Recently, another wave of “Dear White Women” articles and blogposts have been popping up. The contents of these articles or videos reveals that white women - apparently all of them - are anything but dear to the authors.
While it is rightfully considered scandalous and disgraceful to put out racist or homophobic statements and publications, it remains wholly acceptable to utter disgusting sexist filth in songs pumped through the airwaves in public places, make overtly sexist comments in TV, radio, podcast or video interviews, or publish blatantly sexist articles lumping all women, and sometimes all white women, together in one despicably shameful pile.
When the MeToo movement began to do damage to the existing vertical power structure and knocked off some icons whose shadow side was revealed as mostly female victims finally started to speak out about sexual abuse and harassment they had endured in numbers too large to ignore by the media, what happened?
First, the powerful men who ended up suffering the most severe consequences from being outed were disproportionately men of color. Co-incidence?
Second, stories started surfacing featuring young white women calling rape when the encounter had been consensual, resorting to minutia within the encounter which not only shamelessly put the focus on graphic sexual details, it evoked the question if these were cases of miscommunication rather than rape. These stories were popping up and one got widespread mainstream media attention. Of course the validity of the entire MeToo movement was questioned. It created militancy in protecting victims. It minimized thousands of abuse stories. It diluted the meaning of the word rape. It created much confusion for everyone, with men fearing that even consensual sex could henceforth potentially be used against them. It started the mocking reference of being ‘MeToo’d.” It made young white women look terribly entitled. Co-incidence?
Third, when an actress who had been part of the story that catapulted MeToo into the mainstream publicly threatened the Hollywood power establishment at the Cannes Film Festival, declaring on stage: “We [the victims] are coming for you [the powerful sex offenders in Hollywood],” her threat was followed by her famous supportive boyfriend’s sudden death and the surfacing story of her bedding a seventeen year old boy. This story became so wide spread in the media it was a full blown scandal. Along with it, the news spread that the MeToo movement was dead. Co-incidence?
Grassroots movements that threaten to upset the dominant vertical power structure will always be co-opted, infiltrated, politicized, smeared, ridiculed, and snuffed out. The MeToo movement may not last, but women and other victims will not stop speaking out about the rape, sexual abuse and discrimination they have had to endure in silence. There are few women alive who have not encountered at least some form of sexual harassment.
The way society is structured allows each person to use their privilege as a cushion to cover over personal unresolved trauma. Since privilege is something purely external and has nothing innately to do with a person, those who wish to control us can create and implement privilege as well as retrieve it.
Societal oppression feeds personal trauma. Repeated exposure to disrespect, humiliation, objectification and vilification fuels previous injustices experienced as a child of having been disrespected, humiliated, objectified and vilified by the original authority figures in the family and social environment. Those people who most cling to whatever privilege they have gained, through their own efforts or through engineered societal changes, are those who need it most, to cover over their personal unresolved trauma. No one clings more to their privilege than the entitled few at the very top at the existing power paradigm, because they are running the hardest from their own pain and humiliations.
To heal personal trauma is to increase awareness, not only of the self but also of the entire societal structure. Internal integration and the resulting consciousness expansion loosens the need to attach to external values. It ushers us out of the toxic power structure to emerge self-empowered, not needing external authority figures to tell us what to do, not needing to be treated as children by a few insane psychopaths with a nefarious agenda. The actress on the Cannes Film Festival stage was vengeful, fighting power with power, daring the perpetrators, miscalculating that the tide had turned. If you employ the same tactics as the power addicts, they will crush you. If you heal from your personal trauma, you don’t need power anymore and then you can’t be bribed. You operate from a different paradigm, in all humility, which power addicts can’t understand.
However, to heal from trauma, time and resources are necessary. That is why therapy and healing has historically been reserved for the middle class, especially women, who have been able to heal from child sexual abuse and the old-world parenting of the previous generations and have been able to break the dysfunctional cycles of their families and offer their own children more genuine and natural love.
While there is a focus on healing for the downtrodden, there are many therapists who are not helpful, even harmful, as was my own experience searching for the right person. In low socio-economic environments people do not have the same liberty of choice. When I worked with survivors of sex trafficking in the New York City women’s jail “Rosie’s” at Rikers Island, some of the women, through some NGO or government program, had spent some time with a good social worker and had been able to begin to heal. However, the program would end, or their circumstances would change and interrupt the process, meaning that healing, apart from the often ongoing trauma of being trafficked, became almost impossible, even if the impact of the realizations did last.
From the perspective of the ruling psychopaths, it makes sense that the middle class forms the greatest threat to the existing power structure, as they have benefited from that privilege and often used it to heal themselves. If there were to exist an agenda to destroy the middle class, how would that be put into action? Would there be another war? Would there be privileges given to to others who would be invited to use their newly acquired privilege to dump on the supposedly privileged middle class, even as that privilege is slipping away? How much division can be created in order to effectuate that destruction?
What can serve as a release valve for continuous indignities one suffers? The way our lives are structured in the current capitalist model is that families live in isolation, with either one couple or one person raising children, which puts unrealistic expectations and pressures on parents and leaves children to be raised by strangers or each other or themselves. The structure encourages for rage and other negative feelings in reaction to oppression and abuse to be aired when one attains a position of power. This means the easiest and most natural release is to dump on one’s own children or younger children in the immediate environment. The second most-easy release is to dump on societally defined groups.
From the perspective of the one percent holding the strings of worldly power, the first release valve encouraged by the accepted societal norms - also created by the one percent - ensures that trauma is perpetuated within families. Next whatever privilege the members of that family enjoy can serve as an unconscious addiction so the personal, familial trauma can remain hidden beneath whatever benefits come with the privilege, at the expense of anyone less privileged. The higher you go in society, the more this becomes prevalent, the more the family secrets are stuffed under the rug for the sake of the family’s reputation, with considerable material benefits dangling as so many bribes before the younger generations. Within higher society, child sexual abuse is often minimized, mocked and tolerated, while a sense of superiority over all those below their station justifies any and all harm. The latter release valve, of dumping on groups, ensures division is kept intact, diverting the attention away from the real problem, which lies at the top of the power structure - not with the people.
Can we not look behind the stories in the media, behind what is apparent, behind what the power establishment might want from us that will protect the mask of power and eventually comes at everyone’s expense, including those at the top? Can we see through the imposed veil of delusion by those in power, who exploit division and trauma to keep the people disempowered and blind to the real sickness, the source of so much pain in the world?
Healing from personal trauma is revolutionary. It shows the truth, not only of the family narrative spun to maintain a good face to the outer world, but of the narrative spun by the elite who try to control all of us, to keep us pitted against each other, to perpetuate slavery to create privilege at the lowest bar, to keep desecrating the female.