I started my once-a-week blog 2 years ago (though I had remembered it as near Halloween and as it turns out it was the week before so I’m a week late).
The blog has become a part of my journey. It gives me a structure to pause and reflect on the prior week. I’ve also been cautious about rendering judgments in the “real world” that people are not ready to hear. But in my blog, I have a looser standard. If you are reading my blog, you are entering a part of my inner world of your own free will. If you are triggered, so be it. And if that’s the case, I invite you to pause and to reflect on why, and to go beyond surface-level reactions.
I have been triggered more times than I can count. It’s often where the healing begins.
I tend to not be triggered by words. But it can and has happened.
I would never use a sensitivity reader. Ugh! But the editor has flagged a number of trigger words (words that even after the fact leave me puzzled) and I usually go with a change but not always. An example from among many is I used the word “retard” as in to slow/hinder but because “retarded” is a trigger word, she flagged it. I could have gone either way. “Court” as in “courting” was another example—I had no idea that the word was viewed by some as sexist. I decided to get rid of it. People choose whether to be triggered. But some battles are not worth fighting.
I mean that at a spiritual and emotional level. Some battles are quite necessary. But then there are those, like the Battle of Malplaquet, fought on September 11, 1709 (odd coincidence) in the War of the Spanish Succession. King Louis of France had sued for peace, but the Grand Alliance (Britian, Netherlands, Austria/Holy Roman Empire, Prussia, Savoy, Portugal) smelled blood in the water and decided to up their demands. When Louis refused, the Allies invaded northern France and triggered Malplaquet where 30-40 thousand men died…in a day of battle.
For nothing.
It was a battle not worth fighting. The Grand Alliance had won. But part of men’s oppression (yes, that exists) is that men are disposable. So I take things like that as a lesson, a perspective in life…not every battle needs to be fought, indeed, some battles should never see the light of day.
The men are disposable mindset has been the message of feminists since the beginning of that movement, but it was already rooted in cultures the world over. It’s simple biology. Women and children are more important to the future of the species. Men recognize that. Which is why from before the time of cities, men have sacrificed themselves to save women and children.
But in the western modern world, it’s all haywire. If women don’t want to have children, they are no longer special in that way; such women are as disposable as men (welcome to men’s oppression).
The basic sexual dynamics still exist but it’s been seriously eroded—women were the gatekeepers of sex, men were the gatekeepers of relationships. Women used the withholding of sex, not strictly as manipulation, but to say to a man, if you want me then I expect commitment. Women therefore wielded significant power. Whatever anyone wants to say, healthy men with healthy hormone levels want sex far, far, far more than women do. When I was younger, I needed it several times a day and I called that period of my life “the madness” because I wasn’t getting it. Feminists have wanted to change the dynamics where women could treat sex like men do—but it doesn’t work. If women offer up sex freely, a man will often go for it as a without strings attached encounter. The man gets what he needs. The woman may think she is getting what she needs, but the biological drivers do not agree; deep down, something is missing/wrong.
Even as women have accumulated cultural and economic power, they have given away their role as the gatekeepers to sex (though here again in a two-faced kind of way as it’s become a thing for women to say the sex wasn’t consensual after the fact which unfortunately has muddied the waters of what counts as permission and why accountability only rests with the men (men’s oppression in a different form).
Power is a means to enforce safety. But it does not lead to happiness/fulfillment. Humans are social animals. Relationships are core to what gives our lives meaning—with partners, children, siblings, parents, extended family. Yet the progressive culture denigrates these relationships. No wonder white liberal women are the unhappiest people around (yes, studies have been done).
I want men to recover their maleness (no apologies/no shame). I want women to recover their femaleness (no regrets/no shame).
This has been a bit of a stream of consciousness.
Breath to Fire
S
I’m adverse to the cultural push to police language in the guise of safety or tolerance. Such motivations rooted in victim-hood and shame projection dynamics, are inherently totalitarian in the suppression of free expression, and creates more fear than it supposedly cures by enforcing social standards that keeps everyone locked on a minefield. Authenticity, a moral virtue when it works for the virtue police, is quickly forgotten when it becomes inconvenient.
