Dear Women: Stop Feeding the Machine

The entire world has been shaped by a bro-code patriarchy. Look at history: centuries of unhinged, psychotic greed, domination, rape, robbery and killing carried out overwhelmingly by men—and systems built by men to protect male power.

It was only a few decades ago that Canadian law finally made it explicit that a husband does not have some special exemption to rape or assault his wife. The law changed. The culture didn’t magically change with it. And a law that exists on paper means very little if women still have to walk into the justice system and hear: Prove it. Where’s your evidence? Did you get it in writing?

Women can be raped, beaten, stalked, controlled, psychologically abused and terrorized, and then be met with another layer of misogyny when they try to report it. They are isolated, overwhelmed, disbelieved and made to question their own perception until they start thinking, Maybe it really is just me.

It isn’t.

Misogyny is a socially embedded pathology—a deeply rooted sickness that exists throughout the justice system, law enforcement, government, media and society at large. Laws can change overnight. Human behaviour, beliefs and social conditioning can take generations to change. Those patterns are modelled, normalized and passed down to children until somebody finally wakes the fuck up and breaks the cycle.

And women are waking up.

Because we cannot survive as slaves.

Women have had to fight for virtually every right and freedom we have against systems built around the idea that women’s bodies, labour, sexuality and lives are available for male ownership and control.

So trust your perception. Speak. Hold onto your voice and your truth. Pour love into yourself. Protect your peace.

And watch what happens when you stop centring men, appeasing them, explaining yourself to them or reacting to their attempts to control you.

They glitch out.

Let them.

Healthy men will respond. Misogynistic men will react.

And healthy men are oppressed by patriarchy too. They are expected to navigate a world containing male predators as well. They are fed the same temptations, conditioning and silence. And then people ask, Where are the men? Why aren’t they stopping this?

Sometimes a good, honest, empathic man stands up to another man and risks getting punched in the face, assaulted, robbed or worse. Men can be victims of male violence too. Some men absolutely do stand up—and sometimes they are punished, threatened or crushed for doing it. Good men can be deceived and decimated by the same system.

This is not a war against men.

It is a war against a system that teaches human beings to dominate, exploit, silence and consume one another.

And some men have risen into positions where they have enough power to fight it from the inside. But even powerful men can be squashed when they challenge the machine.

It has to become a unified front.

Women weaken patriarchy when we stop feeding it our attention, our labour, our bodies, our energy, our money, our compliance—and yes, our pussy. We do not have to keep voluntarily handing our power to people who use it against us.

And stop pretending sexual violence is entertainment.

Since when is rape entertainment?

I’m not talking about one particular movie or series. I’m talking about the sheer volume of rape and sexual violence woven into mainstream entertainment, television, film, streaming series and pornography. We have become so accustomed to seeing it that people barely register what their nervous systems are being shown. If your body recoils, if you feel sick, frightened or disturbed, you are not necessarily “too sensitive.” Maybe your body knows exactly what it is looking at.

Rape is not normal. Pornography is not automatically normal simply because it is everywhere. Sexual violence is not a historical rite, a plot device or entertainment. And a rapist walking out of court without meaningful consequences because someone doesn’t want to “ruin his life” is not normal either.

Yet the message keeps dripping into culture from every direction: rape is everywhere, rape is inevitable, rape is sexy, rape is entertainment, rape is forgivable, rape is something women just have to live with.

Little girls grow up absorbing the message that their job is to avoid being raped. Boys can grow up absorbing the message that sexual domination is masculine, inevitable or consequence-free. Women can internalize the same conditioning and start telling themselves they are prudish, dramatic or “too sensitive” for being disturbed by it. This all leads to the burden of accountability being placed on women. Which seems unfair until we stop seeing our own accountability as punishment.

This is the rotten core of patriarchy.

Sexuality is one of the most powerful places to control and traumatize us because it is sacred, intimate, creative and deeply connected to our sense of self. That is precisely why we have to reclaim our agency there.

We have power through our consent.

So use it where you can.

Look up what you are about to watch. If something contains graphic sexual violence you do not want to consume, don’t watch it. Turn it off. Don’t buy the ticket. Don’t give it your money. Don’t give it your attention. You do not have to prove you are tough enough to tolerate something that violates your values or activates your nervous system.

This is not about blame or judgement; it’s about recognizing that all of us have choices within the system.

That conditioning doesn’t stay on the screen. It follows us into dating, relationships and sexuality. We live in a culture where sexual access can be treated as an entitlement, where buying dinner can be framed as purchasing access to a woman’s body, and where women can be pressured to perform sexually in order to prove that they are desirable, loving, easygoing or “not like other women.” That is not intimacy. That is conditioning. We can refuse it. We can honour our bodies and sexuality as sacred, uphold our boundaries, and remember that nobody is entitled to sexual access to us—not because they bought us dinner, not because they are our partner, not because they are angry, and not because everyone else says this is just how dating works.

We cannot control every predator, every judge, every institution or every fucking thing that happens in the world.

But we can flex the power we do have.

We can withdraw our consent.

We can stop feeding what degrades us.

We can stop calling rape entertainment.

We can walk away. We can disengage.

We can talk about it.

We can teach our children differently.

We can pour love into ourselves instead of continuing to hand our attention, bodies, money and sexuality to people and systems that have spent centuries teaching us to disconnect from our own power.

That is how we begin taking it back.

We are not magically immune to patriarchal conditioning because we are women. We need to be accountable too.

Women can be just as gassed up and brainwashed by the system as men.

That is why waking up matters.

Speak. Witness. Refuse. Create. Live.

The more people who wake up and speak, the weaker the machinery becomes.

This shit is not going to be dismantled overnight. It may take generations. It may take centuries.

But somebody has to start flipping the fucking table.

It’s us. It’s now.

Do not go silent.

Do not accept shame or blame for an entire worldwide pandemic of violence.

If women go silent, oppressive systems get to write the his-story for us.

We’re here right now writing the first chapter of HERSTORY.

If you’re breathing, you’re a part of it.

So make your mark.

Make the light viral.

Let the darkness have nowhere left to hide.