I want to talk to women about our role in preventing a dystopic future for our children.
We must tackle the job of dismantling misogyny at the community and inter-personal scale. Misogyny affects and plays a role everything else – every other form of oppression, every other path to freedom. For that reason, our efforts must be intersectional. That means this is going to be a painful process as we build new understanding and new muscles for this heavy lifting.
This post is basically a link roundup to sketch out the ecosystem of misogyny, capitalism, and White Feminism. (If you’ve never heard that last term, look it up. It’s not a good thing.)
My goal is to titrate between the high level collective perspective – systemic racism and misogyny – and that for which we are personally responsible.
That’s pretty much all we can really do, right? There is no hope of accomplishing this immense collective task if we don’t break it down into small actionable steps.
Some of the steps must be taken by white women specifically. Other steps must be taken by all women and also all men. This can sound daunting, but if you’re someone who considers yourself to be on a spiritual path, chances are that you will inevitably be tasked with these steps and may regret not attending to them sooner.
Because what we’re talking about here is the both the individual and collective safety of women, children and men, of all races and orientations, ages and abilities.
How can this not be part of (y)our spiritual work?
There are Physical, Emotional, Mental and Spiritual dimensions of misogyny that we must address within ourselves, and within our relationships, in order to function together as a moral collective and members of a healthy civil society.
Let me say right now, I don’t know that we can do this. I see little evidence that a healthy civil society is possible in the West. But while we’re waiting for the revolution, this is how we can each do our own little part to destroy the regime.
Let’s start by slowing down and looking at the culture of misogyny that gave rise to a political regime with such distorted views of women that a presidential candidate can achieve power in spite of, (and perhaps even because of), a statement like, “grab ‘em by the pussy”.
The truth is, we all know someone like Trump. We’ve run into him at school, at work, at the bar. We may even be related to his ilk.
We arrive at Trumpism slowly over time through a sequence that starts in our own lives as we navigate/avoid/cope with the trauma of living in a white supremacist imperialist capitalist patriarchy.
Physical Level – Money & Resources (including Social Capital)
At the Physical level, along with who we choose to spend time with, we need to address how misogyny shows up in our money and material resources, (our jobs, entrepreneurial ventures, where we spend our money and who we hire).
Kelly Diels has done an incredible job of charting the map of the Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand, how it perpetuates patriarchy in our marketing and explains why in the fucking world white women would vote for Trump.
Zoe Samudzi explained how white women aren’t as committed to dismantling the patriarchy as we might seem to be.
Following that, Emma Lindsay wrote an excellent article on how male privilege doesn’t seem so bad if you can marry it or be protected by it/in proximity to it.
Now, here’s where you might start to feel a little sick to your stomach but this is the most important part for us as individual women:
Pick Up Artist culture does this to women all the time.
I feel a little nauseous just writing that.
Pick Up Artist culture (PUA) is also know as the Seduction community. Wikipedia summarizes PUA as,
a movement of men whose goal is seduction and sexual success with/access to women. Members of the community are often referred to as “pickup artists” (PUA). The community exists through Internet newsletters and weblogs, marketing (e.g. banner ads, seminars, one-on-one coaching), forums and groups, as well as over a hundred local clubs, known as “lairs”.[1]
The rise of “seduction science”, “game”,[2] or “studied charisma”, as it is often called, has been attributed to the “chaotic” modern dating scene reportedly as a result of the increased empowerment and equality of women in western society and changes to traditional gender roles combined with the influence of distinct biological imperatives in men and women.[3] Commentators in the media have described “game” as sexist or misogynistic,[4] acknowledging that the techniques espoused do sometimes succeed in attracting women.[5]
PUA is rampant not only in the straight dating scene (I don’t know where it lands in the LGBTQ communities), but it’s pervasive in the workplace and consumer spaces, too.
There is a tremendous amount of crossover between Pick Up Artist culture and Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
When I started to learn about PUA, I cringed at how many times I was taken by the same tactics, but employed by managers and bosses, salesmen, even teachers and professors.
Turns out, those are the exact fields where the original PUAs learned their skills: fields of persuasion and compliance like business, sales, psychology and personal development, and sociology. Some men are particularly “gifted” and seem to pick up these skills without having to study too hard – they figure out how to get what they want and they apply those skills indiscriminately. Markedly, they have a total lack of any sense of ethical responsibility for the well being of others.
One of the tactics that PUAs will use is something they call pre-selection.
Essentially, they use women as bait for other women.
(This video highlights how similar the language between Trump and PUAs. TRIGGER WARNING: mention of assault, predatory language. It’s vile.)
A misogynist will surround himself with strong, attractive women in order to signal to other women that he is a good guy – he has been endorsed by what he will call “alpha women”.
Other women will look at him and think, “Oh, well he’s friends with so-and-so and she really has her shit together so he must be a cool guy.”
If they have interactions with him that somehow seem “off”, they’ll think it must just be them (and he will often tell them it’s their own insecurity or their issues to reinforce their insecurity).
In marketing, we call this “social proof”. Testimonials. X number of satisfied customers. 90% of dentists can’t be wrong. Pictures of smiling faces beside the “Buy Now!” button.
This is why Trump owns a beauty pageant. This is why Trump has supermodel wives. This is why his impeccably polished daughter is essentially performing First Lady duties.
They are a signal to other women – the ones he wants to seduce to his side. The ones he wants to keep from questioning him.
They signal that he must not be all that bad.
How does this shows up in our money and resources? Women will often trust and invest in men and men’s enterprises that have been tacitly “endorsed” by other women in this way.
We see women doing business with or being promoted by charismatic men – men who are apparently generous and supportive of the community – and we think, “Oh, well if so-and-so Successful Woman trusts him, he must be okay.”
This is where I become furious.
Historically women have had a hard enough time securing and maintaining resources. This is just another example of patriarchy enjoying the fruits of the labour and resources of women.
A high profile example of this would be marketing guru, Marie Forleo, having marketing guru, Derek Halpern, as a guest teacher for her B School program.
Full disclosure: I’ve taken B School. Following the process, it did what it aims to do. I was “successful”.
Knowing what I know now about white supremacy, patriarchy and misogyny, can I recommend B School? No.
Knowing what I know now, can I employ the strategies as taught by Marie Forleo? Not many.
Is Derek Halpern using the play book of PUA to prey on consumers using “Social Triggers”? Absolutely.
Is it cool that someone as influential as Marie Forleo would proudly claim Derek Halpern as a guest teacher in B School? Absolutely not.
Does aligning with Marie Forleo’s community and training them to use Social Triggers ultimately benefit Derek Halpern much more than it benefits B School students? You betcha.
Is Marie Forleo sidestepping responsibility for the wellbeing of her students and the self-help market in general because it is to her financial benefit? Fuck yes.
It’s gross. It renders me completely, inarticulately angry. You can listen to the podcast I did with Kelly Diels laying out how one major marketing influencer, Eben Pagan, literally is a Seduction community guru operating under a pseudonym.
Read these posts while I recover from my anger aneurism:
Liking Someone Can Be Terrible Information
Ivanka Trump is Calling All White Women
“You Are The Average Of Your Five Closest Friends” Is White Supremacy In Action
Donald’s Trump Card: White Women
Personally, I’ve seen a version of this play out in a thousand ways in “conscious” communities. Anecdotes are not analysis, but take a look around your own life and communities and see if you notice this version of the pattern…
Male entrepreneur and female entrepreneur decide to collaborate or cross-market. She (and perhaps he) has built their business from the ground up over years and has developed a great following. In their collaboration, she will use his services. Both will gain from increased exposure to the other’s community.
But, she has to purchase his services (for a reduced fee, of course).
She, in turn, will surely gain more sales from her increased exposure and the goodwill from his brand.
She supports the collaboration materially. He supports the collaboration gesturally.
Often, the collaboration costs her more than expected or doesn’t achieve the gains she hoped.
His business gains from the reflected goodwill of her successful brand. He has covered his costs.
I admit, that may sound like a very specific scenario.
Except it isn’t.
Just in my small city, I’ve seen at least twenty incidents in the past three years of powerful, high profile women who’ve run through this scenario.
But this is a general problem in society, so multiply it across our whole country.
Why? WHY? Why do we keep letting this happen?? It makes me so irritated.
I’ve also seen women organize to bring in male teachers to host a workshop. They’re not just securing a venue and promoting the event, but also arranging accommodation, providing transportation, and facilitating in-person introductions to other key influencers in their network.
When it comes around to that woman’s workshop? Sure, he’s happy to promote it online. Even write a beautiful ode to that woman and her work.
She contributes materially. He contributes gesturally.
Time and again, I see women and their enterprises being used as springboards, leverage, and window dressing for male enterprises. Sometimes her enterprise benefits, but often to a lesser extent than his.
You can call me cynical. I call it observation.
Emotional Level – Reciprocity
Humans are wired for reciprocity and female humans in the west are conditioned for politeness. This not only gets us into trouble when it comes to our bodies, but also with social justice and racial discourse.
White women must heal from the disease to please or we perpetuate the very oppression we seek to escape onto people of colour.
Again, my hero Kelly Diels wrote a tour de force newsletter on the marketing principle of Reciprocity and how it relates rape culture. This article is everything and I recommend you read it, but even a highlight will help fill out the picture:
Exploitative compliance professionals are trying to force you to receive.
They know that once you receive a gift you will be triggered – compelled, viscerally, by your deep social programming and tendency towards justice – to offer your own gift in return.
This is what sexual predators and romantic con-men do, too. They love-bomb. They offer so much time, attention, affection and gifts that their prey – women and girls – eventually feel obliged to reciprocate and give the exploiter what he has been grooming them to provide.
Obliged isn’t quite the right word. It’s deeper and more visceral than obligation.
Exploitative compliance professionals in marketing, sales and politics also try to force you to receive so you are compelled to reciprocate in a way that disproportionately serves them. Sexual predators, romantic con-men and pick-up artists try to force girls and women to receive so we are compelled to reciprocate.
Force you to receive.
This is what we need to scan for and counter.
Once you receive, you are in a sequence in which you will feel compelled to reciprocate.
So now…
It doesn’t take too many steps to draw a parallel between rape culture and something we might call racist culture.
We often don’t call out our racist friends because “she does really great work for under-privileged women in the community”. We drop it with our mothers and aunts who live in a privileged bubble because “they’re never going to change and have done so much to support me emotionally, financially, etc.”
We don’t address casual racism at dinner parties because we don’t want to offend our hosts “because it would put an awkward strain on our friendship and they’ve been so helpful through our relocation/birth of our new baby/recent depression/etc.
Silence about racism is racism.
When we are silent with our racist uncles, homophobic bosses and sexist brothers, we create a climate where these behaviours are okay because the perpetrators have other redeeming virtues.
But this is not okay.
This is Brock Turner media coverage. This is the CBC managers protecting Jian Ghomeshi’s job. This is PUAs lavishing attention and gifts so generously that to protest mistreatment would seem ungrateful or unjustified.
We are not living on a teeter-totter where a person’s racism or sexism is somehow balanced out by their goodness towards us.
This is how white supremacy and patriarchy are held in place: by giving with one hand and taking with another.
Here are a few more articles that expand the ideas:
Your Friends And Relatives Did This — Now What Can You Do?
How People Magazine Came Home To The Minivan Majority
The Toxic Attraction Between an Empath and a Narcissist
Mental Level – The Mind-Fuckery of False Equivalence
Coverage of the last American election destabilized our ability to think critically about content because of the shit job the media did of framing.
False equivalence sucks us into ridiculous arguments that seem unreasonable to be having, but we can’t help having them because of the way the argument is framed, as though two inequivalent points have equal merit.
False equivalence is a logical fallacy in which two opposing arguments appear to be logically equivalent when in fact they are not. This fallacy is categorized as a fallacy of inconsistency.
In the American election, Clinton and Trump were treated as equally flawed candidates even though they weren’t.
He was caught on tape boasting about sexually assaulting women, and also had multiple lawsuits against him at the time of his candidacy, even one for alleged sexual assault on a minor.
*But her emails! *
She had a long, controversial track record in politics from her positions as influential First Lady, Senator, and Secretary of State.
*He had zero government experience and multiple bankruptcies in his purportedly relevant career in business.*
As the tweet said,
The most qualified woman in the world lost to the worst man in the world.
Once you notice false equivalence happening, you’ll see it everywhere from Facebook comments, to arguments with your partner, to conversations about intersectionality (or the lack of it).
False equivalence happens when a man says, “Men are victims of domestic abuse, too,” in the midst of a conversation about women’s survival and recovery from abuse.
His fact is true, but it simply doesn’t occur nearly as often, the disparity is clear and statistical, and that’s not even what we’re talking about right now and also are you allergic to women-filled spaces or what?
False equivalence happens when women say, “I don’t need feminism because women occupy the highest levels of power these days.”
Wow, 4% of the Fortune 500 are women? I feel so liberated!
You say 14% of top executive positions are now filled by women. Jeepers! I can’t wait to be king!
I believe false equivalence arguments belong in the same category as “But, all lives matter”.
*Slaps person who said this.*
STFU. We know all lives matter but some lives are not *treated* as though they matter and that’s what we’re talking about right now.
This also has echoes of cis straight white women saying they don’t feel safe in relatively homogenous groups of women because…I don’t know why – they claim a million reasons:
They refer to past trauma, they say don’t trust other women, they’ve had “bad experiences” with other women and power dynamics, etc…
Yes, all those things have happened to them.
But here’s the danger with false equivalence:
When you conflate the hurt you’ve felt in past conflicts with the violence of abuse, and claim victimhood for yourself, you are drawing equivalence with people who are literally physically unsafe.
Feeling hurt and being abused are not the same.
You may be uncomfortable. You may be at a disadvantage. You may be feeling upset, unheard, unvalued, insecure, uncertain, dissenting, or out of alignment – you may be feeling many true things which are not the same as “unsafe”.
Your history and trauma response are real and valid, but privileging them is not always appropriate.
We have to recognize false equivalence and stop it whenever we see it or notice it in our own behaviour.
Spiritual Level – Bypassing & Privilege
Many of us have experienced “focus on love & light” advice from people consoling us after bad shit happens.
“Everything happens for a reason”, “it will only make us stronger”, “we will rise better than before”, etc, etc.
Spiritual Bypassing is the term coined by John Welwood in the ’80s to describe the tendency of all humans, but especially certain spiritual seekers, to avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks.
Spiritual Bypassing is the near instant legitimizing of anaesthetizing, avoidant behaviours in the face of crisis, shadow or uncomfortable truths with a strong orientation towards solutions regardless of effectiveness.
There’s much more to be said here regarding Privilege and Fragility but for now, I’m going to just focus on my home turf, an area I’m working in every day, the Spirituality scene.
In a nutshell, here’s what I’ve observed about Spiritual Bypassers.
They:
- insist on emotional comfort. I see this a lot from progressive liberals when it comes to conversations about race and white supremacy – they need to “be safe” in these conversations even though vulnerable populations NEVER get to feel safe in our culture.
- confuse anger with aggression/malice/ill will.
- conflate judgement with discernment.
- are prone to premature forgiveness.
- view speed of resolution/recovery as a marker of progressed spiritual evolution.
- often display an overdone “niceness”, exaggerated gentleness and sometimes superficiality.
- can only perceive painful emotions from the victim perspective (wounded child, abandonment, powerlessness) but rarely, if ever, from the perpetrator perspective (remorse, shame, guilt, responsibility).
This is where I want to circle around to PUA culture again because it’s easy to see where Spiritual Bypassing is pervasive in white culture when it comes to racism, but perhaps less so in patriarchy.
PUAs feed off of women who actively seek to uncover their own shadow and try not to bypass.
PUAs are like vampires who can recognize a woman who is likely to receive feedback, internalize it, and process it deeply. This is how they make you feel crazy.
They learn the language of your wound and reflect it back to you so that every issue is your issue, all your concerns are your projections. They are usually men with a keen intellect so they know how to use the language of feeling without ever actually feeling.
Not only do these men bypass like slippery fish, but they also know how to manipulate every conversation so that you walk away with more of your own emotional work to do.
Every conversation in which you bring up a concern ends up with you apologizing for it.
You are then held in this cycle by all of the aforementioned tactics. (“His friends are great so it must be me…”, “I do have daddy issues so I suppose this is the next dimension for me to work on…”, “I have had trust issues in the past so it’s possibly true that the intensity of our relationship is just triggering my old wounds…”, etc)
PUAs will read articles like this one and then cleverly turn all our arguments back on us to reinforce that we can’t trust ourselves.
(Here’s a particularly disgusting use of “mindfulness” as a way to enhance your PUA game. Seriously: PUA has infiltrated the “consciousness” scene in a bigger way than you might imagine.)
Patriarchy. Misogyny. That’s what this is.
What’s so gross about this in the spiritual realm is that most of us turn towards spirituality to cope with relational wounding, only to be re-traumatized by parasitical relationships shrouded in an illusion of “spiritual growth”.
(See again: PUA, narcissism and the tactics used to cause self-doubt in smart women, especially women who are inclined towards personal development and spiritual growth, who are always seeking to evolve and improve ourselves –> these men are targeting us.)
Back to Trumpism.
Trump’s path to the presidency was cleared by white supremacy and patriarchy.
There’s nothing unbelievable or special about this turn of events. Look around your own life. We all have our own Trump issues to deal with in our work, relationships, ideologies and spiritual paths.
What do we “do” about Trump?
We clean up our own houses.
We help each other recognize the signs of our own oppression.
We support each other to escape the traps of patriarchy and white supremacy.
We suspend our differences and act in solidarity with other women, particularly women of colour, because their struggle is our struggle.
We protect the resources of other women by making sure we do our own due diligence before we purchase, align ourselves or associate with leaders and purveyors because we recognize that our affiliation – socially or professionally – is a tacit endorsement that influences other women to let down their guard.
We stop condoning bullshit. Period.
Call out or call in, do whatever you have to do, but shut that shit down right fucking immediately no matter who the perpetrator is.
Zero tolerance.
Remember this advice from Shahid Arabi, author of the excellent article, 20 Diversion Tactics Highly Manipulative Narcissists, Sociopaths And Psychopaths Use To Silence You,
Highly manipulative people don’t respond to empathy or compassion. They respond to consequences.