Patriarchy

There is a common belief that viewing porn conditions men to objectify women, turning them into emotionless sex objects. This is a fallacy. The objectification of women happened at the dawn of patriarchy. This conditioning has been handed down from one generation to another via epigenetic inheritance. The formation of patriarchy As I wrote in […]

In a post a few months ago I posed the question, Does patriarchy traumatise the feminine? At the time, I was pretty certain that it did—that patriarchy arose through the institutionalised denigration of the feminine: It’s hard to imagine how the goddess-worshipping hunter-gatherer cultures of the Neolithic period gave way to patriarchy. What was that […]

Edwin Longsden Long’s 1875 painting, The Babylonian Marriage Market, is monumental in more ways than one. Firstly, in size: the painting measures 10 feet by 5 feet 8 inches. Secondly, in value: in 1882 it sold for £6,615, at that time a record price for a painting. Thirdly, and most importantly, it provides a window […]

It’s just a film. They’re all stuntmen. The blood isn’t real; it’s ketchup. The blood may not be real. The violence may not be real. But the underlying acceptance that violence is part and parcel of our world is very definitely real. This isn’t just an acceptance that others—some indeterminate ‘they’—will commit violence. It includes […]

In recent months I’ve been having the same conversation over and over with people who are involved in personal development, building emotional integrity and improving the quality of their relationships: there is a hole at the heart of their most significant relationship, their marriage. It’s the hole where we hide our truest selves from the […]

Some years ago, I read that the children of the Roman aristocracy used to wear a small penis-shaped charm called a fascinum. The charm signalled that they were members of the nobility and if anyone messed with them, they would be messed with—seriously. (The word ‘fascist’ derives from fascinum.) It intrigued me that the symbol […]

In What is ancestral trauma?, I wrote how traumas that occurred thousands of years ago yet remain embedded as genetic memories in our collective unconscious. As we go deep into our healing journey, these age-old traumas can surface for resolution through porn. In that post, I posited the origin of these traumas: How far back […]

In The Heart of the Soul, American spiritual teacher Gary Zukav writes that, “The longest journey that you will make in your life is from your head to your heart.” It’s a popular axiom in mindfulness and self-development circles. After all, the heart has only positive qualities: love, courage, connection. What’s not to like? Yet […]

In What is ancestral trauma? I describe the key psychological wounds that humanity suffered as a result of the drought, desertification and famine that gave rise to patriarchy. Here I want to focus on the fifth of these wounds: the victimizer-victim dynamic. Patriarchy is built on a victimizer-victim dynamic where we are all victimizers and […]

In What is ancestral trauma? I describe the key psychological wounds that humanity suffered as a result of the drought, desertification and famine that gave rise to patriarchy. Here I want to focus on the third of these wounds: humanity’s core sexual wound.  Humanity incurred a core sexual wound as a result of the drought, […]