The last week of news has given me a kind of existential rage against patriarchy and misogyny I haven’t felt this intensely since the Kavanaugh hearings. A global rape academy with 62M site visits, a highly publicized murder-suicide… it’s been a difficult week to be a survivor on the internet.
I’ve written before about how conflict isn’t abuse — but today I want to talk more about the abuse side of that distinction.
(And if that isn’t something you want to engage with today — beautiful! Please make yourself a nice cup of tea on your way out, and I’ll see you back in our next newsletter.)
I need us to be able to recognize why abuse has such a chokehold on our social fabric, how to recognize its patterns, and what to do when we do.
I need us to be able to do this because misogyny, cisheteropatriarchy, white supremacy, etc — these are systematized patterns of abuse, and as always, the individual and the systems form an interconnected web. Or, as Nathan Shara writes, “When we talk about violence, we always end up talking about everything… Solving violence is rarely as much about the moment at hand as it is about everything else that preceded it.”
So we need to be able to recognize it when it happens — because it happens all the time.
Fundamentally, abuse is about power and control.
adrienne maree brown defines abuse as “behaviors (physical, emotional, economic, sexual, and many more) intended to gain, exert, and maintain power over another person or in a group.”
When we go deeper into the belief systems and worldviews that make these behaviors so prevalent — even accepted by broad swaths of society — we find Staci Haines’s explanation: “Power-over economic, political, and social systems concentrate safety, belonging, dignity, decision-making, and resources with a few elite, and particular nation-states… Power-over systems dictate that some peoples, nations, ethnicities, genders, and lives are more worthy of safety, belonging, dignity, and resources than others.”
She continues, “If we look to male gender socialization, we find lots of training in power over beliefs and behaviors with little permission to feel afraid or vulnerable, to not know, to not be in control, to have needs for connection” [emphasis mine].
Which, as always, reminds me of bell hooks — “The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of [boys] is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all [boys and men] that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves.”
Now, these violences are some of the greatest griefs we have to contend with, as a species and as a collective. There’s so much I could write about grief work, death work, mourning, and the composting energy that violence puts us into. But for now, I turn again to adrienne maree brown’s questions: “What can this teach me/us about how to improve our humanity?”
I believe the invitation is as much to turn within self as it is to turn externally. Our sphere of influence is the self — our behaviors, beliefs, convictions, values, and actions — and so there too is our context for change.
Kai Cheng Thom writes, “We live in a culture that demonizes an oversimplifies abuse, probably because we don’t want to accept the reality that abuse is actually commonplace and can be perpetrated by anybody.” She goes on, “when we are able to admit that the capacity to harm lies within ourselves — within us all — we become capable of radically transforming the conversation around abuse…. Because the revolution starts as home, as they say.”
As a facilitator, my job often comes from another one of amb’s edicts: “I want to feel like we are responsible for each other’s transformation.” My job is to offer containers for transformation — to co-design and co-construct the rooms and spaces in which we can be collectively responsible for culture change and social impact.
I’m bringing the fire of my rage this week towards that work — a resolve towards transformation, towards care, towards the kind of benediction that intimacy offers us.
