They Weren’t Afraid. I Won’t Be Either.
So many women tell me they are scared. Scared to share their opinions and thoughts, scared to stand up for themselves. It's not just out on the internet anymore. Women are scared to use their voices in a lot of places, from the grocery to the mall to the parking lot.
I hear the same question over and over. How can one person stand against the onslaught of outright rage?
I feel it too. I found myself repeating the same fearful questions in my own life as I write. How can I hope to influence women against an ocean of outrageous bullshit, designed to destroy common decency. To divide and conquer us online. To subjugate women in a way we haven't experienced in decades?
At first, I asked myself why should I even try? The wave of rage and attacks have too much force behind them. An unseen, very wealthy, very determined force at that.
I Resent the Hell Out of It. Do You?
These manosphere sharks freely chum their vile attacks to denigrate women. But it's far beyond us. They attack anyone who isn't part of their high testosterone club. From people of skin not white, to different religions, hell, to different states, streets and tshirts.
What the living hell. It's getting worse. Faster and Faster every day.
I don't know about you but I am DONE.
DONE with being bullied into fear. Done handing my nervous system to a bot or rage news designed to keep me manic.
DONE.
WE ARE NOT ALONE
Last week I had a panic attack that turned into a crisis of faith, in myself, in our world, in our government, in everything that I believe to be true and valid.
I truly believed that I was alone, one person, in the fight.
I sat in that dark place for a few hours and then my ever-powerful intuitive voice led me to think about how women have fought and won for so many rights through the ages.
I thought back to my mom organizing women to be able to get their own bank accounts and credit cards when I was probably 10 years old. When it was happening it didn't hit me how insulting it was that my mom, who had literally broken glass ceilings for her entire life, had to have my dad sign for any of her financial accounts. I think about that now and my heart and mind say what the F$#K.
I clearly remember the joy when she and I went to our local bank and she opened her own checking account in 1974. All the women in the bank rejoiced and I remember being so proud and happy for my mom.
I am so much prouder of her, and the women like her, now.
That memory taught me a lesson that I'd forgotten in my panic. We have never done this alone.
Women have never won our battles alone. We won them together. Think of the suffragettes. They were jailed. Force-fed. Beaten in the streets for daring to demand a voice. They demanded it anyway. And they won.
The story of women bonding together to force change echoes through history. As recently as 1974, a force of women like my mom fought and won our rights to own our financial wealth.
As the manosphere has been busy screaming into their webcams about how women are ruining everything, we've been quietly building an empire they can't touch.
Women control over $10 trillion in U.S. household assets right now. By 2030, that number is expected to hit $30 trillion. We run 14 million businesses that bring in $2.7 trillion in revenue. We consistently out-vote men in elections. We make up nearly half of all political donors.
Read that again. That's not a wish list. That's what we've already done.
Now imagine what happens when we stop believing in the silos they want us to believe in and start doing it together, again. When we buy together. Vote together. Build together. Fund each other. Hire each other. Promote each other.
Not as charity. As a strategy. The math is already on our side. We just haven't aimed it yet.
The manosphere wants us to be scared. Isolated. Fighting each other for scraps at a table we have already paid for. The second we look up and see each other clearly, their game falls apart.
Not because we fought them. Because we stopped playing their game and started playing ours.
The Bottom Line
We aren't waiting for a seat at their table anymore. We are building our own.
You do not have to face this system alone. None of us do. They want us isolated because they know that together, we are an unstoppable force.
So let them chum the water with their rage and attacks all they want. They may organize the sharks... but we are the ocean that will drown them all.
_______
If you want to know about women’s organizations harnessing our power in the face of the manosphere, I collected information in this google doc. If you know of more organizations, please let me know! I’ll add them for all of us.
This graphic of the historical timeline of womens’ movements from the National Women’s History Museum pulled me out of me fear. Look at how long and hard we have fough.
I didn’t crack my skull on that glass ceiling for decades to have a bunch of billionaire man children take my rights away from me. I’m DONE.