From a FB post by a good man…
——-Why do you think women are many times more likely to develop autoimmune conditions?———
Violence. The correlation holds across conditions, across geographies, across every study that bothers to measure. The stress response, the held tissue, the body that cannot metabolize what was done to it. Not physiology. Not inherent femininity.
The correlation is plain. The cause is plain too, if you're willing to see it. Chronic stress. The state of permanent alert. Anger held in tissue, grief held in tissue, the body unable to metabolize what was done to it.
Men are taught we can hurt women and face nothing. Women carry the cost of that teaching in their blood.
Autoimmune markers are not random. They are the body's record of what it could not release. Sophie Strand writes trusts no man until that man proclaims, loudly, that this violence stops. Not quietly. Not in private. Loudly. That is the threshold. Not belief. Not sympathy. Not the careful silence of men who consider themselves allies while other men do the damage. The threshold is a voice raised.
Read her.
Sophie Strand:
"[[...]] What it convinced me is that there is no moment I am sitting still, enjoying my coffee, that a child is not being tortured or that a woman is not being raped.
Every movement is shadowed by this knowledge.
And when I try to deny it my body flares with autoimmunity. This past month a rash has spread over my whole body. I’m told it is an autoimmune response to a cold virus. But I know it is also my anger spilling over my very cells. It has to move. It can’t be quiet.
This is the first time I have ever written down the details of my abuse. It has always felt too hot. Too dangerous. I’ve worried that I’ll retraumatize myself by sharing specifics.
But at this point I have nothing to lose.
You doubt that child abuse lurks in every house, in every computer across America? You doubt that this is our national anthem?
Let me disabuse you of your naivete.
You want women to drop into their feminine softness and surrender?
And who does that benefit?
Given the statistics and the ongoing revelations about Motherless and the Epstein Files and more femicide and abuse every single day, it shocks me that more men are not thinking and speaking about what it means to interact with the women and girls and children in their life.
Every time a woman and a man go on a date a man worries he will be ghosted or embarrassed or catfished.
Every time a woman goes on a date she risks being assaulted or killed.
There is no such thing as the male loneliness epidemic.
There is the child abuse epidemic. There is the rape and violent assault epidemic."
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My TLDR
I agree. Violence against women and girls is ubiquitous. It is grotesque, extreme and exposed in the ruling and celebrity classes, but the dynamic of class and gender violence cuts throughout the world, and it must be addressed not only through men denouncing it. There is a reason why they/we are not, I feel clued into to it, believe me. But understanding such a block will take time. There is also very high penalties for getting this wrong, and more hurt and no healing in that, so I gotta be mindful.
Sorry for the lengthy of this mansplanation that will follow, haha. In my view, the context for men and boys, and accountability, recovery and healing, is deep, present and necessary now.
This is akin to the Pipe, and this teaching belongs to Pipe Carrier Jocelyn Wahbano Iahtail of Cree Nation, in the Pipe itself, where the bowl represents the feminine, women and girls, and the stem represents boys and men. The Pipe must be held together, shared in an egailtarian way, and it is bound together and mixes, it is not a binary - and she saw the dividing way of colonizing patriarchy empire as root cause for the pain of all genders. She gave this teaching out of sheer compassion, and fierce as a matriarch, and traditional Pipe Carrier, teacher, ceremonial keeper and warrior woman. She would cajole everyone to get on their ‘decolonizing healing journey! Fiercer than any man I’ve ever seen, fought her way out of a hospital room. Broke a TV of mine, when I was being ignorant and stubborn on a point, got on her walker and stormed off, living kilometres away, my fault for debating her on a point of history like a dumb male scholar! In her view, missing indigenous women and girls as a Commission was infected with colonialism, for her it needed also say missing indigenous boys and men, because in her view, it is how we raise the village together, the Pipe as a whole, and this is just like One Dish and One Spoon in the Great Law that applies here and in Montreal in fact, it remains if you understand it, true law
.And my recovery, accounting and final stages in life will be committed to condolence, accountability, and restoration, for the sake of my own daughter.
It is not only those who are actually missing, but missing their own lives, and missing in them, and missing the direction, motivation and ways of attaining good mind as a man. This teaching was held in very much support for trans and binary, and I also received an amazing teaching from a berdache, not only two spirits, but a great many more varieties. So this rediscovery of spectrum is part of the healing and good. Notwithstanding our cultural and economic context of privilege, the effect on boys and men of the extreme binary patriarchy the world endured, carries a lot more burden for some than those who unconciously or conciously enforce it socially, and takes its toll on the bodies of the fallen men in the heirarchy.
The pain is severe internally, you cannot see it. I cut my teeth in caregiving, in men’s shelter, Shepherd’s of Good Hope. This experience of maleness, it varies a great deal, the family in our territories carry a range of contexts of amazing variety, from those that will attend Upper Canada boarding school, to those born of male gender at the edge of the binary, on the rez, or fresh out of Mogadishu, and how we grow up in the fascinating and terrifying world of heirarchy status privilege assignments, which happen in realtime as non-curricular training moments from the day you enter school, maybe already in the family.
The healing of man, of relationship with the Earth, and of settler pyramid empires, migrants and homeland people’s, and the resilience of the Circle Way of culture, both within empire among the ‘common people’ and those sustaining themselves despite colonization, that hasn’t been happening. Where we stand today, broken pipe dream, world at brink, war and ecogenocides, threat of bottleneck or even extinction, mass extinction, political violence, ongoing incarceration of the marginalized and rule by criminals. Shattered pieces, men and women, girls and boys and across the binary.
What I am suggesting, is that we now reach a time where we need to retrace our steps, as with the prophecy of the 7th to 8th Fire, and retrieve the ways of being together.
But I also want to begin to share what I can about male mind, about patriarchal status heirarchy, about the spectrum and how it is expressed, and about male erotic mind, sexology and what remains bewildering about the shattered dream of man, what can be liberation here, ecstatic, safe, true liberation of our spectrum, and for that we need to be free of this violence, to become harmless.
We have a a long way to go, and the next fifteen years for me, from 50 to 65, will be critical.
No man has mastered this, in my view. And that is because the idea of mastery projected into a male hero, is part of the problem in how we think men should lead or develop in skills. But what we need is basic life skills, not cool moves at the dojo. How to listen. To feel. To communicate, to consent within oneself even to know what one is doing, and to reach mutual consent in open awareness, and shared risk, burden and load bearing, in our most intimate lives.
Yet, mastery was also a male ideal, and motivation, part of his brain, his dick, and his dick to brain complex, so he is attracted to and may for the path. Always thinking the path protrudes outwardly like an erection, he will break things and people. Going inside, that is the true courage.
The question, in our own spiritual teachings, was about mastery, was about inner mastery though. Mastery of self. For the man today, the minimum is avowal against and censure of violence toward women and girls, or anyone, a commitment to non-coercive means of attaining goals, and having goals that regard community, regard women and family and generations, that receive the teachings of ancestors and set a course for generations to come. 7 generations, in just 2 seconds of historical time, the next 15 years, hangs in the balance. Even one generation hangs in the balance, even the next 7 months, 7 years are fragile.
The fall of man hits hard, and picking up the pieces will take centuries. Start gathering now.