I WOULD MUCH RATHER HAVE MY VOICE THAN HAVE A MAN PART 2
”What men don’t understand they fear, what they fear they destroy” ~ Robert Morning Sky.
I think one of the biggest ways that men silence women is through sexual shaming. Growing up being unable to express your sexuality as a woman, and having to hear constant degradation in regards to it, makes you really shut down as a woman. Our sexuality is our center of power as women. You wanna know why Mary Magdalene has been so villainized throughout history? Well she was one of the most powerful women who has ever walked on this planet, she was the holy grail. And do you know where her power came from, well it came from that area that only we have as women. Because of this power, the male population was so threatened by her that they have spent thousands of years dragging her name through the mud all in an attempt to not only destroy her, but to ensure that no other woman would be able to access that same power that she, and therefore all of us as women carry around inside of us every single second of the day. Without his Mother Mary, Jesus would not have existed, without Mary Magdalene, Jesus would have been nothing. While his disciples worshipped him, he worshipped her.
As a result of all this stigma and shame I have found myself spending many many years working on healing my own sexuality. I recently began to read this book I would highly recommend. It's called Wicked Voodoo Sex by Kathleen Charlotte. While people may think that Voodoo like witchcraft is inherently bad, that isn't the case at all. Both are normally used for good, and it always goes back to the intention behind it, and the people who are choosing to use it. Her book is a sex manual to help women heal and celebrate their sexuality. On page 4 in Chapter 1 she states "But even with all that going on, women have never been very comfortable in admitting that they like sex, being open about their sexuality, or asking for what they want. The reason for that is social and religious pressure. If women use the S word (Sex), they're rewarded with another S word (Slut)-and so are men (Stud), who get to be quite Something by bedding them. There's still a double standard, for sure, which leads to another S word for many women: Shame." I couldn't agree with her more. I think this shame towards our bodies and our sexuality ends up setting us up to be in abusive relationships.
I came across this great article written by a man in which he talks about how men will make degrading comments towards women on purpose to destroy us and our power. And than when we rightfully get upset about it, they just brush it off by saying that we are crazy. I think what's happened is that most women figure if he isn't hitting us, he's a pretty nice guy, so it's basically left the door wide open for us to be victims of a lot of emotional and mental abuse. And in a lot of cases I think women figure it's not that bad, or he didn't mean it like that, and what it ends up doing is that it ends up destroying our souls. And it ends up silencing us, and keeping us from ever accessing this massive amount of power we have inside. Which in then turn does exactly what the male population hopes it will do, it takes out the people who are the greatest threat to their male privilege and male entitlement and allows them to continue on with their male reign of terror.
"Because women bare the brunt of our neurosis. It is much easier for us to place our emotional burdens on the shoulders of our wives, our female friends, our girlfriends, our female employees, our female colleagues, than for us to impose them on the shoulders of men. It’s a whole lot easier to emotionally manipulate someone who has been conditioned by our society to accept it. We continue to burden women because they don’t refuse our burdens as easily. It’s the ultimate cowardice. As far as I am concerned, the epidemic of gaslighting is part of the struggle against the obstacles of inequality that women constantly face. Acts of gaslighting steal their most powerful tool: their voice. This is something we do to women every day, in many different ways."
http://thecurrentconscience.com/blog/2011/09/12/a-message-to-women-from-a-man-you-are-not-“crazy”
I can not emphasize this next point enough. Every single man was born with the capacity to respect and value women, and anything less than that at any point has simply been, because he has chosen to be that way. If you ever need to make excuses for your man or any man, that right there indicates there is a HUGE problem that needs to be addressed. No one should ever have to try to justify bad behavior from men, because they should never do this to begin with. More importantly and maybe even more sadly is that they all know how wrong it is and they know how much damage they are doing, yet they choose to do it anyways. While this man has a fancy name for what this is called, at the end of the day it is simply just ABUSE. All abuse is unnacceptable, and if you ever find yourself as a woman in any sort of abusive relationship you need to get out of there immediately, before he ends up destroying all of you.
What I love about this clip below is that it is such a typical example of our interactions with men. The story was suppose to be all about celebrating this brave little girl. Instead the douchebag newscaster felt that he needed to make a misogynistic comment about the little girl, and when the female newscaster calls him out on it, instead of apologizing he just throws it right back into her face and pretty much calls her a feminazi. It's just so immature. And these are the people we're suppose to look to lead us?
Also I think it's funny that the male population genuinely believes that they can spend all their time and energy abusing and oppressing 3.5 billion people without it someday coming back to them. You can only abuse half of the world's population for so long before they eventually will rise up and put you all in your place. Don't worry men, it's coming :)
http://jezebel.com/5874459/im-mad-at-you-because-youre-an-idiot-not-because-im-a-woman?tag=relationships
