I seem to be having a lot of varied conversations these days about the right of women (and other marginalized groups) to self determination. And let me just lead up front with this thought: we are not in a great place. To put it mildly..

Truthfully, some of these chats really bring me back in time. My Hindu readers might remember the story of when Shiva was discoursing for so many aeons about religious philosophy that Parvati dissociated. Shiva grew angry and the story takes an earthward turn. They are reunited at the end, of course. It’s how I feel when my husband goes into a lot of detail about something mechanical, or math related. Helppp, I say, even as I recall the story above, and how relatable it is.

The convos bring me back in time in my own life too, because I remember being posited as the absorbed female listener in one guy or another’s longed for scenario. In the fantasies of young men, their female companion merely listens to admire and validate. The fantasy does not often include pushback and intellectual disagreement.

I just cannot serve such a purpose, and have never been able to. Such a male fantasy is the furthest thing from benign. We are being asked, as women, to lend credence to the beings with the greatest social power. And if their views are harmful, we are being expected to practice smothering our voices so that a man can feel respected even in his wrongness, when he would not do the same for us. And so that he can say to other women in his life: SHE agreed with me, so I’m not wrong.

Some of my memories of such interactions have even been tinged with guilt over the years. I felt I had robbed one guy or another of his sense of purpose, made him feel foolish in front of a woman. Other women have asked me to tone down my opinions to uphold this fragile sense of dignity in a man.

I would have rather spent my life entirely alone than acquiesce. And am grateful to be married to an exception to such a systemic flaw. Grateful also to my (male) therapist, who said, to my surprised laughter, “Anyone who spends any time talking to you knows to expect feedback.” Heh heh. Yes.

To be clear, I am aware that it is an honor to be so cherished by a man that he would wish to sit and talk about anything and everything with me. But in my own fantasies, these convos do not ever end in me muting myself.

And that’s really it, isn’t it? The interiority of women’s minds is not part of a lot of male fantasies. But dismissing our interiority does not erase it.

I believe that the Goddess is alive in the interiority of girls and women. Not abstractly, but concretely.

This is why patriarchy struggles to bend, not just our bodies to its will, but our minds. And, when it goes hunting for anarchy and heresy in us, it encounters the Goddess, and finds Her unacceptable, alluring. Why won’t She (we) sit with men in submission?

Oh well. They must fix that internal glitch in themselves.

Why am I talking about this? Because I find this thinking in every kind of group I engage with. And I see some people, but not all, struggling to connect the intersectional dots.

You can replace cis men with whichever demographic that holds privilege. But the main issue they show up with is that they see each issue as a disparate one, and, without being able to connect them, they expect each issue and each instance of suffering to pass a merit test through the filter of their own experiences of the world. With themselves as judge and examiner, how will the systemic connections be made? They cannot be made.

This is also why we can sometimes believe that all our oppressors are being purposefully ignorant. No one can be that unaware, we fume. But it kind of doesn’t matter, since their ideas of the world don’t include engaging with our interiority anyway.

If women are a bunch of sexy body parts, and disabled people are too much trouble, and LGBTQ people are against God (even if a God we do not worship), and the Global South is metaphorically a woman, whose resources should belong to the North, metaphorically a man, and any objection is met with eugenics policies, then the dots need never be connected, and we can all just spend our lives studying Guns, Germs, and Steel to understand why we deserved to be colonized, and make sure our next waxing appointment is booked, and be grateful for whatever Temu man seats us beside him and pontificates to us about his world domination dreams.

There is such a serious disregard for our personhood that I do not see a way to pretend we are alright. But apparently it’s the talking about it that’s hurting everyone, so smothering your throat is the way to go.

Radha.