Race, Gender, & The Agenda Against Intimacy
*This blog will explore the dynamics within straight white culture that tipped the election scales and will cause a ripple in the relational world of intimacy, as we seek to assess in the chaos who we can trust with our most vulnerable bits. As patriachy always seeks to repress sexuality “out of the norm,” queer folk already feel the implications. And BIPOC folks, while Black folk in particular did not vote for this, will receive the brunt of a culture that seeks to commodify femininity for sexuality. Keep watching, keep revolting until we are all free in it’s truest expression of joy liberation, one courageous act of radical intimacy at a time.
Women are feeling betrayed. The more marginalized the identity, the more that hurt is compounded in the trauma of actually being physically unsafe in a country that votes against the interests of the most vulnerable. White women are of course in cahoots with this, having majority voted for a proclaimed assailant. Internalized misogyny is certainly part of the design that keeps this beast alive.
And when we look deeper, we see that men’s own sense of ongoing betrayal and scorn is what led to the results we have today. What the analysis seems to boil down to is young white men feeling hurt that they have been painted as the villians since perhaps 2016, and while they may not agree with the outright racist and sexist statements of Trump, they could look past that because he was the candidate that didn’t make them feel bad. Should this not be an indication that a subset of the population feel poorly about the state of their group when the one showing them unconditional love and support is degrading others with slurs in the next breath? This of course highlights yet again the importance of critical race theory, so that we can get accustomed to talking about harsh things that make us feel bad without simplifying it into us being bad.
As I comb through articles dissecting this, the connection back to the untended and unprocessed racial trauma of this country by the white folks who have perpetrated it, is the obvious culprit in how this transpired. White folks lack a resilience to talk about race because we do not practice being with the charge. And in our refusal to engage critically, and our attempt to entirely avoid by doing away with important pieces of societal progression like keeping Critical Race Theory in schools, we cause fallout all around us. Part of this fallout is the most recent U.S. election, and how this has solidified the divide amongst us having different lived experiences even further.
We seem to have gone backwards since the “great white awakening” of 2020. Was it “too hard” for us to stay with the charge in our bodies of the harsh reality that many in the U.S. live under? Are we so used to enjoying comfort that our tolerance for this discomfort tricked us into thinking it was not sustainable to keep this awareness present in our actions going forward? And for the steep drop-off in voting of white women ages 18-29, is this because white culture is not based on community responsibility where we may be driven to cast a vote thinking of those we seek to protect from further harm? Be that Palestine or right here in our own country, were white women thinking beyond their own resignation?
If every time we have these conversations defensiveness kicks in and we feel we are being attacked, for our bodies, identities or values, then the divide grows. So what is to be done? We educate ourselves and we talk. We try to do hard things. We develop our own somatic practice so our bodies can hang with it. Across genders. Not across racial lines until white folks can consistently practice being with this material while relating with other white folks. If our preferred sexuality determines that we relate with genders dissimilar to our own, we can expose ourselves to the information and media that our people are taking in. Because when it comes to Gen Z, you all have been entirely divided into silos of information with different facts and info. You are living different realities according to gender and race, and anything else the algorithms can divide you by, and you are fed the information that the machine has determined you already agree with. If you are old enough to remember a world without social media, that does not mean you are just as susceptible to being soothed with media agreeable to you. Media Literacy was not something any of us were taught in school.
Does this sound like a behemoth you don’t even know where to begin with? I recommend doing this learning and trying in a community that will hold you as you make the inevitable mistakes. I am currently in a course that made it possible for me to even be writing this rather than holing up in a pit of rage. The facillitator is my best friend and yet we think and feel differently about many big things. We are able to accept our differences and see from the other’s vantage point. We are better able to show up and defend what is important and tender for each other. This dynamic is what I want for us all in the microcosms of our relational worlds. The next cohort starts in January and I will likely be a guest trainer. Interested? Deets here.
In the immediate, I hope that men can try to understand where our hurt and self protection are coming from. For men of any age to align with economics over bodily autonomy, the environment and gun control, sends a visceral biological message to women that you all are not the ones to build and raise kids with. That you are not our protectors or bread winners, allies or advocates. Which only furthers the divide as we seek to villify, to both make sense of what has transpired but also as an attempt to ensure our safety. The nervous system will take data and try to categorize and classify so that if we are confronted with a split second judgment call, or are trying to assess if your sweet words on a dating app will align with real lived behavior, the negative bias designed to keep us out of harm’s way will prevail. If you are not able to align beyond what directly affects you and see how this may affect those you say you love the most dearly, what data should we take from that in supposing how you will show up in relationship?
The upswing in the rally call of liberal leaning women to go on a sex strike makes more sense when it is seen from the viewpoint of self preservation. The nervous system will also go into a state of me vs. you if it is led to believe that it has to be one of us that makes it out unscathed. If women are feeling unmet and unseen in their terror over this, a harsh boundary makes all the more sense. We are conditioned for sacrifice in a way different than male bodied folks are, so if put in the position where we have to give up something we may need and love to keep ourselves emotionally and physically safe, we may make that decision we don’t really want to have to make.
What’s behind the cry are the voices that have been consistenty unheard and silenced. We feel into where we have power and agency, during a time where we are told we do not even have this over our own bodies. And, of course, our first place to strike is to take back agency and say nothing will come in and out of our bodies until our demands of being treated as not only human but precious and worthy of good care, are met. This obviously clashes wildly with the entitled language of men who are subscribing to the ethos of incel, who feel they are owed being taken care of by the “gentler” sex so they can feel resourced to go out into the world and do “manly” things.
What this is really screaming is that men too feel unmet and unheard. That they have been trained to not have feelings and to not express, but that the tender in them also wants to be loved, held, and treated as sacred. Of course this too is a part of misogyny, that men should not embrace these tender emotions and instead women should be responsible for navigating them for everyone. Just like white supremacy delusions impacts all of us negatively, men too are the victims of misogyny. And just like women buy in for our own detriment, we join in on the negging and taunting of “weak” men in touch with their emotions who do not know how to “get the job done.” This disgusting dance is one that none of us are really consenting to. We didn’t think of the narrative, we are not crafting the plot, and yet we parrot the languate that feeds the machine. This is why it would be brilliant if we all could join together for the obliteration of patriarchy, designed for some of us to feel we have a little more power than others, but ultimately still disempowering for everyone and still totally about the concentration of wealth for a very select few.
This phenomenon is apparently being felt worldwide, with election results in the UK, Germany, Poland and South Korea mirroring this. The sex strike movment is inspired most recently by the feminist 4B movement out of South Korea. 4B calls for no dating, no getting married, no having children, and no sex. The movement emerged after a man murdered a woman, saying he did it because women ignored him. It was also an overall response to the rise of misogynistic social media platforms. The movement asks women to ponder what a world without men would be like and to make personal choices that align with that. It may be safe to say that many of us across genders do not want that, we just don’t know what else to do to get you to love and hold and uplift us the way that we have been screaming to receive. And we want to be able to hear you in your cries as well, which I believe we will be able to hear if our basic needs of safety are met in bodies inherently more vulnerable to harm. Meet us, we want to meet you.
*This blog focuses on some information in a subset of the voting population. It is meant to spark analysis and conversation that can then be widened to the shift in election results across many racial lines towards more conservatism driven by men. The connections and questions posed here are based on my lived experience and what I am seeing and hearing around me. Take some of these ponderances to your own micocosm of community and see what you may discover about the effects of race and gender on election choices, what this tells us about values, and the intimacy implications they may have for your communities.