The abuse of women and girls did not begin with the advent of social or any media, but with imperialism; colonialism; xenophobia; racism; unquestioned traditions; patriarchal religion and rule where women were, and still are, treated as “instrumenti diaboli.” Celibacy, for example, was not introduced into the Roman Catholic Church until A.D.4th Century. Despite the “spiritual” narrative of “purity” (as also practiced by religions older than Catholicism) the choice was rooted in economics; unmarried priests would not burden the coffers of the Church with the added expense of supporting wives and children. Women are still denied priesthood. The last two decades have begun to reveal how all of that sexual repression and misogyny has played out.
Deep in the marrow of intransigent patriarchy women are still considered the property of empires and men. This is also true of vulnerable men and boys, though perhaps fewer in number and under-reported. Boys or men who are raped by women are considered “lucky” and desirably “manly.” If they have been raped by men, then homophobia, both internalized and societal, create an exile of silence. Numbers are lower among males, but the rape of one man, woman or child, is one too many.The #MeToo and #TimesUp movements are catalysts of long overdue change and public discourse and both need to expand the narratives into their historical contexts.
The abuses against those of us who grew up with full and curvaceous bodies at a young age do not need data to tell you that it was often assumed that we were inherently “loose.” The targeting of our bodies as sexual objects was normalized and excused with the presupposition that the “little hussies are asking for it.” Large breasts and hips signaled that we were somehow promiscuous and ready for some back seat action. This perception is heightened when the melanin of the female body falls within a Black Pan-African spectrum.
Manhood is still equated with hyper-heterosexuality (real or imagined) swagger and conquest, sexual or otherwise. A prematurely large penis signals that the boy will be a “stud” or “ladies man.” When such a distorted narrative is applied to a Black man or boy and seen through a lens of white supremacy, it denotes the “Black guy with the big dick” as a danger to white women. He is a potential rapist, but only when it comes to white women; anyone else is fair game, since many of us were born “asking for it”. Endowed White Man: a sexy stud. A good catch; since of course all women are heterosexual man chasers with baited hooks. The Black Man: The savage. The King Kong who seduces the dainty blonde; the Mighty Joe Young to be kept in chains.
As better informed conversations emerge, we can see some progress, but they are more parallel than intersectional and amputated from the histories that created and bestowed imprimatur on white supremacist patriarchal abuses in the first place. One of the most aberrant outcomes of these gendered expectations and normalized narratives is currently on global view, wildly pacing the Oval Office, Big Mac in hand, as he contemplates his next narcissistic bullying and coercive conquest, whether grabbing a pussy or raping the Constitution, in full view of sycophants, self-serving bystanders, and thanks all that is holy, a growing resistance.
Child rearing practices that exclude healthy and age appropriate training in sexual wholeness and understanding, inadvertently collude with violence, sexual or otherwise. Shaming, secrecy and guilt are inferred by children early on when they are instructed to name their genitals. When a penis becomes a “pee-pee” or a vagina becomes a “chi-chi” the genitals can then be personified and as a result possibly detached and “othered” from the rest of the body. The coded message inherent in this implies that if our genitals are not really part of the rest of us, then perhaps we are not accountable for their actions.
Explicit violence and genitally targeted violence against women in media certainly does exacerbate and normalize what is abhorrent, but it is a symptom, albeit systemic, and not the root cause.
The lack of holistic, informed and comprehensive sexual health education in our schools reinforce sex and sexuality as something that should be kept hidden. How ironic that we are fighting for the end to secrecy in what has already happened to those of us who have been assaulted, raped or worse, but changes in sexual health education are sluggish at best.
I suggest that the kind of education that is needed is one that makes clear connections between sexual violence and all that contributes to its continued surge: religious hetero-normative dogma that espouses white heterosexual male supremacy; the histories of colonial and imperial oppression over the human body; despotism displacing democracy; and the corporate and media takeover of how the human body continues to be desecrated and insulted to sell products.
There are new tactics being played out in marketing, that mimic “inclusion and diversity.” We have been seeing more curvaceous women and women of color in advertising, but let’s not fool ourselves that the move is altruistic. This supposed awakening of consciousness is tied to the bottom line. The average woman in the U.S. is a size 14 and women of color and women who do not otherwise fit the mold of white Euro-centric somatic perfectionism, have in recent years been “discovered” in the new world of untapped markets. Give us your freckled, your short, your tall, your round, your curly, your straight, your diversity of melanin, your gender Queer, and we will embrace them with our products, services and strategic welcome.
The message is being shifted from products to improve your looks, to products that support you being all of you. A strategic marketing pitch and one of supremacy and manipulation. You still need the products to “become” to “be” to embrace the fullness of you. Now that we have decided there’s nothing really wrong with you, let us sell you a thousand dollar tee-shirt that tells the world how you feel about yourself. Or we can sell you a really cheap one. No matter; someone you will never meet is stitching together the message of YOU for pennies an hour.
The corporate takeover of public education is robbing our young people of the ability to think critically. Not only are they denied a holistic sexual health education, if they have any at all, they are robbed of the ability to think creatively in ways that allow societies to flourish and progress in non-destructive ways. The distilled, assimilationist lowest common denominator sprinkling of “diversity and inclusion” remains in the category of tokenism, with the systematic hiring of those who go along to get along, who have not moved beyond the 101 diversity training by which they themselves have been colonized. Our children are deprived of their true histories and pride of ancestry; their souls bleached into submission to the authority and inferred “empirical truths” of whiteness. To decolonize curriculums, we must also decolonize the human body. We need sexual health curriculums that address the origins of self-loathing, shame, secrecy, heterosexism, sexual violence by the authentic intersectional study of revisionist and exclusionary histories and their roles in the entanglement of sex and violence, body image, and how these have evolved into oppressive and rigid narratives on gender and orientation.
I grew up hating gym class where innate athleticism and lean bodies were rewarded and anything less in males or females was ridiculed. Those of us with large breasts held them as we ran, ashamed of their bounce. The were “boobs” and by inference, we were too. Big tits, dumb broad. Athleticism in the U.S. was, and still is, associated with competition, celebrity, sexuality and nationalism. I’ve been “taking a knee” since I was eleven; we need more Colin Kaepernicks on the field, in board rooms, and in the halls of education.
Underperformance of schools is the result of gerrymandering by standardized testing systems that reward rote learning and discourage the intuitive imagination, that birthright foundation that builds a love of learning and inquiry. Compliance by fatigue of a developing workforce and new leaders provides a long-term benefit to corrupt politicians and corporations, who profit in money and power from an easily controlled and manipulated populace. We already know that uniform “White/Male/Stale” testing does not allow for individual intelligences, vision and intuitive abilities to flourish. We shove the mind and the body into “one size fits all.” As the “data” is gathered to “prove” that our teachers and students are “underperforming” to standards that are culturally incompetent, do not look at the full economic and social conditions of the students, allowing the “Master” to take over forcing schools onto the auction block for the highest privatized corporate bidder. Our children learn at an early age that what they think doesn’t matter, that questions unrelated to the tests are irrelevant and intrusive, and that all that is required of them is to follow rules and swallow the cud that dulls their senses, and numbs their passions as they are stealthily amputated from their legacies and logic. They are still obediently pledging allegiance before they even know what the words mean.
Within this corporatized paradigm of an intentionally manipulated education, is the loss humanity and of healthy interactions among genders. Not only do we urgently need age appropriate sexual health education that begins in primary school, but we need it to be a comprehensive, inclusive, non-heterosexist, celebratory and holistic. It must begin a dismantling of the Eden story, a revisit to Matriarchal societies, and an understanding of how imperial, religious, racist and colonial rule that have brought us to the time of #MeToo. #TimesUp on a bleached, bland and biased educational system and curriculums.
Before #MeToo stops “trending”, we need the sequel that endures, the sequel of a new educational system; not re-formed, but revolutionized and entrusted to educators, administrators, artists and visionaries of conscience, passion and integrity. We must take back our bodies and minds to help our children do so as well.
The understanding that sexuality is not genital, but a part of our whole humanity and interactions, is essential to our learning and healthy mental and physical development. When the teaching of human sexuality is either avoided or rendered devoid of intimacy, tenderness, celebration and personal accountability, what outcomes can we possibly expect?
I am a survivor of sexual assault. I have dedicated my life’s work as a teaching artist to the interruption and dismantling of all violence at it’s roots. It is challenging work. There are no easy or canned responses. Every class, every workshop, every talk, although well prepared, must be ready to shift to the needs of those who show up. Presence to the moment is mandatory for honest interaction. Together we find our questions and together we seek the answers. We are each the experts of our own experiences and we bring them with us everywhere we go.
We can all be educators, every day of the week; if we are willing to learn. When the systems fail, We the People must rise.
Magdalena Gómez, Copyright 2019. All rights reserved.
Deep in the marrow of intransigent patriarchy women are still considered the property of empires and men. This is also true of vulnerable men and boys, though perhaps fewer in number and under-reported. Boys or men who are raped by women are considered “lucky” and desirably “manly.” If they have been raped by men, then homophobia, both internalized and societal, create an exile of silence. Numbers are lower among males, but the rape of one man, woman or child, is one too many.The #MeToo and #TimesUp movements are catalysts of long overdue change and public discourse and both need to expand the narratives into their historical contexts.
The abuses against those of us who grew up with full and curvaceous bodies at a young age do not need data to tell you that it was often assumed that we were inherently “loose.” The targeting of our bodies as sexual objects was normalized and excused with the presupposition that the “little hussies are asking for it.” Large breasts and hips signaled that we were somehow promiscuous and ready for some back seat action. This perception is heightened when the melanin of the female body falls within a Black Pan-African spectrum.
Manhood is still equated with hyper-heterosexuality (real or imagined) swagger and conquest, sexual or otherwise. A prematurely large penis signals that the boy will be a “stud” or “ladies man.” When such a distorted narrative is applied to a Black man or boy and seen through a lens of white supremacy, it denotes the “Black guy with the big dick” as a danger to white women. He is a potential rapist, but only when it comes to white women; anyone else is fair game, since many of us were born “asking for it”. Endowed White Man: a sexy stud. A good catch; since of course all women are heterosexual man chasers with baited hooks. The Black Man: The savage. The King Kong who seduces the dainty blonde; the Mighty Joe Young to be kept in chains.
As better informed conversations emerge, we can see some progress, but they are more parallel than intersectional and amputated from the histories that created and bestowed imprimatur on white supremacist patriarchal abuses in the first place. One of the most aberrant outcomes of these gendered expectations and normalized narratives is currently on global view, wildly pacing the Oval Office, Big Mac in hand, as he contemplates his next narcissistic bullying and coercive conquest, whether grabbing a pussy or raping the Constitution, in full view of sycophants, self-serving bystanders, and thanks all that is holy, a growing resistance.
Child rearing practices that exclude healthy and age appropriate training in sexual wholeness and understanding, inadvertently collude with violence, sexual or otherwise. Shaming, secrecy and guilt are inferred by children early on when they are instructed to name their genitals. When a penis becomes a “pee-pee” or a vagina becomes a “chi-chi” the genitals can then be personified and as a result possibly detached and “othered” from the rest of the body. The coded message inherent in this implies that if our genitals are not really part of the rest of us, then perhaps we are not accountable for their actions.
Explicit violence and genitally targeted violence against women in media certainly does exacerbate and normalize what is abhorrent, but it is a symptom, albeit systemic, and not the root cause.
The lack of holistic, informed and comprehensive sexual health education in our schools reinforce sex and sexuality as something that should be kept hidden. How ironic that we are fighting for the end to secrecy in what has already happened to those of us who have been assaulted, raped or worse, but changes in sexual health education are sluggish at best.
I suggest that the kind of education that is needed is one that makes clear connections between sexual violence and all that contributes to its continued surge: religious hetero-normative dogma that espouses white heterosexual male supremacy; the histories of colonial and imperial oppression over the human body; despotism displacing democracy; and the corporate and media takeover of how the human body continues to be desecrated and insulted to sell products.
There are new tactics being played out in marketing, that mimic “inclusion and diversity.” We have been seeing more curvaceous women and women of color in advertising, but let’s not fool ourselves that the move is altruistic. This supposed awakening of consciousness is tied to the bottom line. The average woman in the U.S. is a size 14 and women of color and women who do not otherwise fit the mold of white Euro-centric somatic perfectionism, have in recent years been “discovered” in the new world of untapped markets. Give us your freckled, your short, your tall, your round, your curly, your straight, your diversity of melanin, your gender Queer, and we will embrace them with our products, services and strategic welcome.
The message is being shifted from products to improve your looks, to products that support you being all of you. A strategic marketing pitch and one of supremacy and manipulation. You still need the products to “become” to “be” to embrace the fullness of you. Now that we have decided there’s nothing really wrong with you, let us sell you a thousand dollar tee-shirt that tells the world how you feel about yourself. Or we can sell you a really cheap one. No matter; someone you will never meet is stitching together the message of YOU for pennies an hour.
The corporate takeover of public education is robbing our young people of the ability to think critically. Not only are they denied a holistic sexual health education, if they have any at all, they are robbed of the ability to think creatively in ways that allow societies to flourish and progress in non-destructive ways. The distilled, assimilationist lowest common denominator sprinkling of “diversity and inclusion” remains in the category of tokenism, with the systematic hiring of those who go along to get along, who have not moved beyond the 101 diversity training by which they themselves have been colonized. Our children are deprived of their true histories and pride of ancestry; their souls bleached into submission to the authority and inferred “empirical truths” of whiteness. To decolonize curriculums, we must also decolonize the human body. We need sexual health curriculums that address the origins of self-loathing, shame, secrecy, heterosexism, sexual violence by the authentic intersectional study of revisionist and exclusionary histories and their roles in the entanglement of sex and violence, body image, and how these have evolved into oppressive and rigid narratives on gender and orientation.
I grew up hating gym class where innate athleticism and lean bodies were rewarded and anything less in males or females was ridiculed. Those of us with large breasts held them as we ran, ashamed of their bounce. The were “boobs” and by inference, we were too. Big tits, dumb broad. Athleticism in the U.S. was, and still is, associated with competition, celebrity, sexuality and nationalism. I’ve been “taking a knee” since I was eleven; we need more Colin Kaepernicks on the field, in board rooms, and in the halls of education.
Underperformance of schools is the result of gerrymandering by standardized testing systems that reward rote learning and discourage the intuitive imagination, that birthright foundation that builds a love of learning and inquiry. Compliance by fatigue of a developing workforce and new leaders provides a long-term benefit to corrupt politicians and corporations, who profit in money and power from an easily controlled and manipulated populace. We already know that uniform “White/Male/Stale” testing does not allow for individual intelligences, vision and intuitive abilities to flourish. We shove the mind and the body into “one size fits all.” As the “data” is gathered to “prove” that our teachers and students are “underperforming” to standards that are culturally incompetent, do not look at the full economic and social conditions of the students, allowing the “Master” to take over forcing schools onto the auction block for the highest privatized corporate bidder. Our children learn at an early age that what they think doesn’t matter, that questions unrelated to the tests are irrelevant and intrusive, and that all that is required of them is to follow rules and swallow the cud that dulls their senses, and numbs their passions as they are stealthily amputated from their legacies and logic. They are still obediently pledging allegiance before they even know what the words mean.
Within this corporatized paradigm of an intentionally manipulated education, is the loss humanity and of healthy interactions among genders. Not only do we urgently need age appropriate sexual health education that begins in primary school, but we need it to be a comprehensive, inclusive, non-heterosexist, celebratory and holistic. It must begin a dismantling of the Eden story, a revisit to Matriarchal societies, and an understanding of how imperial, religious, racist and colonial rule that have brought us to the time of #MeToo. #TimesUp on a bleached, bland and biased educational system and curriculums.
Before #MeToo stops “trending”, we need the sequel that endures, the sequel of a new educational system; not re-formed, but revolutionized and entrusted to educators, administrators, artists and visionaries of conscience, passion and integrity. We must take back our bodies and minds to help our children do so as well.
The understanding that sexuality is not genital, but a part of our whole humanity and interactions, is essential to our learning and healthy mental and physical development. When the teaching of human sexuality is either avoided or rendered devoid of intimacy, tenderness, celebration and personal accountability, what outcomes can we possibly expect?
I am a survivor of sexual assault. I have dedicated my life’s work as a teaching artist to the interruption and dismantling of all violence at it’s roots. It is challenging work. There are no easy or canned responses. Every class, every workshop, every talk, although well prepared, must be ready to shift to the needs of those who show up. Presence to the moment is mandatory for honest interaction. Together we find our questions and together we seek the answers. We are each the experts of our own experiences and we bring them with us everywhere we go.
We can all be educators, every day of the week; if we are willing to learn. When the systems fail, We the People must rise.
Magdalena Gómez, Copyright 2019. All rights reserved.
RSS Feed
