Why Abused Women Are Ahead of the Evolutionary Curve
We crashed, burned, and rebuilt. Now the world needs what we learned.
This post is free, but not completely free. The price is a like. One little like! Consider it a button to upgrade humanity into a much more delightful species. Light the heart! Ta. ❤️
If you’ve read my Humanifesto you’ll know that I see this dystopian shitshow we are living through as a critical evolutionary moment where — just like other organisms we see suddenly disappear or transform in the fossil record — we have the catalyst for a profound shift in the species. We are heading towards a crunch-point: evolve or die.
Like the peppered moth in the Industrial Revolution, change will be necessary for survival. In both cases, polluted surroundings drive the change. But where for the moth (with its lifespan of a year) this species-wide change was physical and achieved through generations, ours is an evolution of consciousness and can occur (individually) within a matter of months. And where “survival of the fittest” for the peppered moth meant an outward shift from light to dark, for we human beings, it’s an inner shift in the other direction.
Because our pollution is mind-based. Tribalism, racism, sexism. Hate-posts, shit-posts, adverts. Scammers infesting our DMs, AI slop clogging our social feeds. Misinformation, disinformation, and information overload. An environmental crisis created by short-term thinking. Fear-inducing governments that snatch your neighbours in the night. The result: an overwhelming sense of disempowerment.
For some of us, the sense of disempowerment isn’t new. It was the base note of our childhood and reverberated well into adulthood. You can only live so long in a state of suffering. So we crashed and burned, then rebuilt ourselves, discovering as we did so that there was always a source of power that we could tap into. It was with us all along. Reachable only when we stilled the self-hatred and found self-love. Gentler than you imagine “power” to be.
Because “power” is portrayed as brute force and muscle, money and armies. But there are subtle forms too. Like electricity, running unseen behind ceilings and walls. Like the electrical fields of our hearts and minds and indeed, our whole bodies. The power within us is infinitely connected to the world at large and affects it directly. Too subtle to be measured, except by its effects. And it can change everything, and anything. More profoundly than violence, which only provokes more of the same.
We are the ones pre-primed for this crisis.
The lead-up to change is characterised by sickness. Sickness of all kinds, but let’s focus for now on the physical. Modern medicine eradicates symptoms, seemingly blind to root causes that our ancestors well understood as emotional and spiritual, as recorded in the language: dis-ease. We must find the root causes ourselves and change them, or they deem us “incurable”, we sensitive ones, whose bodies object to the way we are treated.
Ah, that paragraph, full of Latinate language and abstract concepts. It bounces off the skull like a squash ball. So, let’s get personal. The longest-lasting legacy of my abusive first marriage is an autoimmune thyroid disorder. I wrote about it, rather poetically here: Why Women Get Sick And Men Get Sad — The Hidden Cost Of Misogyny. There’s a reason why 80% of autoimmune patients are women. And that reason is abuse: sexual, physical and emotional abuse by the men who (at least at first) pretend to love them. Suffering from society’s idiotic desire to blame women for men’s behaviour, abused women often attack themselves from the inside out.
I remember, long ago, tapping on this metabolic disorder, the weight problems it causes, and landing on the phrase “I hate my guts.” How fitting, then, that my guts, the object of my hate, had become inflamed (the label: IBS). I could barely digest a thing back then; had to take enzymes, probiotics, and raise my stomach acid before every meal. Of course I could barely digest a thing. Could barely digest that I’d fucked up my health by marrying a man whose whole plan, from the outset, was to trick me into being his slave. And then, after slowly rebuilding my trust, married again, only for my second husband to fall chronically, angrily ill. My first thought was, constantly, I am a fuckwit. That was my phrase, yes, fuckwit. This was the source of inflammation I had to undo.
Zawn Villines’s survey earlier this year suggests that the default model of heterosexual relationships is abusive. And that’s because patriarchy in itself is abusive; it treats as subordinate and exploitable the physically weaker (statistically) half of the population. So you can’t blame women for “choosing” abusive men when it’s frankly so damn hard to avoid them. When these abusers are not only more common than non-abusers but, as her more recent survey shows, start off so charming, loving and fake feminist, laying out the bait of equal treatment and respect until the trap is sprung.
So it’s interesting that we women, trained under the patriarchy to blame ourselves for everything, do so. But we are learning not to.
Look at women now, getting empowered. Sharing red flags on the Threads app. Signing up for the Burnt Haystack Dating Method, or getting off dating apps entirely. Deciding yes, we are safer with the bear, and in reality, that means girlfriends and cats.
World fertility rates are in “unprecedented decline”1, and I don’t think that’s all about microplastics in the water. Women are choosing not to be oppressed, and motherhood is the key tool of oppression. It doesn’t have to be so. But men are going to have to evolve.
Reading You Can’t Fuck the Sad Away a few months ago, I was struck by this:
There is something particularly bleak about the way some men use women to self-actualize. Not just sexually, but existentially. The girlfriend who teaches him empathy. The wife who teaches him responsibility. The affair that teaches him shame. The daughter who teaches him tenderness. Women, in these narratives, are not people. They are plot devices. They arrive on time, deliver their lesson, and are discarded or destroyed accordingly.
It is astounding how many men need to be broken in order to become decent. Not challenged. Not humbled. Broken. Dragged through years of conflict, failure, rage, and betrayal, often inflicted on others, until finally, like a dog who has chewed through one too many pairs of shoes, they are housebroken.
And what happens when the women decide we will no longer put ourselves up for being “discarded or destroyed"? Men will have to self-actualise all by themselves, or hit the buffers. Those who genuinely get broken, evolve, and this is a good thing. Women are already default traumatised, so well on the path to empowerment.
From Virginia Mendez, Before We Talk About Sexual Liberation, Let’s Talk About This:
I think we start with awareness. I think we give women space and freedom to deal with their trauma however they need to. I say we educate EVERYONE to de-prioritise men in sexual relationships. It sounds radical, but I can tell you—even with that, they wouldn’t trade their pain for ours.
I say we trust that men are strong and mature enough to carry this. We tell women to refuse to feel guilty. We remind each other that there is nothing to feel guilty about, that we won’t victim blame them for having natural reactions to unfair circumstances, and some biological tendency.
I say from now on we expect men to come to bed with solutions, not problems. We demand that they can take no for an answer. We demand them to understand that anything less than enthusiastic consent is a no—and pressuring is stepping on old bruises. It is plainly wrong.
We demand better from men because we refuse to believe that men can’t be better.
And if men, as a whole, don’t change? Also good. As women get wiser, fewer of the shitty men will get to reproduce. Fewer kids will be damaged by abusive homes. The species will shift towards the light. Housing will get more plentiful, thus affordable. Capitalism, challenged by having insufficient up-and-coming worker bees, will need rethinking. But all this is not immediate. We need more light now, not in a generation.
And we can have it now. Individual consciousness shifts can happen faster than we’ve been taught. Not through months of therapy or years of processing, but through targeted work that removes the short-circuits caused by trauma. An effective method brings a shift so “now” that you can take yourself off to the bathroom and come out, ten minutes later, significantly lighter. This is how I went from self-loathing to love. This is how I right the ship every time it yaws. This is how I dug down, layer after layer, to neutralise the mother wound. This is what I share and teach.
I’m off to Portugal next week. A few days staying with my son in the rent-free house he manifested there. So next week’s post will be a different kind of gift. But after that, I’ll be setting up, for paid subscribers, monthly “lightening” sessions that will leave you feeling more relieved and hopeful than you can probably believe.
Because, unlike the peppered moth, turning dark to match our polluted world won’t save us from predators. Our fear and anxiety are, in fact, exactly what attracts them. So let us, all of us, lighten up.
“A man attaches himself to woman -- not to enjoy her, but to enjoy himself. ”
― Simone de Beauvoir
Great post, Ros. Thank you. xo
"The power within us is infinitely connected to the world at large and affects it directly. Too subtle to be measured, except by its effects. And it can change everything, and anything."
I'm hanging onto this fiercely. Thank you.