Fuck Feminism

While I have been give every reason to choose an identity as a feminist through the abuse of men in my life, the question I'm asking is: do the men who inherited this patriarchy actually want it.

If you know me, you know that my passion can shift the room.  

In the midst of becoming borderline suicidal in trying to navigate the complexity of being a female founder in Silicon Valley,  I signed up for intense executive coaching. I interviewed half a dozen women, who I thought would understand me better.  Ultimately I hired the one man I interviewed and it was the best decision I ever made - but that’s a story for another day.

At one point in our work together, I was given an assignment to write a Master Class on Resenting Men…the task was to put together the perfect recipe to create a strong resentment for men.  It was a masterpiece due to the depth of my lifetime of experiences – the fact that I started out as a female fetus that my dad wanted to abort and then he raped and beat me, all the way through building multiple businesses with men that used me and stole from me, to partners that abused me, controlled me, and shamed me….I have a million justified reasons to resent men, and I even held back in completing that assignment;  I sanitized my stories, because I didn’t think my coach could handle the real raw depth of what I have experienced, as a child, as a teenager, and as an adult navigating the world as a woman. 

But the truth is, I couldn’t handle it.

My  story is not special or unique, there are millions of women around the planet navigating their lives vulnerable in every way, and being “safe” is something that most men take for granted.  Most men will never know what a woman feels walking down an alley, even in broad daylight.  Did I wear the wrong shoes to run, should I tie my hair up, should I tuck my purse under my jacket, can I run in this dress, are my breasts going to get in the way if I need to run, should I turn around and check, or would that give a signal, oh crap, did I just make eye contact…

This is the simple reality for every woman.
We don’t even “teach” our daughters to have these thoughts, they just learn, because literally everything tells them they are not safe.

And then the subversive culture underneath it all, tells them, it’s their fault.

It’s what they wear.
It’s where they walked.
It’s how they laughed.
It’s who they sat next to.
It’s the way they crossed their legs.

In some cultures, the men cover the women up so that just a slit reveals their eyes so they don’t trip over the cloaks draped over their bodies, such that they don’t entice men with the natural artifacts of their bodies; and still, they are raped and beaten, because, that’s “just what men do”.

Men are typically physically stronger and larger than women, statistically speaking.  Historically men have used their strength to overpower women and set up a world based on terror of what will happen if women don’t stay submissive.  This is the foundation of patriarchy, and there are volumes written on this topic, and it’s not my expertise, and I don’t pretend to care to memorialize the details, because I am more concerned about where we are going than how we got here.  

My point is this.

I probably have at least a hundred reasons to be a feminist.

And yet, fuck Feminism.

We are not going to change a world where women polarize themselves from men, where women replace men for the sake of gender, where women silence men, or silo men into a place of shame for the past.

We cannot move forward until we forgive the past.

We cannot unlock our potential without the other half of our biological potential.

We cannot heal the planet without our own wholeness.

I can and will tell my story.
I will share the wounds deep in my soul and on my body from the men who took from me, where those wounds are now scars of deep reflection and contemplation for what comes next for a society aching in pain everywhere.   Truth is the whisper beneath the toxic shame we all carry, and the way forward is deep love and acceptance;  of each other, ourselves and what has been.  The past should no longer dictate the future, and maybe we should ask the men who inherited the current patriarchy, if they actually want it.   

When we create synergy as all genders (regardless of how we identify, orient, or love) we begin a new chapter of “Collaborism”, and unlock a paradigm that expands the consciousness of our species.