From a Broken Web
Reflections on the aftermath of abuse and disclosure
Content warning: police, rape, abuse.
I’m mystified when the detective asks me if I have his phone number. True, most victims have some kind of acquaintance with their rapist, but the NYPD wants me to call him and try to get a “confession” while they secretly record it? How this is supposed to work in any scenario, I have no idea, and it’s been years since I last spoke to Mark Whitwell, my former yoga teacher. I also named him on the internet a few months ago.
Once my shock wears off, I’m left feeling obliged to do everything asked of me to complete the report. The call will probably be no different from past instances when I tried to confront him, or so I think. Like any abuser, Whitwell not-so-secretly thinks his abuse is justified, so if you let him keep talking he “confesses” all the time. After I came forward online, the backlash from him and his enablers only attested to the confusion and abuse I had tried to put into words, and then some.
I named names not because Whitwell is extraordinary in any way — rather, his entitlement that respects nothing and no one is commonplace.
Those who could most clearly recognize his abuse were those who had endured the same, from him and the countless others like him. “Me too,” says it all. A few even reported recognizing themselves in similar situations, and taking steps to get out. I remain grateful to everyone who wrote to me about the affirmations my story gave them, and the relief that comes with finally naming abuse that could so often feel like standing in the pouring rain and being told the sun was shining.
Soon enough, Whitwell had a law firm reputed to enjoy bullying survivors email me several cease and desists, demanding that I remove my story and stop discussing it on social media. They also accused me of “harassment and defamation” of Whitwell as, “a manipulator, a predator, and a rapist,” to use their words. No evidence of anything I had written was included.
His threat of legislative violence reeked of yet another attempt to punish me for resisting his control. I consulted with several lawyers (and friends) who advised a number of actions I could take (or not), one being to file a police report. Well aware that the police are hardly a feminist institution, I rejected the idea, even though I learned that having a report on file would protect my right to speak without fear of legal attack from him.
Meanwhile, as more and more of the people Whitwell abused over the past several decades continued to contact me, I learned more about him than I ever wanted to know. Somewhat predictably, his basic penchant for trickery and exploitation is hardly limited to sexual violence, and the privileges and protections of his abuses have only grown over time, thanks to the collusion of enablers and ignorant bystanders, willful and otherwise.
By the end of the summer, several journalists have also encouraged me to file a police report. As the calendar day Whitwell showed up and raped me four years prior approaches, I call the hotline. It turns out to be mildly cathartic to go through all the details with the detective. She thanks me for reporting, and mentions that multiple women in California have also gone to the police about Whitwell. Then she brings up the “controlled call.”
It takes me weeks to harness enough numbness to send him a message asking if we might talk, to “humanize the situation.” Hands cold and shaking, I imagine myself trying to speak to him in the detective’s office, paralyzed and about to dry heave, the same reaction I had when he attacked me and had the audacity to call it, “a transmission from Krishnamacharya,” a dead guru he covets who also happened to be an abuser.
Earlier on, before I could even name Whitwell’s abuse, I often got sick defying his relentless attempts to cajole, isolate, and discredit me. I kept a journal to hold onto my headspace, sought support in friends and therapy, and did whatever I could to nurture myself as I deepened my understanding of abuse and trauma, and reclaimed trust in myself and my chosen community.
Despite all the support I have now, I dread this “controlled call” like nothing else, and hope he doesn’t reply to my message. Confronting an abuser like him is rarely worthwhile, especially after his shield of excuses, manipulations, and distortions has taken a hit. Most victims are fortunate to just leave and stay away. Best case scenario, we speak up on our way out, in hopes of protecting others, and find a few allies. Easier said than done, given the elaborate systems of control abusers install around themselves.
And no one wants to admit their yoga teacher is an abuser.
The next day, Whitwell responds to my message with his typical fake care, what a “pleasant surprise” it is to hear from me, he would be “happy to talk anytime.” Revolted but reassured, I text the detective for confirmation, and tell Whitwell I will call him the next day, when I mask up and meet a friend who walks me to the station.
Once the recording device is set up with my phone, the detective informs me that Whitwell will need to admit to being aware that I had not “consented,” a departure from her original answer when I asked what might constitute a confession. She had said, “We usually try to get an apology.”
As the phone rings, I feel a familiar mix of outrage and futility anticipating the chaos he’s about to dump on me, made new by the police listening in.
When he answers the phone, I maintain composure and speak honestly. I tell him that I’m tired of his story, and if he might acknowledge the damage he’s done and apologize, maybe I can move on. The detective nods. Whitwell assures me that he “understands,” has “always heard” me, and says, “Your well being is very much in my heart.”
Again nauseated but remaining calm, I question him about his lawyer threatening me. He claims he was “bullied into that.”
Then I ask him, “What’s with all the goofy women online saying I was your girlfriend?” Even if that were true, it’s no excuse for abuse.
He laments that he and I “never got to be in a relationship,” and for the next 40 minutes proceeds to dominate from a perpetual state of false victimhood, as all abusers do — it’s called DARVO.
“I asked you to leave me alone so many times,” I remind him, hearing my tone get sharper, and louder. “A relationship was never on the table.”
He quickly accuses me of being “after sex” when I agreed to go to Fiji as his student-assistant back in 2013, while he “wanted a relationship, but held back because of the age gap.” (I was 23, he was 64.)
“Stop trying to blame me for your shit,” I lower my voice, and question one of the fabrications in his doomsday defense narrative — that his rivals (whom I do not know) brainwashed me against him. “You think I’m brainwash-able?”
“You once told me our sex was important to you,” he goes on complaining and projecting, now in tears.
“You must have me confused with someone else,” I reply, barely resisting the urge to mock all of his lies. I return to my request — that he simply acknowledge my reality and apologize.
Then he claims he has never forced himself on anyone, and that I’m confusing him with another male yoga teacher who once “attacked” me.
“Who do you think you’re talking to?” I snap, and remind him that I am still hearing from dozens of former female students whom he abused on the same continuum.
“They’re all lying,” he whines.
“No one has any reason to lie about this … except you,” I tell him, and notice that while somewhat frozen, I’m fighting— which used to make me feel guilty, until I came to understand that abuse has nothing to do with interpersonal dynamics or conflict.
Whitwell abuses by the book, regardless of how anyone responds. Everyone I heard from responded differently, from those who immediately got out, to those who ended up in “relationships” with him, and anywhere in between.
The detective prompts me to get specific about the incidents I reported. I try, “I can’t trust anyone to crash at my place now. I’m afraid of waking up to them fucking me like you did …”
“I don’t remember that,” he mumbles, and tries to bait me into more of his absurd deflections. He “loves” me, was “monogamous” when he raped me, and won’t stop rambling about “indivisible reality,” a phrase lifted from another dead guru of his who also happened to be an abuser, Adi Da.
Though I can recognize every same old abrasive pattern designed to shock and outrage and paralyze me; it is chilling to be fully reminded of the twisted lengths he will go to shame me for his abuse, all the while sounding so damn sure of himself. Will the detective see through it?
Finally, I burst: “My reality is NOT yours, PRAISE GOD.”
The detective writes me another note to say I can end the call. I drop whatever might be left of my decorum and tell Whitwell that whatever labels and fanciful garbage he needs come up with to justify his abuse, if he actually believes it to be “friendship,” “love,” or “mutual,” I feel sorry for him.
“That’s disrespectful,” he snips.
“I lost all respect for you so long ago, at least you can acknowledge that much of my reality,” I scoff. After one last fuck you, I hang up.
“You did great at the end there,” the detective remarks, then shakes her head. “He’s not coming back to the US, he’s terrified … all that wanting a relationship stuff, they all say that.”
They all say that.
For years, I’d been baffled by what I could only name as Whitwell’s hypocrisy, or the way he gets on his spiritualized soap box about “sexual intimacy” as intrinsic to yoga, hiding in plain sight behind a not-so-subtle smokescreen. Now I understand it as the professional gaslighting of a serial rapist.
All so-called predators like him share the fundamental confusion that abuse is love, and bank on the fact that society perpetuates, obscures, and sexualizes the subjugation of their so-called prey. However, in the wise words of bell hooks, “love and abuse cannot coexist.”
Walking home from the police station with my friend, I’m relieved that Whitwell’s trash was obvious to the detective, and disgusted by the whole experience. It’s like he violated me all over again. Then I notice a text from him: “Sorry that didn’t seem to go well, can we try again to converse?”
More deeply than ever, I know that nothing I ever did or didn’t do provoked his abuse, nor his will to make-believe anything in order to evade even the slightest hint of responsibility for himself. Why would he change? It would seem abuse has granted him every reward, with minimal consequences, for his entire career.
Listening to him on the phone reminded me of how fortunate I am to be divided from his “indivisible reality.”
I used to wonder if Whitwell was aware of his own violence — and if it even matters. In his derivative and reductive yoga system, he deigns to dismantle some nebulous idea of “patriarchy,” always posing himself as the “good guy” on his own scale against other abusers in yoga. Meanwhile, patriarchy might be the only thing he’s ever had going for him. As abuse counselors say, “When he sees his dirty face in the morning, he washes the mirror.”
Abusers are generally more aware of what they are doing than they want to appear, hence their obsession with persona. Any seemingly “good” behavior is part of the theater, and part of the abuse. How often Whitwell seemed bumbling and nice, yet calculated and combative in hindsight — especially when he would make his violence out to be a misstep. In fact, he is always perfectly in step, bystanders at the ready to say, “but he does so much good!”
Back at my apartment, my friend and I ceremoniously block his number.
A few weeks later, the detective calls to let me know the DA decided I can press charges if Whitwell ever comes back to the US. The horrible phone call somehow worked. Though my experience was relatively lucky (and privileged), the process of reporting and contacting the perpetrator only affirmed to me why so very few victims of sexual violence go to the police. Roughly 99% of the 1 in 10 reported rapes in the US go unprosecuted.
Though small and hard-won feminist progress has been made in the legal arena in some countries, criminalization does next to nothing to stop sexual abuse. Not long ago, when rape became illegal in the US, it was a crime of property — the theft of a white man’s property. Most rape is still only illegal in theory. On the whole, policing and the legal-carceral system routinely get turned against victims in ways that perpetuate the abuse, trauma, and resounding silence. In many cases, survival is criminalized.
Worldwide, rape remains mythologized to the degree that many are not even sure what it is, and may have internalized it as biological, or natural, rather than the legally, religiously, and socially sanctioned status quo that it is — the “private combat” that has kept all cis men in a position of domination for thousands of years, across cultures, communities, and households.
Under the ownership, entitlement, and control of the male gaze, rape culture indoctrinates everyone to accept the narrative assumptions of the cis hetero patriarchy — that women are lying provocateurs who need to be raped into submission, and that rape initiates them into womanhood, as defined by men. Yogi Bhajan, of Kundalini Yoga notoriety, often publicly preached notions like, “Rape is always invited.”
That level of complete control is the ultimate goal of any rapist — to manipulate and otherwise threaten his victim into “inviting” his sexual violence, or at least understanding that she has no choice — resistance will only lead to potentially far worse punishment, from him and society. As a rule, she has been taught from birth to not get raped.
That “unspeakable” context of terror and isolation creates a legacy of trauma and cyclical abuse that defies being reduced to the binary of predator-prey.
With every respect for survivors and advocates who seek support, protection, and justice within the legal system, I find it vital to understand that the law was created by those in power to protect those in power. In the wake of abuse coming to light in yoga spaces, I’ve seen ignorant calls for ethics, regulation, and oversight defer to the law as some kind of moral measuring stick. Perhaps invested in the industry agenda, most advocates for such “reform” seem to share in the mindset of fear, control, and arrogance that abusers inhabit, and end up causing nothing if not more damage.
Institutions, even those meant to regulate and protect, habitually betray survivors. Many large yoga organizations, like Sivananda, knowingly harbor abusive teachers and maintain all sorts of exploitative conditions under the pretense of moral and spiritual superiority. Then there’s the Yoga Alliance, the world’s largest registry of yoga teachers, which boasts extensive (and still desperately low) standards and protocols, with no the will to implement them. Consumers are left with the illusion of a quality teaching community that all sorts of grifters hide behind, the same way abusers hide behind yoga as a prop for their image. Pioneering psychologist Judith Herman writes,
“Authoritarian, secretive, sometimes grandiose, and even paranoid, the perpetrator is nevertheless exquisitely sensitive to the realities of power and to social norms … he seeks out situations where his tyrannical behavior will be tolerated, condoned, or admired. His demeanor provides excellent camouflage.”
Herman notes that the most consistent features among abusers center on their apparent normality, and their, “appeal to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil.” In yoga and spiritual spaces, that desire is law. Patthabi Jois, of Ashtanga Yoga notoriety, sexually assaulted countless students in plain sight day after day, and still has apologists. Survivor Karen Rain writes, “Enablers often believe they are serving a greater good, and in the process, they don’t consider the abusive behavior (or the people who report it) to be relevant.”
After I came forward, I learned that several of Whitwell’s enablers call him a “sociopath,” but continue to support him because he’s their “teacher.” That mindset is as ugly to me as that of his abuse. Sexual violence (and all kinds of abuse) is rampantly excused in any space where “the greater good” has been identified with the persona of an individual leader. The ends, however, can never begin to justify such means. Observing the power of clout culture and social capitalism, queer Black trans revolutionary Pro.Found notes,
“People will literally hold onto abusers because “they do good work”, as if the work hinges on them as an individual person and is not simply a conscientious expression of a collective striving for freedom. People gain unquestionable, unchallenged images in their communities because of clout culture, even when they move in unprincipled and anti-revolutionary, abusive ways, because now the work and their persona is tied together.”
No matter how much clout they have, abusers often find shared values and instant allies not only in those who hold influence in the state, media, and institution, but on the street and in the home. Especially when the abuse is systemic (gender-based, racialized, etc.), and largely bypassed and upheld by society, efforts at supporting community accountability easily backfire for survivors, who wind up again rendered invisible thanks to clout culture.
Before I came forward, I hesitated to sacrifice my virtual anonymity knowing that both Whitwell and one of his enablers, my former employer J Brown, do little else but craft personas online. Though I had known Brown to replicate Whitwell’s decrepit values and gaslighting tactics, I went easy on him in my story. He fully exploited that to stir up fake “controversy” and build his social capital, then whined about being “cancelled” for saying things like, “I’m an enabler, a shamer, and a feminist, and I bet you are too!”
For bystanders, at a certain point denial becomes a choice. That choice shares in the stunning arrogance and forgetfulness of the abuser. In yoga, it also comes with gaslighting slogans like, “choose joy,” “we create our reality,” and, “separate the teaching from the teacher.” Like Brown, they might eventually accept the basic premise of believing victims, yet neglect to denounce the abuse — sustained by the “benevolent” oppression, fear-mongering, and victim blaming too many yoga and spiritual teachers have mastered. In that club, anyone who names a problem is the one with the problem, and a detriment to “the greater good” they all need for their collective persona.
Power, privilege, and impunity are not merely conditions of abuse and oppression, but rewards.
Abusers teach abuse — which originates in a learned mindset of supremacy and entitlement. That legacy in yoga spaces demands that respect for the teaching, and thus the teacher, override what students may know and feel, even during practices supposedly intended to bring about body knowledge and introspection. Obedient students learn to manipulate and gaslight on the abuser’s behalf, and their compliance is rewarded (usually with crumbs), while skeptical students are punished. Thus, concentrated control within an insular chain of secretly or not-so-secretly abusive clout chasers holding yoga itself hostage as their veil, weapon, and shield.
Pervasive abuse calls the practice itself into question — or whom it is serving, how, and why, given the way it has been systematized, colonized, and commodified time and time again. The marketable illusions of “liberation,” “empowerment,” and “healing,” usually only counteract such potentiality. Abusers in yoga typically employ predatory capitalism and magical thinking that produces numbness at best and madness at worst, to say nothing of the acrobatics originally designed to repress pubescent boys, and the overtly physical ways they might assault, or “adjust,” students.
Such danger and devastation is compounded by the fact that many who have already suffered come to yoga for refuge and healing, only to become unwittingly entrenched in trauma bonds, oscillating states of hyperarousal and constriction, and ongoing captivity within the status quo. Otherwise sound yoga techniques can be corrupted to induce and exacerbate traumatic symptoms, to the degree that we all have trauma. Herman notes,
“These detached states of consciousness are similar to hypnotic trance states. They share the same features of surrender of voluntary action, suspension of initiative and critical judgment, subjective detachment or calm, enhanced perception of imagery, altered sensation, including numbness and analgesia, and distortion of reality, including depersonalization, derealization, and change in the sense of time. While the heightened perceptions occurring during traumatic events resemble the phenomena of hypnotic absorption, the numbing symptoms resemble the complementary phenomena of hypnotic dissociation.”
Alongside hazardous modes of practice, silence and gaslighting weave a vicious web of doubt, confusion, and shame that denies the possibility of self-determination and informed decision-making. The highs and lows can leave students desperate to get clear, thus highly suggestible to the teacher’s ideas of clarity, and underlying agenda — despite the fact that the teacher created the confusion in the first place. That level of “power-over,” and disempowerment, or “surrender,” creates the trauma bond — wherein the teacher, like any abuser, becomes both tormentor and savior.
Recall that rape culture motto, “Rape is always invited.” I have observed both men and women who seem to admire Whitwell’s unhinged narrative that “sex … must always be made positive.” Even the most outlandish justifications, like that abuse is born of concern, discipline, or love for the victim, make it almost irresistible for confused bystanders to identify with the abuser and do nothing rather than contend with the inconvenient reality the victim would have them acknowledge, and the action it would necessitate —like to examine their own abusive mentalities and trauma bonds.
“The more powerful the perpetrator, the greater his prerogative to name and define reality, and the more completely his arguments prevail,” notes Herman.
Along with mental illness and addiction, trauma often gets stigmatized and weaponized as an excuse for abuse. Bystanders caught in sympathy for the abuser often repeat his false reversals, projections, and deflections— “he’s had it rough,” “he needs to heal,” “he loves you.” If trauma, or even “feelings,” caused one to abuse, marginalized populations who suffer the most heinous abuses would all be abusers, and that is hardly the case.
In fact, like any seasoned abuser, Whitwell sensed that he could more readily victimize me in prying for details about my preexisting trauma, and using it against me later. Now I think of him whenever I hear about yoga teachers who pressure students to share intimate details, “open up,” or “be vulnerable” — boundaries are crossed, trust is misplaced, and the trap is set, a process known as grooming. Abuse is always inhumane and never excusable.
Most of us have little experience defending ourselves under the material conditions of abuse, which can be ambient and slow to develop. Traditionally, cis women are socialized to “tend and befriend,” and modern conditioning encourages us ignore male hostility and make-believe we have more freedom than we do in reality. I’ve seen “gender equality” co-opted by the male gaze in many yoga spaces, few as intensely as that of Whitwell, who seems to constantly exploit causes like “feminism” and “sex positivity” with the help of women he is currently manipulating and gaslighting.
When I first started working for Whitwell, I told myself I was safe due to his seniority as a supposedly respected yoga teacher and his psuedo-radical ideology, seemingly legitimized by those around him. Looking back, each of his manipulations, small offenses, and veiled threats seem incalculably ominous, but at the time I saw no danger in making light of it as part of the job and brushing him off with kindness, especially because of his old age. His violence then crept up by surprise, only to seem so obvious in hindsight that I blamed myself — exactly like he planned.
All that said, abusers will target anyone, and no one deserves it. Bystanders again take on the role of the perpetrator when they attempt to scrutinize and ridicule victims in looking for anything to suggest that responsibility for the abuse is shared, like “she brought it on herself.” This kind of ignorance contributes to the abuser’s atmosphere of total control, making it difficult for victims to sense the danger in the first place, and even more of a struggle to put responsibility for the abuse where it belongs —with the abuser only.
No matter how aggressively abusers impose their “indivisible reality” on us, change will come as more and more of us understand how abuse thrives, that it indeed harms everyone, and proximity to supremacy will not save anyone from its death trap. After I named Whitwell online, I noticed a few prominent yoga teachers comment on having “known about him for so long.” More remained silent. I’m not sure which is worse, but I know that nothing would stop an abuser like him faster than losing the protection of enablers and bystanders, especially those who remain “neutral,” or indifferent.
The lack of integrity, autonomy, initiative, and equitable communication leaves enormous blanks to be filled in, and cycles to be broken at last. Everyone has a role to play in denying abusers the profits of exploitation. That my post turned out to be of any consequence for Whitwell (he lost all his gigs within a week, or so I was told) mostly spoke to me of how long so many people have “known about him,” but would have rather forgotten, myself included. Herman writes,
“Survivors understand full well that the natural human response to horrible events is to put them out of mind. They may have done this themselves in the past. Survivors also understand that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. It is for this reason that public truth-telling is the common denominator of all social action.”
Throughout time, unique stories of survival speak to a universal narrative on how abuse, exploitation, and oppression function on silence and forgetfulness. Truth-telling, bearing witness, and solidarity are an existential threat to that cycle. As a survivor, it starts within. We might then begin to share in the words, voices, and stories of healing and service from survivors who came before, whenever, however and with whomever we might choose. As Rain writes, “All survivors deserve the recognition of having more to offer than the recounting of a traumatic experience.”
We all stand to benefit from learning how to notice and recognize the roots of abuse and its tactics, which decreases their impact. No one can hold anyone else accountable, but we can support accountability with education, center the needs and values of survivors, look into strategies for intervention, exert pressure on bystanders, demand institutional courage, and take steps to administer nonviolent consequences — which guarantee no comfort for the abuser, but don’t perpetuate the abuse.
What can we then build that would actually keep us safer, and allow for not only recovery, but freedom? What would render punishing constructs like surveillance and policing, the guru model and colonialism, obsolete?
Along with ongoing defiance, disruption, and divesting from supremacy in all forms, survivors and allies can organize and build praxis that tends to spaces for grieving and remembrance of our inherent worthiness in a better world where yoga, or equanimity, finds action in the every day, on every level. There are plenty of yoga teachers who share with their students (rather than to or for) in wonderful ways quite the opposite of that which I’ve just described.
Gratefully, I will never be done practicing, and learning how acts of storytelling of all kinds can offer connection and freedom in a landscape of few if any viable alternatives. Rebecca Solnit writes, “The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.” For me, that revolt starts and ends in the stories of my breath and body, and opens exit strategies and pathways to the safer, saner, practices, relationships, and communities I know are possible, and in many ways already here.
Resources
Abolition Reading List for Survivors and Allies by Know Your IX
Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman
Understanding Sexual Violence in Context by Karen Rain
I Don’t Need ‘I Believe You.’ I Need ‘I Will Stand Up For You.” by Karen Rain
All About Love by bell hooks
“Abuse and neglect negate love. Care and affirmation, the opposite of abuse and humiliation, are the foundation of love. No one can rightfully claim to be loving when behaving abusively.”
Social Capitalism by MerriCatherine
“There is a clear correlation between popularity, co-optation, and authority that isn’t being addressed often, all tied together through social capitalism: a mechanism designed for individuals or entities to acquire power at the expense of others.”
Clout Culture: Queer Liberation and Social Capitalism Interview with Prof.Ound
“Clout culture literally prevents us from creating a consent culture; clout culture literally prevents us from addressing rape culture and gender violence.”
What is DARVO? by Jennifer Freyd
“DARVO refers to a reaction perpetrators of wrong doing, particularly sexual offenders, may display in response to being held accountable for their behavior. DARVO stands for “Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender.”
DARVO: What Is the Influence on Perceived Perpetrator and Victim Credibility? by Jennifer Freyd
Institutional Betrayal and Institutional Courage by Jennifer Freyd
Why Does He Do That? By Lundy Bancroft
What not to say when women talk to you about sexual harassment by Sian Lewis
Cancel Culture Isn’t Real and anything by anti-rape activist Wagatwe Wanjuki
Dear 8th Grader by Mona Eltahaway, Feminist Giant
“Patriarchy wants to deny you a necessary response to injustice when it tells you that your anger is wrong or out of place. Patriarchy knows that your anger — should you accept it — will hold patriarchy accountable and that you will grow up to be a woman who will demand a reckoning. Patriarchy prefers instead that you perform a self-reckoning, one in which you learn to turn anger not outwards where it belongs and can target injustice, but inwards.”
Letters From a War Zone by Andrea Dworkin
“I think that we have been grateful for the small favors of men long enough. I think that we are sick to death of being grateful. It is as if we are forced to play Russian roulette; each night, a gun is placed against our temples. Each day, we are strangely grateful to be alive. Each day we forget that one night it will be our turn, the random will no longer be random but specific and personal, it will be me or it will be you or it will be someone that we love perhaps more than we love ourselves. Each day we forget that we barter everything we have and get next to nothing in return. Each day we make do, and each night we become captive or outlaw — likely to be hurt either way. It is time to cry “Enough, “ but it is not enough to cry “Enough. “ We must use our bodies to say “Enough” — we must form a barricade with our bodies, but the barricade must move as the ocean moves and be formidable as the ocean is formidable.”
Transform Harm Resource Hub by Mariame Kaba
Survived and Punished Supporting Survivors in Carceration
Hope in the Dark and Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit
“Feminism is an endeavor to change something very old, widespread, and deeply rooted in many, perhaps most, cultures around the world, innumerable institutions, and most households on Earth — and in our minds, where it all begins and ends. That so much change has been made in four or five decades is amazing; that everything is not permanantly, definitively, irrevocably changed is not a sign of failure. A woman goes walking down a thousand-mile road. Twenty minutes after she steps forth, they proclaim that she still has nine hundred ninety-nine miles to go and will never get anywhere.”
