Rape
I have had the ill-luck to be raped several times. I have had the good luck to participate with other women in healing circles.
As a matter of fact, there are as many men as women raped. Both genders are abused. Rape is not a gender issue; it is a power issue; it is an issue involving the violence that permeates human systems of relations. Violence haunts our dreams and, maybe worse, our imaginings. We have come to crave violence. Violence permeates the structures of our institutions and our analyses.
Rape is a pathological expression of the need to connect, to be loved through physical contact, to exchange. As long as we deny ourselves and each other the ways and means of careful, caring connectivity, the ways and means of careful, caring touch, the ways and means of careful, caring loving, people will go mad for these things, grab and tear and violate each other in order to break the distance which separates us. Hierarchical social structures represent, recreate and reinforce a humiliating distance between people.
If we can begin to build connectivities that are based on an acceptance of our shared humanness, this could be an antidote to the violence which we see escalating as we build our civilization to higher and higher higher peaks of achievement. Group achievements are taken credit for by individuals pushing others out of the picture, making it seem as if it were possible for one person to achieve anything.
The illusion is the false isolation of heroes. From Jason to Kennedy, through Ulysses and Patton, these men did not, could not, act alone. Hitler did not act alone. Sadaam Hussein does not act alone. Marx could think alone but to turn his thoughts to action many read, shared, debated and then acted, and never alone. Democracy's solo heores - Kennedys, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King - were all shot. Democracy has ceased putting up heroes and this is a very good thing. Democracy is regrouping as networking. Working locally to affect the global is the new heroism. People who can network, teamwork, lead without leading, connect, communicate, build community, these are the new democratic heroes, never acting alone and no longer pretending to do so.
No one can be without the cooperation of others. Everyone is a group project and a group responsibility.