To love women, to love our vaginas, to know them and touch them and be familiar with who we are and what we need. To satisfy ourselves, to teach our lovers to satisfy us, to be present in our vaginas, to speak of them out loud, to speak of their hunger and pain and loneliness and humor, to make them visible so they cannot be ravaged in the dark without great consequence, so that our center, our point, our motor, our dream, is no longer detached, mutilated, numb, broken, invisible, or ashamed.
If you are trying to please, how do you take responsibility for your own needs? How do you even know what your own needs are? What do you have to cut off in yourself in order to please others? I think the act of pleasing makes everything murky. We lose track of ourselves. We stop uttering declaratory sentences. We stop directing our lives. We wait to be rescued. We forget what we know. We make everything okay rather than real.
Slowly, it dawned on me that nothing was more important than stopping violence toward women – that the desecration of women indicated the failure of human beings to honor and protect life.
Women secretly love to talk about their vaginas. They get very excited, mainly because no one has ever asked them before.
I have always been obsessed with naming things. If I could name them, I could know them. If I could name them, I could tame them. They could be my friends.
It will move through you and you will touch joy and suddenly realize you have never felt joy because it requires abandon. It grows from gratitude and cannot exist where there is mad cynicism or distrust. You will touch this joy and you will suddenly know it is what you were looking for your whole life, but you were afraid to even acknowledge the absence because the hunger for it was so encompassing.
This may or may not appeal to you – this moving, this nomadic existence, and this nonattached life. I am not suggesting we all leave our relationships and homes and children. Not at all. I am proposing that we reconceive the dream. That we consider what would happen if security were not the point of our existence. That we find freedom, aliveness, and power not from what contains, locates, or protects us but from what dissolves, reveals, and expands us.
If overthrowing some five thousand years of patriarchy seems like a big order, just focus on celebrating each self-respect step along the way.
In “securing” people, make them really really afraid. Create all kinds of colors and alerts that terrorize the population. Terror and numbness will eventually be mistaken for security. In “securing” people, take away their opinions and voices and instincts. Make them feel afraid to speak out. Control will eventually be mistaken for security. In “securing” people, distract them through addictive consumption and mindless entertainment programming. Amnesia will eventually be mistaken for security.
I am an emotional I am an emotional, devotional, incandotional creature.
I did not live in the forests. I lived in the concrete city where I could not see the sky or sunset or stars. I moved at the pace of engines and it was faster than my own breath. I became a stranger to myself and to the rhythms of the Earth.
Finding violence against women means opening to the great power of women, the mystery of women, the heart of women, the wild unending sexuality and creativity of women – and not being afraid.
How much self-awareness does a life of privilege and entitlement afford the entitled? If you are birthed into a particular paradigm that serves you, what would compel you to look outside?
Lasting social and cultural change is spread by ordinary people doing extraordinary things.
How come we have money to kill but no money to feed or heal? How come we have money to destroy but no money for art and schools? The.
Saying the word I was not supposed to say is the thing that gave me a voice in the world.
We are able to cross and dissolve all kinds of borders if we are willing to go to the political, emotional, and spiritual places we most fear and resist.
Each admission here defies a blood vow determined long before my birth. An apologist is a traitor of the highest order. How many men, how many fathers ever admit to failures or offenses? The act itself is a betrayal of the basic code. It sprays shrapnel of guilt in all directions. If one of us is wrong, the whole structure and story come tumbling down. Our silence is our bond. The power of not telling, of not letting on, is the most ancient and powerful weapon in our arsenal.
I did not want to see how careless this whole system is for so many, how easy it is to fall through the cracks.
People ask me all the time how I survived. It wasn’t that I was smarter or even stronger than anyone else. I didn’t even know what I was doing. It was just that something inside me couldn’t go along.