"Women Have a Lust For Pain...”

As I read and meditate on the knowledge I am gaining over how deeply entrenched patriarchy is within the world’s psyche, one (of the many) passages that struck me ended decisively with the line, “...women have a lust for pain.”

I felt like I had read a secret that was horribly false and widely regarded as true. This notion that women are masochistic lives quietly in our human mind. Having separated ourselves so violently from nature, we have renamed her to impose dominion and strip her of life; and in this separation, we have divorced ourselves from women in a very similar fashion: violently. We treat earth like a wasteland, assuming she can take everything we throw at her, seeing her as passive. Women, being closer to nature in a way (white heterosexual) men are not, are treated as the world’s scapegoat in this dehumanizing and soul-wrenching that we engage in.

From seeing our natural habitats as passive and submissive, we take from them viciously, ungratefully, with little remorse or compassion. Cheapening her sexuality to nothing more than pornographic, the sacredness of this earthen vessel is reduced to a masochist…one enduring all of it because….”she deserves it,” “she’s asking for it,” and the saddest part of all is that no one has to really ever say it. We are born taught that being women (or anything other than a white man) is to endure pain for life; it is our birthright for having cursed Adam and humankind with knowledge. We must suffer and like it, beg for it even.

It is an awful secret, one not so secret yet the roots of it snaking around deep in the consciousness of the world.