When the nurturers and conquerors share the power

by | Dec 9, 2014 | Uncategorized

nurturers & conquerorsThere is Jian Gomeshi, who beat up women for sport and got away with it for years because we all wanted to believe he really was the charming and likeable man we heard on the radio.

And then there is Bill Cosby who drugged and raped possibly dozens of women who came to him for advice, and also got away with it because he was Dr. Huxtable, and he was the voice behind “NOAH!” and you just HAVE to be able to trust someone who’s that fun and likeable.

And then… different but still related… there’s Darren Wilson, a police officer who won’t be punished for killing Michael Brown.

And there is Daniel Pantaleo, who forced Eric Garner to the ground in a choke hold, listened to him say “I can’t breathe” repeatedly, and kept going until he was dead. He won’t stand trial either.

And there are countless other young black men dying. And countless young Indigenous girls dying. And their deaths barely warrant a mention in the newspaper.

And then there is the ferocious beast called the economy that gobbles up the earth and spits it out in its hunger for more, more, MORE.

All of these things are different and yet the same. All are about the damage done when force is left unchecked.

And I want to scream “How did we end up here?!? How did we get to this place where women can be beat up and raped by celebrities who get away with it? Where the police have the right to kill with impunity? Where pipelines are given permission to plow through sacred land? Where we turn a blind eye again and again to rape, destruction, and murder?”

And though I scream it into the wind, I know that the answer sits like a lump of toxic waste in my heart.

We ended up here because we have created a culture in which the conqueror is revered above the nurturer.

We ended up here because we placed power above love, hierarchy above collaboration,  progress above community, and economy above conservation.

We ended up here because we consistently allow our leaders to build up our military might, and make decisions based in fear and protectionism.

We ended up here because we have allowed ourselves to believe that the financial economy in its present state is the only way an economy can be shaped, and if it doesn’t grow we are all doomed.

We ended up here because of patriarchy, a system rooted in fear.

Patriarchy is afraid of losing control, afraid of the unpredictability of a system not based in hierarchy, and afraid to give power to women or anyone who might upset the status quo.

You may say “but Michael Brown and Eric Garner died because of racism, not patriarchy” and I would argue that it’s all related to the same problem. It’s all rooted in a system that creates an imbalance of power and allows one race to dominate over another and one gender to dominate over another.

Patriarchy is not about men and women. Patriarchy is about dominance.

In a patriarchal system, where fear guides the decision-making, anything that does not comply with the established social order must be locked up or destroyed. So they create stronger police forces, they make it harder for women to control their own bodies, they create an image of God as a controlling masculine figure, and they justify the rape and pillaging of the earth. Patriarchy is the bully in the playground who must have everyone follow his rules or he mows them down.

Patriarchy is a monster hungry for dominance and afraid it will disappear if it gives up even a little bit of its power.

It wasn’t always this way. There was a time when the nurturers were revered along with the conquerors.

There was a time when women were revered for their ability to give birth, for their gifts of healing, and their deep connection to the earth. There was a time when religions were not dominated by masculine deities and the goddess held an equal place.

But then fear began to grow like a weed and the healers and goddess worshipers were branded as witches and the midwives were branded as charlatans. The weed grew, and millions of women were tortured and burned at the stake for knowing too much about the earth, for having too much power over the female reproductive system, and for adhering to a spirituality that could not be contained by those who sought control. (Some say as many as 8 million were tortured or executed in a couple of centuries.)

And so the weed spread, and patriarchy joined hands with racism to mow over anyone in their path and dominate all whose unpredictability made them uncomfortable.

And all those in its path remembered the burning times for generations to come and the memory of it kept us in our place.

How do we stop the weed from spreading further?

There is no simple answer to that question, but we each have to begin by opening our eyes and seeing the weed for what it is. And we have to begin the slow and sometimes painful work of plucking its roots out of our own hearts and our own communities. Because each of us, whether we know it or not, has been infected by this weed and each of us has been taught to be complicit in its growth.

We have been taught how to comply, how to stay in line, and how to not get burned at the stake. We have been taught to guard ourselves and our sons and our daughters. We have been taught to go underground with our deviant belief systems and our connection with Mother Earth. We have been taught to accept the dominant system because not accepting it may cost us our lives. We have been taught that rising up is too dangerous, accusing our rapists is too dangerous, and challenging those in authority is too dangerous.

But gradually we are waking up. Gradually we are rising up. Gradually we are finding each other and daring to stand together in a new power, a shared power. Gradually we are learning to replace dominance with collaboration. Gradually we are overthrowing power. Gradually we are returning to the wisdom of the earth.

Gradually we are releasing the power of the feminine into the world again.

Gradually we are returning to and honouring the nurturer, the healer, and the midwife that we once burned at the stake.

There are many days that feel discouraging, many days that feel like this is taking too long. There are many days when the weed seems to have been fed fertilizer and its grown is exponential. There are many days when those of us who are imagining a new world feel like our efforts are useless. Those days have come fast and furious in recent weeks when celebrities are found to be repeated sexual offenders and cops have gotten away with murder.

But we must not give up. We must continue to tend the new seed growing and trust that it will one day outgrow the weed.

It took centuries to burn the power out of women and it will take centuries for it to come out of hiding and rise up again.

Let us continue to dream of a day when both nurturers and conquerors will have equal power.

Why men need to care about rape

by | Oct 29, 2012 | Compassion, women

Twenty-five years ago, a man climbed through my apartment window and raped me in my bed. When I fought back, he wrapped his angry fingers around my throat, shoved my head between the wall and the bed and tried to choke me to death.

When he finally left my apartment, I ran down the street to my friends’ apartment. While I sat on their couch telling them what had happened, Terence sat on the floor at my feet and cried. He took me to the hospital and stayed there until the doctor had examined me and the police had asked me a hundred questions. Later that day, my brother Dwight came and spent the day with me. Tears appeared in his eyes too.

The next day I went home to the farm and told my parents what had happened. My stoic, pacifist father had to leave the room for awhile to collect his emotions, and when he returned, he admitted that he finally understood the man who’d spent several years of his life hunting down his daughter’s rapist.

Many women showed compassion to me as well, and they are important, but, in retrospect, I believe it was a game-changer for me that men were in my corner along with the women. The fact that all of my family and friends – women AND men – cared about what happened meant that it was a crime against humanity rather than just a crime against women.

From the start, I was able to speak freely of my rape experience, without having to hide behind shame, and that’s largely due to the way that my friends and family supported me. Some people were surprised at how candid I was, expecting me to keep it a secret, but I kept saying “Why wouldn’t I talk about it? A crime was done to me. I did nothing wrong and it doesn’t need to be a secret.”

Sadly, most of the one billion women who experience rape in their lifetime are not able to speak of it. Instead they are taught (by both men and women) that it is something to be ashamed of, that they brought it on themselves, or that it’s cultural taboo to admit that it happened.

We need to talk about rape, and we need men to care about it along with the women. To make real change, rape needs to be seen as a crime against humanity. Anything less than that, and it can be dismissed as a “women’s issue”. If rape is only a women’s issue, than any violence or oppression of women is equally unimportant, and suddenly we have allowed half of the world’s population to be silenced.

Recently, there have been reports of American politicians making unconscionable comments about rape, first about a woman’s body being able to “shut that whole thing down” to prevent pregnancy from a “legitimate rape”, and then a comment that perhaps a pregnancy from a rape was because “God intended it to happen”.  According to Nicholas Kristoff’s recent column, these comments only scratch the surface of the real problems related to rape. What’s underneath is a lot of evidence that rape is not taken seriously by the authorities meant to protect American citizens. In many states, the rape kits collected after women are assaulted collect dust on a shelf and are never tested, and in some places, the women who’ve been raped have to pay for the testing to be done.

In a so-called “developed country” it is an abomination that sexual assault is not taken as seriously as other crimes. Violence against half of a country’s population is being overlooked on a regular basis. It’s even worse in other parts of the world where women are often sent away from home after a rape, or forced to marry their rapist.

Violence against women is a serious enough issue on its own, but, sadly, it is only a symptom of a much larger disease that has infected our world and we must take it very, very seriously. It’s a disease I dare to call patriarchy. Patriarchy is an unbalanced system that allows those in power to exploit and violate those who have less power.

If we, as a culture, are willing to overlook rape, then we are saying, in essence, that it is okay to use violence to overpower other people and/or the earth. If we ignore the rape of women, we also ignore the rape of our oilsands, the destruction of our oceans, the plundering of other countries, and the exploitation of the poor.

Power is a destructive force if it is allowed to run rampant without being balanced with love. As Adam Kahane says in his book Power and Love, the two are like the legs we walk on – each one holds the balance for a second and then shifts to the other. It’s the only way we can move forward in a balanced way.

Men (and women) the world over need to start paying more attention to rape because our world depends on it. It cannot remain a shameful issue that women are only allowed to whisper about in the company of other women. Until it has been brought to the forefront of our politics, the world will continue to be out of balance and we will continue to put power ahead of love.

Every woman in the world needs to be surrounded with the kind of compassionate men that I was surrounded with. Only when men and women work together to end rape and to stop the power-imbalance of patriarchy will the world come into balance.

p.s. On February 14, 2013, I’ll be rising with One Billion Rising. Won’t you join me? Women AND men?

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