Joining the Battle as the Warriors We Have Become
There is a war going on in the US and around the world, its hard not to observe this fact.
Much of the battle, the real battle remains hidden.
This war is between liberty, liberty of mind, of actions, of individual choices, and of governing, versus tyranny, control of mind, of resources, of the narrative, and domination.
While both lovers of liberty and tyrannists are engaged in this narrative battle, it is the tyrannists whom must mainly rely on lies and the deliberate omission or hiding of facts to hold onto power. This, for the obvious reason, most people enjoy freedom, and most modern folk have little real interest In subjecting themselves to a supreme ruler, a king or a tyrant, whomever he might be. So the tyrannists, to seek influence for their cause, must cloak their language in so many different kinds of ways to hide their true intent.
By cloak, I mean lie.
They use words like freedom when they mean, their rule and only their rule. They make up utter fabrications, with no factual basis at all, and thrust it out into the world, maybe hoping to sway the others of their ilk, desperately holding onto traditional power structures without cause to examine the underpinnings of evidence, or maybe just hoping to muddy the waters of the perception of truth, to confuse and obfuscate for the dim, uneducated or people groomed out of knowing how to use their reason or analytical thought to discern reality, taught from childhood to have blind faith in their authoritarians.
Often, as we have all observed, these tyrannists accuse those who love liberty and law, of the very things that they are actually guilty of, this battle tactic called either gas-lighting or projection (slightly different definitions, but essentially a similar tactic, meant either to call into question the truth-teller’s sanity with total lies, or a simple assertion that the other side is committing the same dirty deeds they are.)
This is the war
These tyrannists know the choke point in our defense of liberty, have always known: the lives of women.
For thousands of years, women have been the subject of horrific attacks by these tyrannists, and men everywhere fall for it, even if on a higher level, they are fighters for freedom, or perceive themselves as freedom fighters.
Why do they fall for this?
I can only conjecture why men of all types are so often likely to ignore women’s stories, to disbelieve our lived experience, to deny our humanity and our crucial importance to a just future for humanity.
My best hypothesis includes these three reasons to best explain this phenomenon:
1. Their religions and culture teach men, women aren’t human like they are, we are things that either belong to them or don’t, and when not, aren’t their problem, no need to be concerned or to listen to us.
2. This belief comforts them because, ultimately, men fear losing the women in their lives. By continuing to perceive women as property in their minds, not full human beings as they perceive themselves, it ensures that they can ethically hold onto women, without having to actually understand them, please them, or perhaps the biggest barrier, to confront a history of thousands of years of abusive control and brutal subjugation perpetrated by men on women, enshrined in a culture of hidden hatred directed at the mothers/daughters/sisters of us all.
3. Women’s stories are ones of pain, of subjugation, of enraged and agonized victim-hood. They’re incredibly hard to experience, to live through, and for this reason, hard to share, even amongst ourselves. We trigger each other with every story, they remind us of our collective helplessness, and traumatically bring back the pain of our own horrific stories.
Very often, men can’t seem to bear to even hear women’s stories, to shoulder any potential responsibility, especially if there is a chance that our stories may be true: they close their ears, remind themselves we are property, we must be liars, nothing we say must be true.
Most men never experience anything like the overwhelming victimizing experiences that so many women frequently have. Seemingly blind and willingly blind to the painful and differing reality of the other, most men often easily conclude (without evidence) it’s not really happening, maybe because it seems unthinkable, therefore women are making it up.
A very clear example of this blanket and illogical masculine denial occurs in recent medical history, in the understanding of menstrual cramps, solely a feminine complaint.
It wasn’t until 1980 that a medical study decisively proved that there was, indeed, a biological cause for menstrual cramps (medically termed dysmenorrhea).
Prior to this study, women’s declaration of monthly pain was often perceived as “just in their heads”, presumably because the male doctors and researchers, and the male community in general, didn’t themselves experience this pain, and per the other two logical, ethical, and cultural fallacies listed above, dismissed women’s lived experiences as unreal, since they themselves did not experience it.
I experienced the effects of this medical blindness to feminine pain personally, growing up.
My father was a doctor and had been taught in medical school that period pain was “hysterical” (this is not a true medical word, but simply a term that gas-lights women expressing a painful lived experience men don’t experience, and don’t want to acknowledge as true). Despite the intensity and agony of my teenage cramps causing me to miss school every month, vomit and have diarrhea, he continued to proclaim “it was all in my head”.
It fell on me to hide my symptoms because they, insanely, angered him when he saw them.
I don’t know exactly why this angered him, but perhaps because it contradicted his officially acquired knowledge?
Perhaps also, hypothesis one and two per above, was at work in the psychological underpinnings of my father’s denial of my pain.
In 2018, a reproductive researcher published a study that showed that menstrual cramps often are as painful as a heart attack (presumably comparing it to a relatively non-gendered pain, so that men can comprehend what kind of pain is actually occurring in women every month).
Remember, I am using this medical example of gendered pain and gendered denial of the other’s reality as a very small, but clear, metaphor for the much larger denial of women’s lived experiences continuing in huge measures around the world.
Remember also, I’m talking about strategy in the war of tyrannists versus lovers of liberty.
Attacking women is the choke hold that the tyrannists have on all of us in this war they wage against liberty and justice (and very literally, as if to demonstrate, choking women is a very common act of violence by men against women around the world).
For all the reasons listed above, even the men who believe they are supporters of freedom fail to see what is really happening to the women, and consequently to all of us.
They remain comfortably blind, while believing they are fighting for freedom, when the reality is this: if they aren’t seeing the truth of what is happening to women, if they aren’t making that their first priority, they aren’t.
They lie to themselves or simply don’t see the truth hiding in plain sight, groomed for thousands of years to ignore and demean women, to deny any reality that men don’t have themselves, and especially any pain.
Many women have also internalized these blindnesses, partly maybe groomed to it from childhood, through culture or religion, partly because acknowledging the pain of this hatred is so very difficult, easier to pretend it’s something else or it’s not real.
Easier to cling to a “Strong Man” ideology that makes them feel that they are at least protected, that they belong, if not that they are truly safe, seen or understood.
I’m writing this essay to introduce a service a friend is offering to victim/survivors of perpetrators and abuse, and also, truly, battle assistance to the frontline warriors in this battle for truth and freedom, since the men are busy doing nothing at all really, nothing important anyway.
If you know anyone who needs a narrative warrior to clear their name, to fight a lying perpetrator, to aid in this battle for justice and liberty, please pass this along:
https://www.fiverr.com/superpoweredgro?public_mode=true
