In this excerpt from Ain’t I Woman: Black Women and Feminism, author bell hooks describes the insidious nature of racism and sexism and the links between patriarchy and white supremacy. Understanding this type of analysis is critical to understanding how oppression functions within civilization as a tool of social control. While hooks uses the term “American,” the same analysis applies across much of the world.
American women of all races are socialized to think of racism solely in the context of race hatred.
Specifically in the case of black and white people, the term racism is usually seen as synonymous with discrimination or prejudice against black people by white people.
For most women the first knowledge of racism as institutionalized oppression is engendered either by direct personal experience or through information gleaned from conversations, books, television, or movies. Consequently, the American woman’s understanding of racism as a political tool of colonialism and imperialism is severely limited.
To experience the pain of race hatred or to witness that pain is not to understand its origin, evolution, or impact on world history. The inability of American women to understand racism in the context of American politics is not due to any inherent deficiency in the woman’s psyche. It merely reflects the extent of our victimization.
No history books used in public schools informed us about racial imperialism.
Instead we were given romantic notions of the “new world“ the “American dream.” America as a great melting pot where all races come together as one. We were taught that Columbus discovered America; that “Indians“ was Scalphunters, killers of innocent women and children; that black people were enslaved because of the biblical curse of Ham, that God “himself” had decreed they would be hewers of wood, tillers of the field, and bringers of water.
No one talked of Africa as the cradle of civilization, of the African and Asian people who came to America before Columbus. No one mentioned mass murder of native Americans as genocide, or the rape of native American and African women as terrorism. No one discussed slavery as a foundation for the growth of capitalism. No one describe the forced breeding of white wives to increase the white population as sexist oppression.
I am a black woman. I attended all black public schools. I grew up in the south were all around me was the fact of racial discrimination, hatred, and for segregation. Yet my education to the politics of race in American society was not that different from that of white female students I met in integrated high schools, in college, or in various women’s groups.
The majority of us understood racism as a social evil perpetrated by prejudiced white people that could be overcome through bonding between blacks and liberal whites, through military protest, changing of laws or racial integration. Higher educational institutions did nothing to increase our limited understanding of racism as a political ideology. Instead professors systematically denied us truth, teaching us to accept racial polarity in the form of white supremacy and sexual polarity in the form of male dominance.
American women have been socialized, even brainwashed, to accept a version of American history that was created to uphold and maintain racial imperialism in the form of white supremacy and sexual imperialism in the form of patriarchy. One measure of the success of such indoctrinate indoctrination is that we perpetrate both consciously and unconsciously the very evils that oppress us.
Gloria Jean Watkins, better known by her pen name bell hooks, is an American author, professor, feminist, and social activist.
Featured image: Armenian Graffiti in the city of Yerevan. It is a translated quote of the author bell hooks which reads “To be oppressed means to be deprived of your ability to choose.” By RaffiKojian, CC BY SA 4.0.
Fear of death is a motivation that has driven man to attempt to control death by controlling the world. In this piece, Aurora Linnea explores the patriarchal root behind the unending drive to control and ward off death.
Man is afraid to die. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Denial of Death (1974), Ernest Becker proposed that, “of all things that move man, one of the principal ones is his terror of death.” Becker studied the oeuvres of Brilliant Men – Freud, Kierkegaard – and struck upon Man’s predicament: Man is conscious, he observes that what lives will one day die; Man is aware he is alive, hence he will die, and he is afraid. He fears his body, the “terrifying dilemma” of that “material fleshy casing” yoking him to the physical world of creatures, the mortal, earthly world with its cycles circling birth into death, its inherent limits and exigencies. Being a living body reminds Man he will die; he is afraid. Man is afraid, all the man-made world has been built around his fear. Man’s fear of death has been the ulterior force goading human history along its ill-starred trajectory. Becker’s thesis: The history of Man is the history of his fear, understanding Man means understanding Man’s fear, Man does what Man does, Man is what Man has become, because he is afraid.
To be human, according to Becker, is to be terrified of death and to pass one’s life laboring to allay terror’s torments through “a defiance of and a denial of the real nature of the world.” That Man is a mortal animal is the wellspring of his suffering, in retaliation Man pits himself against the “inadmissible reality” of…reality itself. It is this dedication to existing in pained permanent opposition to material reality that Becker defines as the project of “humanization.”
Clever creature that he is, Man has refined methods for channeling his horror of reality/mortality into the noble enterprise of “humanization.” He dreams up solacing fantasies of immortality, identifying himself with deathless disembodied gods of his own creation. If Man scorns death for depriving him his right to control his own destiny, he rebels by devoting his life to seizing control over as much of the living world as he can manage. He dominates inferior beings, beasts, lesser men, the wilds. He accumulates wealth, to stand as an undying monument to his reign. He extends his dominion through conquest, subjugates whole peoples, builds empires. His yearly more efficient exploitation of the underlings over whom he rules sings to him reassurances of his limitless power. He abstracts his way to intellectual transcendence, leaving his body below. He invents machines to act as barriers between himself and nature, so his hands don’t get dirty. He entombs the natural world choked-out unseen within an encrustation of man-made artifice to find himself surrounded by the products of his own mind, every disruptive reminder of terrorizing reality extirpated from his field of vision.
Thus, Becker concludes, Man triumphs over “mere physicalness,” salvages himself from the clutches of death. Becomes human.
Man makes himself the Master.
Except Man does all that and still he dies, and sometimes, when reality creeps in from its appointed place exiled to the periphery onto the mainstage of the man-made world and the Master’s delusion-complex of power-and-control defenses against death begins to unravel, Man must take emergency action. Here we have the psychoanalyst Gregory Zilboorg, writing during the Second World War, to help us understand what comes next: “Man then resorts to the mobilization of his aggression, his hatred.” Through the conversion of fear into hatred enacted as violence against some chosen enemy, Man can restore the necessary sense of control and avoid the humiliation of being caught frightened. “The murderous drives,” Zilboorg explains, “enable us to feel masters over life and death.” He terms this the process of “overcoming death by means of murder,” and discourages readers from feeling overly distressed by Man’s tendency to transmute fear into “murderous hatred.” It’s human nature, after all, to lash out in rage against mortality.
Becker and Zilboorg wrote “Man” to denote “Humanity”; both presumed they were analyzing “human nature,” the “human condition.” In actuality their sex-specific terminology was entirely appropriate, their exclusion of women apt. The condition these authors elucidate is not the “human condition,” but the patriarchal one, the psychic disposition of human cultures malformed by millennia of male rule. ‘Man’ is not ‘humanity,’ but men, as in males—and in fact, only a small subset of males can be correctly included here. ‘Humanization’ via the rejection of physical reality, through domination and exploitation, delusions of control, and antagonistic violence has been largely the undertaking of Western patriarchal civilization. Given that those of us without the luck to have been born ruling-class males of European descent have historically been fodder for, rather than the innovators of, these patriarchal procedures, a clarifying revision of Becker’s thesis feels warranted.
The history of patriarchy is the history of men’s fear.
To understand patriarchal civilization means understanding the fear that lurks at the core of patriarchal masculinity; engineered and administered by ruling-class men, human society has become what it is today because the men in power are afraid to die.
Fear of death and its various palliations are so thoroughly embedded in the social machinery of Western patriarchal civilization that under normal circumstances, they pass below notice. Granted, to do so has called for the institutionalization of brutal hierarchies, oppressive empires, genocide, gynocide, ecocide, the pervading malaise of mass alienation, but the Masters have been reasonably successful in convincing themselves they’re not going to die. Their fear has been repressed and managed, sublimated into everyday atrocity. It is only when the patriarchal mind is cornered by a surprise encounter with reality/mortality and its defense mechanisms go into overdrive that the underlying fear hurtles to the fore.
What could be a more paradigmatic “surprise encounter with reality/mortality” than an infectious-disease pandemic?
Covid-19 has the Masters running scared. Patriarchal death-terror is a naked thing shivering on the table now, men’s strategies of self-defense newly conspicuous as they scramble to safeguard themselves against the affront of the unacceptable, inescapable essence of our human condition: that we are animals, vulnerable bodies, born of women, destined to die.
As the current menace to male immortality is a disease, an obvious place to begin a study of men’s fear is the social institution known as medicine. Fear of death shines more glaringly here than elsewhere as a general rule. In medicine, men are dealing directly with bodies, bodily functions, physical sensation; patriarchal conquest commences with the conquering of the body; hence, patriarchal medicine is a logical site for intensive death-terror management. Itself a product of patriarchal imperialism, achieved through the (often femicidal) overthrow of female lay healers during Europe’s Early Modern Period, modern Western medicine is grounded on two key precepts:
1) the body is a machine, to be serviced and repaired by experts.
2) death is an aberration, which men should eliminate.
These principles reflect the mechanistic worldview preached by Enlightenment-era Fathers of Science, most notably Rene Descartes, a Brilliant Man who nonetheless struggled to discern any appreciable differences between a dog and a clock. Carolyn Merchant has described how, with the rise of the mechanistic worldview, bodies were recast as machines at the same time as the earth was ideologically demoted to dead inert matter. And, as may be expected, both bodies and earth existed to be used and manipulated by those blessed with the gift of reason, i.e., elite white males.
The reduction of bodies to machines allowed men to imagine that they’d transcended base physicality; men were not their bodies, but the overseers and technicians of those bodies. When the unreliable body-apparatus inevitably malfunctioned, the Father-Doctors would be there to force it back into working order. They could feel themselves heroes, rescuing patients from the sinking ships of their failing bodies. Medical practice thus evolved to give men a taste of victory in what Marti Kheel calls patriarchal medicine’s “war against nature.” Man vs. Body, Man vs. Death. A proliferation of ever-more invasive, elaborate techno-interventions has been the Father-Doctors’ weaponry in this endless conflict, the more aggressive the better. In the ICU combat zones of patriarchal medicine, men aspire to beat death into submission.
In our present-day plague year, ventilators are the medical technology du jour. Coronavirus infection causes the lungs to fill with fluid, the ailing can’t breathe, their blood oxygen levels plummet, they rush to the hospital where they are hooked up to machines, to breathe for them. This has been so-called Best Practice. Medicine’s passion for ventilators has been such that, in the early weeks of the pandemic, the specter of ventilator shortages was a favored mass-media bogeyman. More recently, evidence has been piling up to suggest that ventilators are not the omnipotent emancipators-from-death we were promised. The force entailed in threading an 10”-long plastic tube down a person’s throat and pumping highly saturated oxygen into her lungs has a funny way of inflicting injuries that compromise her body’s ability to recover, while the long-term sedation required can result in permanent brain damage. One doctor has called placing Covid-19 patients on ventilators “almost a death sentence.” Now, some renegade clinicians are starting to suspect that, just maybe, less invasive, less aggressively technological approaches might be more conducive to survival.
Holding hostility towards the body as its premise, patriarchal medicine allots scarce attention (or funds) to the prevention of illness through cultivating the necessary conditions for bodily health, with health here defined as something more than just the absence of acute disease. Where the dominant attitude is rancor for the body as a glitchy machine and/or blundering heap of stupid flesh, there’s not much room for protective succor or nurturance. Instead, the prescription is a series of reactive assaults, to punish the treacherous body when it errs. Today’s patriarchal medicine is also capitalist-industrial medicine, which introduces a new incentive for the heavy emphasis on crisis-stage interventions: medical procedures, drugs, devices are saleable to consumers as market commodities. The health of the populace therefore interferes with the medical industry’s maximization of profits, making it minimally desirable.
The slew of ‘social distancing‘ guidelines handed down by the CDC and states’ “shelter-in-place” mandates seem to indicate a focus on prevention in the Covid-19 response program. However, these measures are not preventative, but reactionary last-minute interventions aimed at controlling an already critical pathology. And lest we forget, humanity’s last great hope still lies with the biotech industry, as the scientist-saviors toil away to develop (and test on sacrificial animals, and patent, and sell) a vaccine. Once again, man-made technology shall deliver us from death! Shifting attention from heroic interventions to meaningful prevention would require addressing the overall abysmal state of human and planetary health that has rendered our situation so precarious, a task the Father-Doctors have zero inclination to undertake. Where’s the money in it? Where’s the glory? To quote Ivan Illich, “What need is there to worry about a murderous environment when doctors are industrially equipped to act as life-savers!”
From fear of death to domestic violence
Outside of the hospital wards, in homes worldwide, women, children, and domesticated animals are locked-down alongside men socialized within patriarchy to alleviate their fear of death through domination and violence.
A man in eastern China beats his wife with a high-chair as she holds their infant daughter in the family’s kitchen; the woman loses feeling in her legs, falls to the floor, still grasping the child, she cannot say how many times the husband hit her. Reports in the U.S. surface of men forbidding wives and girlfriends to wash their hands, reveling in the women’s terror of infection, in the life-or-death power they, as men, can wield. An international upsurge in domestic violence reports, calls to domestic violence helplines: France, 30% increase; Singapore, 33% increase; Brazil, 40-50% increase; Bogota, Columbia, 225% increase; United Kingdom, 700% increase. In the first four weeks of the U.K.’s lockdown, 13 women and children were murdered by men, twice the standard femicide tally of two women per week. Within the first days of lockdown in Columbia, a man shot and killed his wife, his wife’s sister, his wife’s mother. Men murdered at least 1000 women in Mexico in the first three months of 2020. Between March 27 and April 2, with “shelter-in-place” laws spreading across the U.S., as gun and ammunition sales soared, there were at least 19 murder-suicides, nearly all of which involved a man shooting his wife or child before killing himself.
In households where men beat women, there is an 89% likelihood that domesticated animals are also victims of male violence.
In Peru, at least one girl-child was reported raped each day for the first 17 days of quarantine. In Bolivia, police say they have been receiving more than four dozen reports of violence against children, including sexual violence, daily since the country’s lockdown began. By the close of March, the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) helpline had experienced a 22% increase in the number of minors calling in; 67% of minor callers identified their abusers as family members. Reports of online child sexual exploitation to cybertip hotlines are up by an average of 30% globally. Livestreaming the sexual abuse of children has spiked. Experts say: To meet the demand for new child pornography, more children are being abused on camera.
Male violence: common factor in every “disaster”
Intensifying male violence against women is recognized as a regular feature of cataclysms.
Noted in the aftermath of the eruption of Mount St. Helens, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the 2008 recession, Hurricane Sandy. The 2013-2017 Ebola outbreak in West Africa corresponded with an epidemic of violence against women and girls, which included increases in trafficking, child marriage, sexual exploitation, and rape. Public health experts cite “stress” as explanation for men’s brutality when catastrophe strikes. When men feel they have lost control, when they sense their mortality encroaching. When circumstances force men to confront reality.
It can be presumed that women are also “stressed” by volcanoes and hurricanes and bankruptcy and plagues, but women do not relieve the stress they feel by beating their partners, killing their partners, raping children. Women do not learn to restore their sense of control through violence against social subordinates when threatened, as men do, to mitigate their fear. That death-defying trick is reserved for patriarchy’s Master class, while women are its first-line victims.
In a patriarchal society, women are the primary underclass; wherever else a woman is slotted in the social hierarchy, she is below some man.
Every man is above some woman: women are easy targets, then, when men get that stressed-out urge to dominate. But violence against women as a male strategy of death-terror management has deeper roots; a woman is more than an easy target for men’s ‘murderous hatred,’ she is the perfect target. The female, by patriarchal construction, symbolizes bodily existence. As Elizabeth Spelman writes in “Woman as Body: Ancient and Contemporary Views” (1982), man-made culture split mind from body; men cast off the fleshliness they feared by claiming Mind for themselves, while portraying women as mindless Body. What is body-identified is also nature-identified, and both are inferior to Mind/Man, both are despised, for how they represent the origins of male mortality. In the Western patriarchal tradition, it is not only women debased to low status by identification with body/nature, but also nonhuman animals and nonwhite “savages.” We are the brute races, death’s emissaries, the Master’s enemies. And among these evils, a woman is often the most accessible. In the comfort of his own home a man can revenge himself by ravaging the concrete being of the woman he “loves,” or possesses: his own personal scapegoat.
He conquers, controls, degrades and destroys her, and in so doing, Man fantasizes he has defeated death. Yet still he will die; he is still afraid. So he sets his sights on larger prey. He has cut down the woman. Colonized the savage. Slaughtered the animal. Mutilated the body. But the natural world persists, uncontrollable reality/mortality mocking Man’s Master-Mind dominion. Earth: the matrix of our materiality, loathsome Mother of all Mothers, the ultimate body, bearer of the sum vulnerability of all mortal creatures. Women’s and nature’s victimization by patriarchal civilization emerge as parallel phenomena, as men strive to realize immortality through last-ditch rituals of violent domination. The ghastly irony is that in his denial of death, Man’s legacy is a human society condemned to self-obliterate. Fear of death becomes fear of life becomes the Masters’ murderous hatred for the living world. Breaking News: “A top nuclear security official says the U.S. must move ahead with plans to ramp up production of key components for the nation’s nuclear arsenal despite the challenges presented by the coronavirus.”
Life itself, in the terminal phase of patriarchy’s war against reality/mortality, is Man’s enemy, so life must be mastered, and when that fails, exterminated. And Man will fail. He is failing already. At the helm of his death-machine the Master is terrified, raging against reality, the natural world—and we cannot be afraid, neither to live nor to die, whatever it takes, in defense of life, we have to stop him.
Aurora Linnea is a librarian and ecofeminist pariah living near the Atlantic Ocean.
Featured image: anatomical sketch by Leonardo da Vinci.
We Need Your Help
Right now, Deep Green Resistance organizers are at work building a political resistance resistance movement to defend the living planet and rebuild just, sustainable human communities.
In Manila, Kathmandu, Auckland, Denver, Paris—all over the world—we are building resistance and working towards revolution. We need your help.
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Andrea Dworkin (1946-2005) was a radical feminist theorist, writer, and campaigner. In this excerpt from her book Pornography: Men Possessing Women, Dworkin discusses the power of naming. In her analysis, the development of the culture of patriarchy has empowered men with almost sole access to the power to define language. This control over language allows for expansions in ideological hegemony, and has serious implications for women over the centuries.
By Andrea Dworkin
How Patriarchy Works: The Power of Naming
Men have the power of naming, a great and sublime power. This power of naming enables men to define experience, to articulate boundaries and values, to designate to each thing it’s realm and qualities, to determine what can and cannot be expressed to control perception itself.
As Mary Daly, who first isolated this power, wrote in Beyond God the Father “… It is necessary to grasp the fundamental fact that women have had the power of naming stolen from us“.
Male supremacy is fused into language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it. Thought experienced primarily as language, is permeated by the linguistic and perpetual values developed expressly to subordinates women.
Men have defined the parameters of every subject. All feminist arguments, however radical in intent or consequence, are with or against assertions or premises implicit in the male system, which is made credible or authentic by the power of men to name.
No transcendence of the male system is possible as long as men have the power of naming. Their names resonate wherever there is human life. As Prometheus stole fire from the gods, so feminists will have to steal the power of naming from men, hopefully to better effect. As with fire when it belonged to the gods, the power of naming appears magical: he gives the name, the name enjoys she gives the name the name is lost. But this magic is illusion.
The male power of naming is upheld by force, pure and simple.
On its own, without force to back it, measured against reality, it is not power; it is process, a more humble thing. “The old naming,” Mary Daly wrote, “was not the product of dialogue – a fact in advertently admitted in the Genesis story of Adam’s naming the animals and the woman.”
It is the naming by decree that is power over and against those who are forbidden to name their own experience; it is the decree backed up by violence that writes the name indelibly in blood in a male dominated culture. The male does not merely name women evil; he exterminates nine million women as witches because he is named them evil. He does not merely name women weak; he mutilates the female body, binds it up so that it cannot move freely, uses it as a toy or ornament, keeps it caged and stunted because he has named women weak. He says that the female wants to be raped; he rapes. She resists rape; he must beat her, threaten her with death, forcibly carry her off, attack her in the night, use knife or fist; and still he says she wants it, they all do. She says no; he claims that means yes.
He names her ignorant then forbids her education.
He does not allow her to use her mind or body rigourously, their names her intuitive and emotional. He defines femininity and when she does not conform he names her deviant, sick, beats her up, slices of her clitoris (repository of pathological masculinity), tears out her womb, (source of her personality), lobotomizes or narcotizes her (perverse recognition that she can think, though thinking in a woman is named deviant).
He names antagonism and violence, mixed in varying degrees “sex”; he beats her and names it variously “proof of love“ (if she is wife) or “eroticism“ (if she is mistress). If she wants him sexually he names her slut; if she does not want him he rapes her and says she does; If she would rather study or paint he names her repressed and brags he can cure her pathological interests with the apocryphal “good fuck“. He names her housewife, fit for only the house, keeps her poor and utterly dependent, only to buy her with his money should she leave the house and then he calls her whore. He names her whatever suits him. he does what he wants and calls it what he likes.
He actively maintains the power of naming through force and he justifies force through the power of naming.
The world is his because he has named everything in it, including her. She uses this language against herself because it cannot be used any other way. […]
Whatever contradicts or subverts male naming is defamed out of existence; the power of naming itself, in the male system, is a form of force.
On this episode of the Green Flame, we interviewed Shahidah Janjua about women, writing, activism and the creation of a Women’s Centre in Kerry. Shahidah read one of her soon-to-be-published poems.
This episode is also dedicated to the memory of our beloved sister.
We share this memorial she wrote on the passing of Andrea Dworkin, whom she mentions in the interview saying, “I love that woman.”
On Andrea’s Passing.
April 12, 2005 05:53 AM
“I am gutted. It is the end of an era; not of our resistance, but of an era. I am a Pakistani woman of 55, a mother, a grandmother. I read Letters from a War Zone when I was 36 and it did save my life, not in any cliched way, but really. Everything I have done, thought and understood since then has evolved from reading that book. It laid bare what I had known and experienced. I went on to read all Andrea’s books. I wrote to Andrea to tell her this. Even if my voice was one of thousands, I felt it was important for her to know what she had given me. She replied with great humility.
At first I loved and looked up to Andrea as a child does to its mother, always wanting clarity, the truth, and cherishing the guidance when it came in articles, speeches, interviews and books. I grew from there into an adult and an equal, because this is the power that the truth gave me. It demanded that I grow in stature in the world and stand shoulder to shoulder with brave women, by becoming a brave woman myself. No other words, no other actions in the world had allowed me the full possibility of seeing myself in this way; someone of great worth and endless potential. Always her gendered analysis was the key. The abiding question it left me with in any circumstance was “where are the women in this, and what is happening to them?”, the question that followed was “where am I in this, and what is happening to me?” Asking these questions requires brutal honesty, and no place for complicity. I have lost a friend and a sister, and the way that I can honour this very precious relationship is by carrying on the resistance to male supremacy and domination.”
On behalf of the Women of DGR:
We lost you Shahidah in March, and we are gutted. We mourn no longer having the opportunity to work shoulder to shoulder with you, dear sister. We cherish the many gifts of your life’s work. We dedicate our lives, as you once did, to being brave, to continuing that work, wherever we are, with whatever gifts we have to give. With all our love and respect Shahidah Janjua, Thank You.
Rest in Peace. Rest in Power.
Shahidah was a woman of strength, a feminist, writer and member of DGR.
This excerpt from Chapter 4 of the book Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet was written by Lierre Keith. Click the link above to purchase the book or read online for free.This is part 4 of this chapter.
While the alternative culture “celebrates political disengagement,” what it attacks are conventions, morals, and boundaries. It comes down to a simple question: Are we after shock value or justice? Is the problem a constraining set of values or an oppressive set of material conditions? Remember that one of the cardinal points of liberalism is that reality is made up of values and ideas, not relationships of power and oppression. So not only is shock value an adolescent goal, it’s also a liberal one.
This program of attacking boundaries rather than injustice has had serious consequences on the left, and to the extent that this attack has won, on popular culture as a whole. When men decide to be outlaw rebels, from Bohemians to Hell’s Angels, one primary “freedom” they appropriate is women. The Marquis de Sade, who tortured women, girls, and boys—some of whom he kidnapped, some of whom he bought—was declared “the freest spirit that has yet existed” by Guillaume Apollinaire, the founder of the surrealist movement.63 Women’s physical and sexual boundaries are seen as just one more middle-class convention that men have a right to overcome on their way to freedom. Nowhere is this more apparent—and appalling—than in the way so many on the left have embraced pornography.
The triumph of the pornographers is a victory of power over justice, cruelty over empathy, and profits over human rights. I could make that statement about Walmart or McDonalds and progressives would eagerly agree. We all understand that Walmart destroys local economies, a relentless impoverishing of communities across the US that is now almost complete. It also depends on near-slave conditions for workers in China to produce the mountains of cheap crap that Walmart sells. And ultimately the endless growth model of capitalism is destroying the world. Nobody on the left claims that the cheap crap that Walmart produces equals freedom. Nobody defends Walmart by saying that the workers, American or Chinese, want to work there. Leftists understand that people do what they have to for survival, that any job is better than no job, and that minimum wage and no benefits are cause for a revolution, not a defense of those very conditions. Likewise McDonalds. No one defends what McDonalds does to animals, to the earth, to workers, to human health and human community by pointing out that the people standing over the boiling grease consented to sweat all day or that hog farmers voluntarily signed contracts that barely return a living. The issue does not turn on consent, but on the social impacts of injustice and hierarchy, on how corporations are essentially weapons of mass destruction. Focusing on the moment of individual choice will get us nowhere.
The problem is the material conditions that make going blind in a silicon chip factory in Taiwan the best option for some people. Those people are living beings. Leftists lay claim to human rights as our bedrock and our north star: we know that that Taiwanese woman is not different from us in any way that matters, and if going blind for pennies and no bathroom breaks was our best option, we would be in grim circumstances.
And the woman enduring two penises shoved up her anus? This is not an exaggeration or “focusing on the worst,” as feminists are often accused of doing. “Double-anal” is now standard fare in gonzo porn, the porn made possible by the Internet, the porn with no pretense of a plot, the porn that men overwhelmingly prefer. That woman, just like the woman assembling computers, is likely to suffer permanent physical damage. In fact, the average woman in gonzo porn can only last three months before her body gives out, so punishing are the required sex acts. Anyone with a conscience instead of a hard-on would know that just by looking. If you spend a few minutes looking at it—not masturbating to it, but actually looking at it—you may have to agree with Robert Jensen that pornography is “what the end of the world looks like.”
“By that I don’t mean that pornography is going to bring about the end of the world; I don’t have apocalyptic delusions. Nor do I mean that of all the social problems we face, pornography is the most threatening. Instead, I want to suggest that if we have the courage to look honestly at contemporary pornography, we get a glimpse—in a very visceral, powerful fashion—of the consequences of the oppressive systems in which we live. Pornography is what the end will look like if we don’t reverse the pathological course that we are on in this patriarchal, white-supremacist, predatory corporate-capitalist society. . . . Imagine a world in which empathy, compassion, and solidarity—the things that make decent human society possible—are finally and completely overwhelmed by a self-centered, emotionally detached pleasure-seeking. Imagine those values playing out in a society structured by multiple hierarchies in which a domination/subordination dynamic shapes most relationships and interaction. . . . [E]very year my sense of despair deepens over the direction in which pornography and our pornographic culture is heading. That despair is rooted not in the reality that lots of people can be cruel, or that some number of them knowingly take pleasure in that cruelty. Humans have always had to deal with that aspect of our psychology. But what happens when people can no longer see the cruelty, when the pleasure in cruelty has been so normalized that it is rendered invisible to so many? And what happens when for some considerable part of the male population of our society, that cruelty becomes a routine part of sexuality, defining the most intimate parts of our lives?” 64
All leftists need to do is connect the dots, the same way we do in every other instance of oppression. The material conditions that men as a class create (the word is patriarchy) mean that in the US battering is the most commonly committed violent crime: that’s men beating up women. Men rape one in three women and sexually abuse one in four girls before the age of fourteen. The number one perpetrator of childhood sexual abuse is called “Dad.” Andrea Dworkin, one of the bravest women of all time, understood that this was systematic, not personal. She saw that rape, battering, incest, prostitution, and reproductive exploitation all worked together to create a “barricade of sexual terrorism”65 inside which all women are forced to live. Our job as feminists and members of a culture of resistance is not to learn to eroticize those acts; our task is to bring that wall down.
In fact, the right and left together make a cozy little world that entombs women in conditions of subservience and violence. Critiquing male supremacist sexuality will bring charges of being a censor and a right-wing antifun prude. But seen from the perspective of women, the right and the left create a seamless hegemony.
Gail Dines writes, “When I critique McDonalds, no one calls me anti-food.”66 People understand that what is being critiqued is a set of unjust social relations—with economic, political, and ideological components—that create more of the same. McDonalds does not produce generic food. It manufactures an industrial capitalist product for profit. The pornographers are no different. The pornographers have built a $100 billion a year industry, selling not just sex as a commodity, which would be horrible enough for our collective humanity, but sexual cruelty.67 This is the deep heart of patriarchy, the place where leftists fear to tread: male supremacy takes acts of oppression and turns them into sex. Could there be a more powerful reward than orgasm?
And since it feels so visceral, such practices are defended (in the rare instance that a feminist is able to demand a defense) as “natural.” Even when wrapped in racism, many on the left refuse to see the oppression in pornography. Little Latina Sluts or Pimp My Black Teen provoke not outrage, but sexual pleasure for the men consuming such material. A sexuality based on eroticizing dehumanization, domination, and hierarchy will gravitate to other hierarchies, and find a wealth of material in racism. What it will never do is build an egalitarian world of care and respect, the world that the left claims to want.
On a global scale, the naked female body—too thin to bear live young and often too young as well—is for sale everywhere, as the defining image of the age, and as a brutal reality: women and girls are now the number one product for sale on the global black market. Indeed, there are entire countries balancing their budgets on the sale of women.68 Is slavery a human rights abuse or a sexual thrill? Of what use is a social change movement that can’t decide?
We need to stake our claim as the people who care about freedom, not the freedom to abuse, exploit, and dehumanize, but freedom from being demeaned and violated, and from a cultural celebration of that violation.
This is the moral bankruptcy of a culture built on violation and its underlying entitlement. It’s a slight variation on the Romantics, substituting sexual desire for emotion as the unmediated, natural, and privileged state. The sexual version is a direct inheritance of the Bohemians, who reveled in public displays of “transgression, excess, sexual outrage.” Much of this ethic can be traced back to the Marquis de Sade, torturer of women and children. Yet he has been claimed as inspiration and foundation by writers such as “Baudelaire, Flaubert, Swinburne, Lautréamont, Dostoevski, Cocteau, and Apollinaire” as well as Camus and Barthes.69 Wrote Camus, “Two centuries ahead of time . . . Sade extolled totalitarian societies in the name of unbridled freedom.”70 Sade also presents an early formulation of Nietzsche’s will to power. His ethic ultimately provides “the erotic roots of fascism.”71
Once more, it is time to choose. The warnings are out there, and it’s time to listen. College students have 40 percent less empathy than they did twenty years ago.72 If the left wants to mount a true resistance, a resistance against the power that breaks hearts and bones, rivers and species, it will have to hear—and, finally, know—this one brave sentence from poet Adrienne Rich: “Without tenderness, we are in hell.”73
—
The alternative culture of the ’60s offered a generalized revolt against structure, responsibility, and morals. Being a youth culture, and following out of the Bohemian and the Beatniks, this was predictable. But a rejection of all structure and responsibility ends ultimately in atomized individuals motivated only by self interests, which looks rather exactly like capitalism’s fabled Economic Man. And a flat out refusal of the concept of morality is the province of sociopaths. This is not a plan with a future.
Take the pull of the alternative culture across the left. Now add the ugliness and the authoritarianism of the right’s “family values.” It’s no surprise that the left has ceded all claim to morality. But it’s also a mistake. We have values, too. War is a moral issue. Poverty is a moral issue. Two hundred species driven extinct every day is a moral issue. Underneath every instance of injustice is a violation of what we know is right. Unrestricted personal license in a context that abandons morals to celebrate outrage will not inspire a movement for justice, nor will it build a culture worth living in. It will grant the powerful more entitlements—for instance, the rich will get richer, and the poor will be conceptually nonexistent, except as a resource. “If it feels good, do it” isn’t even the province of adolescence; it’s the morality of a toddler. For the entitled individual, in whatever version—Homo economicus, Homo bohemicus, or Homo sadeus—pleasure is reduced to cheap thrills, while the deepest human joys—intimacy, belonging, participation from community to cosmos—are impossible. This is because those joys depend on a realization that we need other people and other beings, ultimately a whole web of existence, all of whom deserve our protection and respect. In return we get rewards, rewards that can accrue into profound satisfaction: from the contented joy of communal well-being to the animal ecstasy of sex to the grace of participation in the mystery.
Currently, the right places the blame for the destruction of both family and community at the feet of liberalism. The real culprit, of course, is capitalism, especially the corporate and mass media versions. But as long as the left refuses to fight for our values as values—and to enact those values in our lives and our movements—the right will be partially correct. They will also have recruitment potential that we’re squandering: people know that civic life and basic social norms have degenerated.
It is a triumph for capitalism that the right is winning the US culture war by pinning this decay of family and community on the left. But the right is willing to take a moral stance, even though the man behind the curtain isn’t Sodom or Gomorrah, it’s corporate capitalism. Meanwhile the left might identify capitalism as the problem, but by and large refuses a moral stance.
The US is dominated by corporate rule. The Democrats and Republicans are really the two wings of the Capitalist Party. Neither is going to critique the masters. It is up to us, the people who hold human rights and our living planet dear above all things, to speak the truth. We need to rise above individualism and live in the knowledge that we are the only people who are going to defend what is good in human possibility against the destructive overlapping power-grab of capitalism, patriarchy, and industrialization.
Cottonwood trees shaded the little river, while the rising sun brightened the blue sky and lit up the expansive slopes of the Sonoran Desert, dotted with prickly pear, saguaro, and cholla cactuses. I was in Aravaipa Canyon, a gorge in the Pinal Mountains of Southern Arizona, where I would prepare thirteen people to be in ceremonial conversation with the land for three days and nights. Aravaipa is an Apache name which means “laughing waters,” and the name fits. The river was brisk and clear as it churned its way around boulders and rippled over gravel bars in a playful, bubbling chorus.
On that first morning in the desert, I’d awakened with a dream.
I see a woman about to be raped. She’s yanked out of the driver’s seat of her car by a man who holds her captive while undoing his pants. A male friend turns to me and asks if he should try to stop it.
“Yes, absolutely!” I respond in haste.
My friend picks up a club that resembles a baseball bat and moves toward the rapist. My stomach knots; what if I’ve just sent my friend into a dangerous situation and he gets killed or hurt? I decide to join him and approach the rapist from behind, while my friend approaches him from the side. As we get closer, the rapist stops, and I feel surprised when he turns around with his hands held up in surrender.
Although our dominant culture marginalizes dreams, we must learn to pay attention to the wisdom and direction they offer. The Tz’utujil Mayan culture elected officials based on the number of villagers who dreamed of that person occupying the position.[1] The dreamwork of the Iroquois preceded the dreamwork of Freud and Jung. The Iroquois knew dreams were sacred and that to ignore them was to invite disaster;[2] they understood that the human soul makes its desires known through dreams.[3] Founder of Dream Tending, Stephen Aizenstat says dreams arise from the “World Dream;” they offer us a glimpse of the desires of the world so we may “act in the world, on behalf of the world…in Archetypal Activism.”[4] When the wisdom of our dreams guides our direct action, we’re able to bring together our visionary and revolutionary natures in a radical dreamwork. With the earth dreaming through us, we’re guided to take the actions that matter most.
Dreams hold a multiplicity of meaning and, like trees, rivers, and birds, each dream element has intelligence; it usually understands more than our waking ego. I guide others to recount their dreams in present tense, inviting them to be in the dream so its visceral impact has an opportunity to arise or burst forth.
On that morning in Aravaipa Canyon, I closed my eyes, returning to the dream about the rape. What was it asking me to experience and how could I steep myself in its mystery? The edgiest part of my dream was asking my friend to risk his life. I felt afraid that he could get hurt or die. I feel similarly when I send questers on a 3-day solo fast. Although I’ve taught them ways to be safe in the backcountry, anything could happen.
On a vision quest, each quester is invited to let go of their identity and listen for a deeper call—in this way, we discover who we really are and how we may serve the world. Questers are invited to undertake a psycho-spiritual death, an initiatory dismemberment, which can lead to a mature adulthood. Such a journey is inherently risky, even beyond the solo days.
Founder of Animas Valley Institute, Bill Plotkin writes that the great crises of our time stem from breakdowns in natural human development. He says that healthy, mature cultures have always emerged from nature: “from the depths of our individual and collective psyches, from the Earth’s imagination acting through us, from the mythic realm of dreams or the Dreamtime, from Soul, from the Soul of the world, from Mystery.” We can’t think our way into maturity; we cultivate our wholeness through allowing the natural world and our dreams to guide us.[5] Yet we can only become whole within a healthy Earth community. So what about the clear-cut forests, drained wetlands, and plowed prairies?
As mountains are mined, rivers are dammed and poisoned, and hundreds more species become extinct each day, my heart breaks at our human failure to protect our nonhuman relatives on whom we depend; they’re dying because they depend on us too. As the oceans fill with plastic, the ice melts, and greenhouse gas emissions grow higher each year, I feel the rape of the Earth alive in my body and psyche. Perhaps this dream invites me beyond myself. What if this dream is asking me to seek assistance in stopping the rape of Earth?
Rape is Acceptable
I had a lot of dreams about rape in my early thirties; it felt unstoppable. How surprising that this dream ends with my friend and I stopping the rape.
I remember guiding women survivors of violence on Women of Courage Outward Bound courses in my twenties. We’d listen to the women’s stories, the other two female guides and I, and then one night, to our surprise, we shared our stories in hushed voices, confessing that we too were survivors. The line between heroine and victim, wilderness guide and survivor, blurred.
It’s hard to perceive rape when you’re raised in a culture where rape is acceptable. As the most under-reported crime, rape[6] is notoriously under-investigated, largely unpunished, and rarely spoken about; less than one percent of rapes end in a felony conviction. Even then, a perpetrator does not often receive jail time, especially if they knew their victim; this sends a message that it’s acceptable to rape someone you know.[7] In eight out of ten cases of rape, the victim knew the person who sexually assaulted them,[8] and ninety-three percent of perpetrators of child sexual abuse are known to the victim.[9] Our culture barely acknowledges rape happens and nearly condones it. The rape of women, the abuse of children, and the destruction of land is our norm.[10]
Sister Carl, my junior high school teacher, repeated daily: “Silence gives consent, girls.” Perhaps she was trying to help us avoid some trauma she’d suffered. But what did the boys in the room hear? What if there wasn’t an opportunity to speak, or we were too young to understand? And what of the Earth? If we are deaf and dumb to her language, does our lack of hearing exempt us from the harm we cause? Perhaps the memory of Sister Carl’s words is echoed in the message of this dream: speak, act, stop the rape.
Rape is Legal
American law is orchestrated to protect abusers,[11] and it legalizes the right to exploit land and water, while simultaneously making it illegal to protect them. “Sustainability itself has been rendered illegal under our system of law,” said Thomas Linzey, Executive Director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund.[12] Our dominant culture, global industrial empire, does not acknowledge the rape of the Earth. Instead, it talks about acquiring resources and the right to exploit. While the Earth suffers massive environmental devastation, many call it climate change and focus on human survival, but dealing with climate change within the values of our dominant culture will only allow the rape to continue.[13]
Our ecological crisis is sourced in a “collective perceptual disorder,”[14] a “collective myopia”[15] that misses our innate connection to Earth. Our culture is founded on the misperception that nonhumans aren’t alive and have no feelings or consciousness; this allows us to perpetuate the lie that no rape is happening at all. To stop a rape, we have to perceive that one is happening, and to do that, we must recognize that we live embedded in relationship with all of life on the planet.
How will I ask people to help me stop the rape if they don’t see it? Dissociation, denial, and silencing perpetuate trauma; to heal, the truth must be told. Although the “ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness,” remembering terrible events is part of restoring justice.[16]
How would you respond if someone you love was threatened? When we see our earthly relatives being harmed, aren’t we equally responsible to act fiercely and lovingly to protect them, like a mother grizzly looking out for her cubs? Fighting back isn’t wrong; it’s relative to the situation in which we find ourselves. It is just as wrong and harmful “to not fight back when one should as it is to fight when one should not.”[17]
The Love of Trees
I know how it feels when others don’t see the rape. My neighbor friend and I were four years old when we had our first sleepover. When I returned the next day, sick with a fever of 103, no one guessed that my neighbor’s father, Jack, might have hurt me, even though his wife sometimes came over to our home when he was drunk to avoid being hit. No one found it odd when I said my vagina hurt and suddenly refused to attend nursery school. I screamed and cried until I was allowed to stay home. No one wondered why my friend, Jack’s daughter, was so troubled. I still remember when she stabbed me in the belly button with a needle. After playing with her, I often returned home with bite marks and bruises up and down my arms.
When I kept insisting that my vagina hurt, my mom took me to the doctor. She stayed in the room while the white-haired man examined me. I asked her later what he had said, and she told me that he said I needed to use less soap.
Being told everything was fine was confusing when my body knew a different truth—one that my mind didn’t know how to hold, let alone put into words. Although in the dream my friend could see the rape, no one saw it when I was four.
But I wasn’t alone; I lived in trees. The thick, ancient trunk of a giant ash tree that rose well over 100 feet in my backyard was the center of my world. Down the hill in a grove of pines, I played in needles, sometimes climbing to the tippy top, arms and body wrapped around the thin tip, the weight of my body gently swaying from side to side. In summer, I crawled to the far reaches of the cherry tree’s branches, eating more berries than made it into my basket for mom’s cherry pie. The maple tree grew in the front yard; I went there to hide, high behind walls of green leaves, where I could see all and no one could find me.
I sensed the trees had feelings, lives; they were living beings with whom to be in relationship. Did the trees know my secret? Is that, in part, why it felt like they looked after me? All trees know rape; ninety-seven percent of North America’s native forests have been cut down.[18] I didn’t know why my young body returned again and again to be held in the branches of these elders who surrounded my suburban home. Or why I turned to the smell of pine and bark instead of human skin or voice when I hurt. Now, I imagine that something in my cells trusted their love and wisdom; they nurtured me.
The Rape of Earth
The Apache who named Aravaipa Canyon no longer live here. Sitting at the edge of the river, I marvel at the joyful laughter of its flowing waters. During the 19th century, the Aravaipa band of Apaches living here fought many battles with the U.S. Cavalry. Hispanic and Anglo settlers began grazing stock and developing copper mines in the watershed. In the infamous Camp Grant Massacre, a death squad of American pioneers—including Tohono O’odham Indians, as well as Mexican Americans and Anglo-Americans from Tucson—descended upon an Apache camp before dawn on April 28, 1871. Those sleeping were clubbed to death, while those awake were shot by men stationed in the bluffs above. [19]
Arvaipa Canyon wilderness
In less than an hour, the raiders had claimed the lives of nearly 150 Apaches, mostly women and children; the men were away hunting. With no casualties to themselves, they sold twenty-nine children into slavery in Mexico. This is neither the largest nor the most brutal of attacks on Native Americans, but it came at a time when a “peace policy” had been promised by the federal government. President Grant expressed outrage and sought to punish the attackers. Although a trial was held for 100 alleged participants, no justice was had; a jury of twelve Anglos and Mexican Americans from Tucson took only nineteen minutes to find the accused not guilty.[20] The remaining Apache were relocated to White Mountain Reservation to the northeast.[21]
Civilization is brutal and unsustainable; agriculture is dependent upon imperialism and genocide. As feminist and environmentalist Lierre Keith said, “You pull down the forest, you plow up the prairie, you drain the wetland. Especially, you destroy the soil.”[25] Shifting from fossil fuels to green energy is a false solution. Green technology markets solutions while denuding the planet; corporations and government profit.[26] Ecosystems are devastated by solar and wind projects, and the increased mining and consumption they entail. Our political system is bankrupt, and violence against women and the Earth are “legitimated and promoted by both patriarchal religion and science” and “rooted in the eroticization of domination.”[27]
The Earth Created Us This Way
Three saguaro cactuses surrounded us in Aravaipa Canyon; each one about thirty feet tall with barrel appendages on each side that look like arms. I shared my dream with the questers in our opening council. “Will you help me stop the rape?” I said. “Put your body between the rape and the rapist?” I raised my voice, uncomfortable with the ferocity of my words. The rim across from us was some distance away, but several moving dots caught my eye. I slowly deciphered them as five bighorn sheep moving causally along the mountainside.
Harrison[28], a young man in his late twenties in graduate school, later shared his view over dinner.
“There’s not a problem,” he said. “The Earth is dreaming us; she created us this way.”
“It’s not a problem that 200 species go extinct each day?” I responded, feeling stunned.
“Extinctions have happened throughout history,” he answered. “It’s all part of her plan.”
“Extinctions have never occurred at this level. This isn’t a passive geological event, it’s extermination by capitalism,”[29] I said. “Yes, the Earth is dreaming us, but we’re sick and disconnected. This isn’t her plan.”
“We shouldn’t treat the Earth like a victim,” he responded. “She’s whole. She doesn’t need us to rescue her. She can take care of herself. She’s more powerful than we know.”
“Isn’t it possible for someone to be both whole and harmed by another?” I asked. “Life is far more complex than a drama triangle—victim, rescuer, perpetrator. This is about honoring the Earth and all of life as Sacred, regardless how powerful she is.”
“Activists are too angry, and protesting doesn’t change anything,” Harrison stated. “Tapping into the imaginative powers of Earth and soul is more powerful—shifting our consciousness.”
“Listening to dreams and perceiving our larger mythic potentialities is imperative, but so is direct action; there are forests, prairies, and animals alive today because of activists and revolutionaries,” I responded. “Perhaps it’s not either-or, but both-and. Each perspective, dream, and revolution are relevant. The mythic is happening, and the rape is happening too. It seems necessary we attend to both. Why are you opposed to seeing the rape?”
A Morsel of Empathic Resonance
While apprenticing on a women’s quest in my early thirties, I asked the dream-maker to help me remember what happened when I was four. Sleeping on the edge of a red rock cliff, I awoke to roaring thunder and the grove of ponderosa pines lit up in the lightning’s glow. Jack was in my dream. “I’m the one who abused you,” he said.
In the months that followed, I remembered the grey streak that ran through his curly black hair, and the disturbing way he looked at me in later years when we both found ourselves at the curb taking out the trash. With the support of trees and humans, my body re-experienced and integrated the memories that arose. It took years to trust what came and even longer to speak about it; it’s not a story I often share.
Those victimized in our culture are invalidated and stigmatized, but my story is only a small thread in the tapestry of violence that pervades and envelopes our culture. My trauma has gifted me with a small morsel of empathic resonance for what most other living beings on this planet endure far more often than I.
By the age of five, I wasn’t allowed to play with my neighbor; my mother had grown concerned about the reoccurring bites and bruises. The giant ash, the grove of pines, and the cherry and maple trees with whom I grew up were far less fortunate; all have since been chopped down. Although my parents had moved, I returned to pay my respects for the lives and deaths of those loving trees who raised me and were my family. I remember them often in my imagination.
The Questions of Displaced Descendants of Slaves
I remember weeping in love and loss while huddled in the crowded adobe hall with over 100 people; Martin Prechtel was sharing the rare and forgotten history of indigenous peoples worldwide. We listened to their music and heard about their creation stories, animals, and daily life. We wept over the rape, the slavery, the injustice, and so much beauty already lost. We asked questions: How did we get here from there?What birthed the original destructive culture that grew to destroy all others? How can we, the displaced descendants of slaves, live and die in a way that feeds life?
Bolad’s Kitchen is a never-before-seen school which aimed to help us remember an intact human approach to living in sacred relationship with Earth. I returned there for seventy days over four years, in my mid-thirties. Martin had grown up on a Pueblo reservation and apprenticed to a Tz’utujil shaman. He taught us an ancient economics. Fellow participants and I made beads, and later repaid our debt to the Earth for the obsidian rocks and shells we borrowed. We made pottery, moccasins, and felt, always offering the best back to the Holy Earth. She is starving and grieving, because she has not been given the ritual food and gifts she needs to live.
Martin shared stories of indigenous cultures who responded to attack in two ways. Some acted directly, fighting to protect their land, animals, and people; they were often killed or enslaved. Others acted mythically, returning to the “origination” place of their creation stories; there they waited to die intact, so their death would send out an echo that feeds all of life. But what if it isn’t either-or but both-and? What if we could act both mythically and directly? What if our revolution to stop the rape was sourced in both our ability to attune to our dreams and our willingness to resist our dominant culture?
Stopping the Rape
My dream seems to imply that we can stop the rape. I write to weave the world of dreams with direct action, so that our dreams can guide us. The weaving of mythos with revolution can support us in stopping the rape. Dreams are “willful, living beings”[30] that can re-align us with earth’s wishes. Through dream incubation, artists ask for a dream to guide their creation, and the dream that comes is “for the work of art, which uses us to birth itself.”[31] Similarly, we can invite the Earth to dream through us, and guide us toward the actions that matter most. When we act on our dreams, more dreams come to guide us further. In this way, dreams can come to guide our life. Dreams have led me to heal and discover my soul; they direct me now to guide and write; they urged me to write this piece.
Dreams offer pivotal clues about our deepest purpose. Each soul’s story feeds and seeds the mythic sinew of our human potential while also empowering our creative service on behalf of Earth. Just as individual transformation requires a journey of dismemberment, so too must our patho-adolescent civilization dismember and dismantle. Civilization will fall no matter what we do, and it’s likely to be messy and dangerous. To stop the rape, we must stop industrial civilization from continuing to harm people and the planet.
Radical change is necessary rather than minor reforms; it doesn’t work to “ask for justice from a system which is deeply invested in injustice.”[32] We’ve been taught to solve problems by getting along, but this strategy isn’t effective with an abuser, and global industrial empire can be likened to an abuser. Abusers “feel entitled to exploit, will do anything in order to exploit, and will exploit precisely as much as they can get away with,” and as eco-philosopher Derrick Jensen says, the only way to stop an abuser is to place him “in a situation where he has no other choice.”[33]
How may we bring this radical change about? We need stealth, resistance, ferocity, and creativity. We need to cultivate a relationship with our dreams, the more-than-human world, and our deep imagination. We need humans willing to fight for what we love by all means necessary to dismantle industrial civilization. Judith Lewis Herman says it’s “morally impossible to remain neutral.” Bystanders are forced to take sides. It’s tempting to side with the abuser, because doing so risks nothing and requires nothing from us; it also appeals to “the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil.” Acknowledging rape asks bystanders “to share the burden of pain.” It demands “action, engagement, and remembering.”[34]
Global industrial empire and a living planet can’t exist at the same time. If you love the Earth, are you willing to stand with her? What happens to Earth happens to us; to side against her is to rape ourselves.
Primal Scream
The cottonwoods shaded us as we sat in final council. Harrison shared an encounter with a teddy bear cholla—a cactus so thick with spines, it almost seems covered in fur.
“It told me to slow down so I could listen better. I took off my shoes and walked barefoot,” he said. “I later touched a hurt place on a barrel cactus, and a surprising flood of painful memories returned of a time when I was abused.”
Harrison’s demeanor was soft and somber. I wondered if his experience would shift his perspective on the rape of Earth. Many women in the group had shared stories of rape earlier in the week. One woman had dreamed about a primal scream of pain for the feminine and the Earth. She carried it out on the land.
“I wanted to hold that scream forever,” she said. “Perhaps my writing can be a voice for it.”
As we paused to take in her words, a squadron of javelinas wandered into a neighboring field to eat some nuts from under the truffle trees. Javelinas are pig-like animals with tusks; they roam the gulches in family bands (like the Apache did).
I shared too. “You may see me as a strong guide, living her mythic purpose. Yet I’m also someone who has been harmed by the violence of our culture. The young girl inside me who carries this hurt also holds gifts. I love her. She lives within my mythos, her heart connected to the heart of the world in a cave underneath a world tree. That little girl who found comfort in the arms of the trees still speaks to me today—if I’m still enough to listen. She informs how I love, guide, and write. She chisels a sensitivity into my bones that attunes me to the rape of Earth and feeds my fervor to act.”
Author Bio
Rebecca Wildbear is a river and soul guide who helps people tune in to the mysteries that live within the Earth community, dreams, and their own wild Nature, so they may live a life of creative service. She has been a guide with Animas Valley Institute since 2006 and is author of the forthcoming book, Playing & Praying: Soul Stories to Inspire Personal & Planetary Transformation.
Rebecca & Doug will offer an Animas Valley Institute program to Deep Green Resistance members and allies, June 26 – 30, 2020, A Wild Mind Intensive for Activists & Revolutionaries: Partnering with Earth & Dreams. We’ll deepen our ecological perception and engage in radical dreamwork…and more!
[11] Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (Basic Books, 1997).
[12] Sean Butler and Will Falk, “Rights for Lake Erie? Why Corporate Rights and Preemption Must Go,” DGR News Service, December 2019.
[13] Aimee Cree Dunn, “An Open Letter to Climate Activists in the Northwoods…and Beyond,” DGR News Service, December 2019.
[14] David Abrams, Spell of the Sensuous (Vintage, 1997).
[15] Laura Sewall’s essay “The Skill of Ecological Perception” was published in Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind by Theodore Roszak, Mary Gomes, and Allen Kanner (New York: Random House, 1995).
[16] Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (Basic Books, 1997).
