A teenage Icelandic woman is raped by her Australian boyfriend after she’s had too much to drink. In his own immature, conditioned teenage mind, he doesn’t call it rape. Because the media and pornography and the way fathers raise sons and bro’s egg on bro’s, he convinces himself that he was justified in taking what was rightfully his — her body, her vulnerability, her sexuality, maybe even her physical and mental health. She is traumatized by the experience, and in his own way, he is too. Her life unravels, and so does his.
We know the story. Almost every woman I’m close to has been raped, molested, or sexually harassed. (You can read my #MeToo story here.) But the horrific story of this young woman and the man who raped her has a different ending, mostly because these two refused to simplify their story into a cut and dried duality of victim/monster. They were brave enough to see the humanity in each other and then to write a book about it and give a TED talk together.
What touches me most in this TED talk by Thordis Elva and Tom Stranger is at about the 13-minute mark, when Thordis Elva points out that whenever someone accuses another of a sexual crime, words inevitably get in the way.
Our Culture Has Brutalized Our Men. These Men Then Brutalize Our Women.
Is It Too Soon To Care About How Our Men Are Hurting?
I don’t think it’s too soon to care about and listen to our men. I think nobody rises until we all rise, and we need our men right next to us as women stand up and say ENOUGH ALREADY. We can still undo the damage that has been done if we’re willing to do what Thordis and Tom dared to do together. We can all start listening to one another, rather than letting our righteous anger cause more harm through shaming, blaming, and demonizing, which separates rather than uniting the genders.
For that matter, we need men to stop calling each other pussies, as if a woman’s genitalia is a sign of her inferiority and therefore an insult to a man’s masculinity. We need men to reckon with their own feminine energy, to honor their own compassion, nurturing, vulnerability, tribe-mentality, collaboration, and tenderness, right alongside the masculine qualities of strength, power, stillness, focus, desire, competition, and drive. Only when we heal the trust rift between the masculine and the feminine — in ourselves, in partnerships, in corporations, and in nations — will we come together in the power of our open hearts.
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Lissa Rankin, MD is a mind-body medicine physician on a grass roots mission to heal healthcare, while empowering you to heal yourself
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