…/

The next cohort of Trauma Informed Embodiment™ for Sexual Trauma Survivorswill begin on April 14 and registration is currently open. This six month program is part support group, part practical coping and embodiment skills, and part psycho-education. During our time together we will utilize the first phase of the Trauma Informed Embodiment™ approach I have developed. There is a sliding scale fee, and alternate payment plans are also available. To learn more go to http://gwynnraimondi.com/tieforsexualtrauma

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Complex Sexual Trauma

No amount of me trying to explain myself was doing any good. I didn’t even know what was going on inside of me, so how could I have explained it to them? ~Sierra D. Waters, Debbie

Over the last few years the term “complex trauma” has been used to describe the difference between the trauma experienced and lived with when it is chronic and typically happens during childhood, compared to “regular trauma” which refers to singular events which typically occur in adulthood. The corresponding diagnosis terms are “c-PTSD” or “CPTSD” and “PTSD”, where the “c” or “C” stands for complex and the PTSD is post traumatic stress disorder.

The DSM V ( Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition) does not list C-PTSD as an official disorder, however within the trauma community we have adopted this diagnosis and term and have been working to better define the difference of impact between chronic and singular traumatic events as well as the difference of the impact as to when in a person’s life the event(s) occur.

This work is tied to the ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences study) criteria for chronic stress, and in our work of defining these impacts we must acknowledge and be grateful for the work of Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, in bringing the ACEs to the forefront of the medical community and truly starting the conversation about being “trauma informed” outside the mental health community.

In our sussing out the differences between CPTSD and PTSD, we (the trauma community) have lumped all childhood traumatic experiences together – be they physical, emotional, psychological, or sexual abuse, neglect, poverty, domestic or intimate partner violence, etc. And while all of the items (as well as others, like experiencing racism, homophobia, etc) on the ACEs can and often do have traumatic impacts, I also believe it is important for us to begin to look at the ways each type of trauma has its own unique impacts.

As many of you know over the last couple of years I have begun to move my own professional focus to sexual trauma, and the majority of my clients have experienced chronic childhood sexual trauma. Exploring the unique and life changing impacts this type of trauma brings with it is part of my life’s work and helping us all have a better understand of these impacts for ourselves as survivors as well as for our friends, partners and loved ones, I believe is vital for our individual and collective growth and healing.

Complex trauma of any kind affects our abilities to have deep, emotionally intimate relationships. Sexual complex trauma can also affect our ability to have sexually intimate relationships. With many types of complex trauma we tend to be dissociated from our bodies and the present moment. This means that often when being sexually intimate we aren’t really “there,” and can only feel the (presumably) pleasurable sensations of physical intimacy as if through a “thick gauze”. It is also true for those who have experienced sexual trauma that the act of sex itself can be triggering, regardless of how consensual the present act is, and can send us into a state of fight, flight, or freeze.

There have also been studies where cancers of the female reproductive system (i.e. cervical, uterine, ovarian, etc cancers) seem to correlate with women who have experienced sexual trauma, as in there is a higher percentage of these cancers in women who have experienced sexual trauma, than those who have not.

An additional impact of sexual trauma that isn’t often talked about is the idea of feeling or being “tainted” in some way. Socially speaking there is a stigma associated with sexual trauma as well as victim blaming, even when the trauma occurs in childhood. This added social attitude only works to exacerbate the shame of those who have experienced sexual trauma, which then reverberates through and adds to the other emotional, psychological, and physical impacts of childhood trauma.

This social attitude, and its impacts, can be a particularly daunting thing for survivors to face and attempt to overcome. This attitude is tied directly to our misogynist culture which holds a woman’s sexuality and sexual experiences in a balance of what is “acceptable” and what is “not”.

I do not want to give the impression that I am somehow creating a “hierarchy” of types of complex trauma. And I feel it is important that we do acknowledge and discuss the differences in experiences of the different types of trauma and how the impacts vary. In doing this we are able to help those who experienced complex sexual trauma see how they are not alone in how they experience these impacts and can aid in our individual trauma processing journeys. 

/…/

Registration for the next cohort of Trauma Informed Embodiment™ for Sexual Trauma Survivors is now open. This six month program is for women (CIS and Trans) and those AFAB who experienced childhood sexual trauma. It is part support group, part practical coping and embodiment skills, and part psycho-education. There is a sliding scale fee, and alternate payment plans are also available. To learn more go to http://gwynnraimondi.com/tieforsexualtrauma

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Sitting in discomfort

Revolution and rebellion and disruption looks like many things. Sometimes its work out in the world and sometimes its that inner work of unearthing, examining, dismantling and dislodging.

Most Monday afternoons I go to see my therapist. She specializes in two particular modalities of trauma therapy, which is why I chose her. To process and dislodge both some relatively recent traumatic events with my kids, and to process my own various childhood traumas.

For the first year plus, every time I sat down on her couch she asked if I want to do one of the two modalities. I would invariably tell her, No. No I do not. Because this particular form of trauma work, while gentle in many many ways, is also intensely uncomfortable. I literally feel the trauma shifting in my body and it creates a type of dissonance under and on my skin that is… well, uncomfortable.

It isn’t icky feeling or unbearably painful. It is simply not a pleasant sensation. At all.

And so no, No I did not want to do that. Because really, who would intentionally sit there in this intentional physical, emotional and psychological discomfort for 20-40 minutes at a stretch.

Anyhow, I would say my no, we’d laugh, talk about the short game of avoidance and the long game of actually dislodging this shit from my body. We’d do some breath work, I would get present and then I say, okay, let’s do this work.

And we’d do the work and it’s uncomfortable and things would shift and sometimes I *felt* emotions and sometimes I cried and sometimes I’d get an intense pain in a particular part of my body and we;d get curious about it then sometimes I would feel even more emotions and so it goes until I would say it’s time to stop. And we check in with that No More and see if it’s short game saying “I’m uncomfortable and I DON’T WANNA” or if I really have reached my capacity of processing for the day. And so it goes.

In the last six months or so, this has shifted.  Now when I walk in I state straight away “I want to do the trauma work” or “I need a lot of time to talk today.”  We don’t need to have discussions about avoidance.  The work, while uncomfortable, is now something I am more than willing to tolerate because I have seen for myself some of the short and long term benefits of the work.

My point however is that being uncomfortable isn’t fun. Not for me, and really probably not for anyone. By definition, being uncomfortable is NOT enjoyable. And for most of us, in our short game of fear or shoving it down or not wanting to deal or feel, we avoid discomfort like the plague.

Here’s a thing though: we need to remember our Long Game. What our real intentions for being in the world are. What do we have to do to make it happen.

I’m doing my own trauma processing and dislodging for a variety of reasons, many of them about other people (like my kids). But the real, the core reason I’m dealing with my own shit is because I don’t want to ever be frozen in front of a TV screen unable to move as a sexual predator stalks about ever again. I don’t want to ever be frozen in inaction again. I want to be able to move and act and roar and fight.

And, well, I also need to walk my talk. Because I invite all of you to sit in your uncomfortable feelings, to push outside your own comfort zone, to learn that even if we *feel* our our emotions and their physiological sensations or make mistakes or feel uncomfortable because we are challenging our racist uncle at the family feast or defending a boundary with our mother while visiting, we *will* survive. And we may even learn a little bit about selves in the process.

In the all the work I do, facilitating groups and individual work, I invite the participants to push themselves outside their own comfort zones. To become curious as to why they don’t want to “go there.” To expand, contract, then expand a bit more. I always offer tools to help titrate or process or soothe, as needed. And then, when ready enough, we bravely push out into discomfort again, get curious again, ask the whys and start to unravel all the stories that have kept us stuck and small and frozen.

Because I deeply believe that we have remained frozen for far too long. And I deeply believe all of us are carrying trauma in our bodies, be it the trauma of our own lived experience or the trauma passed down to us through our ancestors and in our DNA.

Our trauma impacts us in many ways. It impacts our ability to set boundaries and know our consent. It impact how we relate to other people, and especially as women how we relate to other women.

This is why I do the work I do.

This is why I offer the TIE™ for Sexual Trauma group each year.

Why I work with the individuals I do.

Why I continue to do my own work of unraveling and dislodging and learning.

Because while there is the macro work out in the world of tearing this shit down, we will never build something new and different until we do our own inner work of dismantling and dislodging.

In rebellious solidarity, always.
xoox

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Trauma, retreat, cocooning, coming back into world

There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds. 

~Laurell K. Hamilton,  Mistral’s Kiss

About a year and a half ago I received some incredibly traumatic news.  I was incredibly blessed that my people gathered around me and held me together and up as I processed all that was being unearthed.  I was, and am, deeply grateful for those women.

A couple weeks later, I learned that one of my best friends from high school died.  And there was the funeral to attend across the state and the grief to feel and sit in and know.

I lost my words.  All the pain of those two events, the sense of the world as I thought I knew it shattered.  I needed to go inside, to spend as much time and energy and space as I could process and being with those I love most.  I stepped back from the world and went in my safe cocoon.  I processed and felt and cried and screamed.  I listened to music I knew would encourage my tears.  I allowed all the tears to shake themselves out of my body as my chest hurt and throat felt raw.

I was reacting to and processing two traumas at once.

And because of the way our bodies work, I was also processing old traumas.  While the reason for my tears may have been about recent events, the toxins that were released via those tears have been in my body for a long time.

This is how processing trauma works. Our body doesn’t really know the difference between traumatic events, though our mind does.  Our body only knows something is not right, that it needs to be in a heightened reactive state. And so as we process any one specific trauma, our body also is able to process old and other traumas at the same time.

Part of my process of processing traumas, personally, is to cocoon.  This is different from isolating (which is something trauma encourages us to do).  Cocooning for me is like wrapping myself in a cozy, heavy, blanket. It is warm and safe and quiet.  The cocoon is made up of time with those I love, time with my therapist, time in solitude.  It is having quiet and having soothing voices.  It is being held and being not touched.  It is limiting sensory input and output and allowing myself to sit in and feel and be with and yes, process, the multitude of emotions that are swirling in me.

(Not all that) long ago I would not cocoon when I experienced a traumatic event. I would “power through.” I would isolate – telling all those around me I was “fine” as I felt like I was dying.  I didn’t reach out.  I didn’t feel safe.  I didn’t seek comfort.  All of this is a normal trauma response.  For reasons we don’t yet understand, when we experience trauma, and do not have sufficient reserves of resilience, our mind tells us to stuff it down, act like nothing’s wrong, and even worse, tells us we are all alone, no one would understand, don’t even bother seeking help.

With my own personal work, both trauma specific and not, I’ve been able to come to this place now of no longer isolating, and instead, cocooning.  It hasn’t been easy getting here.  And I am still in my own process and journey in this work.  This work takes time and patience and whole fuck ton of self-compassion.

Because of the self-compassion part I can look back at old patterns and ways of being and not feel shame.  Instead I remind myself I was doing the best I could with the tools I had and was able to receive at the time.

This is true for all of us.

I deeply believe each and every one us at any moment are doing the absolute best we can with the tools and resources we have and are able to receive.

Even when we are at our absolute worst and lowest and darkest.

Take that in for a moment.

Even in our darkest and lowest and worst moments, we are doing the best we can with the tools and resources we have and are able to receive.

(Note: sometimes we are not able to receive resources, for any number of reasons, even when they are offered to us.  We get to have compassion for this too.)

I have often heard people say (and even said myself a few times) “I wish I had started this work [of self-awareness, body-centered mindfulness, and or trauma processing] earlier/when I was younger/a long time ago.”

A truth is, that we couldn’t have started this work until we did.  For whatever reasons we didn’t have the right resources to move into this work.

We didn’t have enough of our basic needs being met.

Dr. Abraham Maslow developed a theory that is called the Hierarchy of Needs.  At the base is food, water, shelter, rest, the ability to breathe and eliminate waste.  If these basic needs aren’t met then we can’t focus on the second “level” which is safety – being in an environment where your body feels physically safe, you have a steady income, you have resources you can rely on including friends and family, you have a relatively healthy body.

The “middle level” in the hierarchy is love and belonging.  I feel this is important to note.  I’ve seen a meme several times over the years that says in essence “If you don’t love yourself, no one else can/will love you.”  According to Maslow, this is absolutely incorrect – we actually need to feel loved and cared for and have a sense of belonging somewhere before we can move on to “self-esteem” or self-love.  We need our people, our community.  We need to feel like we are a part of something.  Sometimes we are able to find this sense of belonging from our parents or siblings, and sometimes not.  Sometimes we find this at church or school, sometimes not.  Sometimes we find it in our social circles, and sometimes not.  It honestly doesn’t matter where we find it, only that we do. (Also, this is what attachment theory tells us – we need to feel and be loved in order to love ourselves.)

This is where that “deeper” work, trauma related, self-awareness, body-centered mindfulness, and our ability to “do the work” comes into play.  We actually can’t do that work UNLESS we have our other basic needs met – one of which is having a sense of belonging and being loved.

My truth is I would not have been able to start any of my personal work any earlier than I started it.  Particularly my own trauma work.  I needed to have my basic needs met, have consistent and reliable access to food and shelter, to have a sense of safe-enoughness, to feel loved and that I belong enough, and then also to love myself enough – to be able to come to the place of feeling that I do matter, that my life matters, and that I am worthy of happiness and to not continue to suffer all the physical and psychological and emotional impacts of my own trauma history.

Frankly, I didn’t get to that place, I didn’t have all those needs met, until relatively recently, in the last few years. And so, even if I had gone into trauma therapy prior to that, it likely would not have helped as much as it is now, and also frankly, I likely wouldn’t have stuck with it.

This “deeper work” isn’t necessary for our survival.  The first three tiers of the hierarchy are.   We honestly don’t need to love ourselves or be “self-actualized” in order to survive on this planet.

And.

For those of us who have the privilege of having those three basic needs met, what would our lives be like if we were able to get the fourth and fifth met?  If we did the work of processing our own lived experience trauma, our ancestral trauma that lives in our DNA, our cultural trauma that feeds  itself every day?  What would that even be like?  How would our lives be different?

For me, I know how my life is different.  I also see the shifts in the women who gather in my circles and who I work with individually.  I know, personally, how coming home to my own body changed every aspect of my life.  I know, personally, how doing body-focused trauma therapies have opened up aspects of my Self and my life I thought were closed away forever.

It hasn’t been easy.  It has certainly more often than not, been really fucking hard.

And yet, for me, and it seems for others who are able to do this work, it has been so fucking worth it.

…

Did you enjoy reading this?  It was originally written for my weekly newsletter in the summer of 2017; I edited it for publication here.  If you’d like to receive my weekly emails, which includes essays like one, you can fill out the form on this page. 

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More on Rape Culture

… in practice the standard for what constitutes rape is set not at the level of women’s experience of violation but just above the level of coercion acceptable to men.

~Judith Lewis Herman

I believe it is important for us to understand the different aspects of our oppressive and harmful culture.  This essay was originally published in my newletter in May of 2017 and has been edited for publication here.

What does rape culture look like?

It’s a million different things.  I believe that the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why depicts rape culture perfectly.  Also you can watch Audrie & Daisy; A Girl Like Her; and/or The Hunting Ground as other films (two of them documentaries) of rape culture.

Rape culture looks like the sexualization of young girls.  Also see beauty pageants and the likes of Toddlers & Tiaras.

It looks like rapists receiving lenient sentences.  See: Brock Turner.  Or rapists and sexual predators being awarded positions of power and prestige.  See: Donald Trump, Brett Kavanaugh.

It looks like being re-traumatized when we do report a rape.  See: being in the wrong place at the wrong time; what was she wearing; she should have known better; she shouldn’t have been drinking; etc.

It looks like being gas lit when we describe our experiences.  See: Oh, he didn’t really mean that; You misunderstood; You’re too uptight; Stop taking everything so seriously; and my personal favorite – They were only joking.

It looks like random men trying to friend you on social media.

It looks like random men sending you pictures of their penis through social media.  It also looks like the social media platform doing essentially nothing and blaming the victim when it is reported (see example below).

It looks like men in power making ludicrous public statements about women and rape (see other example below).

It looks like being afraid to say no.

It looks like not knowing how to say no.

It looks like not understanding boundaries, ours or others.

It looks like being told you don’t know your own body.

It looks like being told to obey authority.

It looks like being told to unquestioningly trust authority.

It looks like not feeling safe walking down the street in broad daylight.

It looks like not feeling safe walking down the street at night.

It looks like not feeling safe in our own homes.

It looks like mansplaining.

It looks like manspreading.

It looks like having a self-admitted sexual predator as the President of the United States.

It looks like…

It looks like…

It looks like…

I could go on listing things for pages and pages.  But I hope you get the point.

Sometimes the insidiousness and pervasiveness of rape culture can feel overwhelming.  It can feel like too much and that it will never change and that nothing we attempt to do about it will ever matter.

I get it.  I so deeply get it.

I have my own personal experiences of sexual assault, abuse, and harassment.

I grew up in a family that pretended the incest wasn’t happening.

I grew up in a culture that told me it was my fault.  I should feel deep shame.

I was told I wasn’t really raped.

I’ve been asked what I did to “encourage” my sexual assaults and harassment.

I was told I was asking for it.

I’ve been called a bitch for calling rape culture and rapists out.

I’ve been threatened with physical violence when I have called rape culture and rapists out.

To date my daughter’s physical safety has not yet been threatened due to me using my voice, and I’m sure that day will come too. (See: any number of vocal feminists on social media.)

I share all this to say Me too.  And You are not alone.  And I get why sometimes some of us do NOT speak up and out. And I believe survivors.

And also.

I know that remaining silent, looking the other way, pretending things aren’t that bad, is all an act of compliance.

I know that not talking about rape culture, not calling it out, not talking about consent and boundaries, not talking about all the ways our culture conditions us to to obey, all of this is complicity.

I know that it can be terrifying to speak up and out (that is intentional and by design, by the way).

I know I have been so scared speaking up that my whole body shook.

I also know it is much safer for me to speak up and out than it is for others. (This is my privilege and I intend to use it to the full advantage of all of us.)

I know that if I don’t speak up and out change won’t happen.

I know that when I speak up and out I am creating ripples and shifts in our culture.

I know when I speak up and out, others hear my voice and know they are not alone. 

Countless FB and IG friends, along with myself, have received a private messages from a not-known-to-us men over the last couple years.  In these messages there is almost always an image of, supposedly, the sender’s penis.  Total strangers.  Unsolicited in any way.

One particular friend ended up in FB jail for 24 hours because she took a screen shot and then publicly posted the picture to a couple of his friends/family pages so they would see what he was up to. (If you have a stronger reaction to her retaliation than you do to the fact that a total stranger felt it was okay to send her a picture of his dick via private message, then… well that is a perfect example of rape culture in action.)

She reported it to Facebook as sexual harassment and essentially they did nothing.  Oh, they gave him a warning.  If it happens again (as in he does it again AND the woman he does it to reports is properly) he may be put in FB jail.  Then she was told not to talk to strangers on messenger.

*eye roll*

Isabel Abbott posted the following quotes by US politicians last year.  All of the men quoted here are Republicans, and let me be perfectly clear that Democrats uphold and are complicit in rape culture too.  They are, perhaps, simply more secret about it.  (You can see Isabel’s original post here. Also, in the comments she provides the original context for each quote below)

(note: offensive and distressing words about sexual violence below)

“Rape is kind of like the weather; if it’s inevitable, relax and enjoy it.”
-Clayton Williams

“If a woman has (a right to an abortion), why shouldn’t a man be free to use his superior strength to force himself on a woman. At least the rapist’s pursuit of sexual freedom doesn’t (in most cases) result in anyone’s death.”
– Lawrence Lockman

“Rape victims should make the best of a bad situation.”
-Rick Santorum

“If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to shut that thing down.”
Todd Akin

“In the emergency room they have what’s called a rape kit, where a woman can get cleaned out.”
– Jodi Laubenberg

“Even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that is something God intended to happen.”
– Richard Mourdock

These are men in power.  These are men who are making the laws of our country.  These are men who have wives and some of them daughters and all of them have mothers.  These are men who see absolutely nothing wrong with the words they have said.

This is rape culture.

And.

These men didn’t become powerful without women :: they all have wives who supported them in various ways, and more importantly women voted for them.  Without the women’s vote, they would not be in office.  

Let’s sit with that for a second.

Let’s also sit with the fact that 45% of white women who voted in the presidential election in 2016 voted for Trump, a self-admitted sexual predator.

We have a lot of work to do to unearth and unravel and dismantle and dislodge from our being, the culture we are currently living in.

All of us. 

It could be easy to blame our current culture on men.  In fact it would be really super easy to do that.

And yes, men are responsible for their actions and words.  Absolutely.

And yes, we need more men to stand up and speak out against rape culture.  To call their friends and brothers and dads and uncles out on it.  To teach their sons to respect boundaries.  To dismantle their own internalized toxic masculinity.

Yes.

And.

The rest of us need to do the work too.

As in us women.

Mothers. Aunties. Voters.

We need to unearth and explore and dismantle and dislodge all that we have internalized and been conditioned to believe.

So we can know our own boundaries.  So we can understand consent.  So we can learn to say no and yes.  So we can respect the noes and yeses of others.

So we can stop supporting sexual predators, rapists, those who physically threaten and assault us and others.

So we can burn down rape culture and create a world of consent culture.

Our first steps in burning it down, are being able to see it.  To name it.  To know what rape culture is and what it looks like in daily practice.

Our first steps are also finding our voice and learning ways to speak up and out.

Even knowing we may not be safe in doing so. Even knowing this is going to make us and those around us very uncomfortable.

There is great risk involved in tearing down our current culture.  Great risk to the status quo.  Great risk to our own perceived comfort and safety.

Here’s a thing though :: we aren’t safe in the culture we currently live in.  Our sense of “safety” is a lie.  A lie meant to keep us complicit and compliant.

I am willing to risk being disliked.  I am willing to risk being hated. I’m even willing to risk my own physical safety to a certain degree to create a world I want for my children and for you and yours.

These are not actually risks per se for me.  They aren’t risks because in many ways they are things I don’t actually care about (other than my physical safety).

There is far greater risk in allowing the world to keep chugging along as it is and sending my children out into it.  Knowing the statistics.  Knowing the statistics are only for what is reported.  Knowing the reality that I am sending my daughter into.

I want something different for her. And for my son.  And for you.  And for me too.  

I want those statistics to be a dark spot on our human history and no longer our human reality.

And so.

I will continue to speak up and out. I will continue to write about the ways our culture oppresses and dehumanizes us. . I will continue my work in anti-authoritarian activism and will continue to promote consent culture. I will continue to call out my profession and the ways it is complicit and compliant. I will continue to raise my kids to understand and respect noes and yeses – their own and others. I will continue to help others unearth, dismantle and dislodge the ways rape culture has gotten into their own bodies and minds and beings. I will do everything I can to BURN IT DOWN and help create a world where this atrocity no longer exists.

I am not alone in this work.  And neither are you.

Together we will do this.  I deeply and wholly believe that.

/../

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