Psychological Harm is Physical Harm 2: Why Survivors Lose Their Voice

Have you ever had that dream where something bad is happening to you, but when you try to ask for help, you can’t speak? You try to scream for help but you just can’t get the words out? This doesn’t only happen in dreams. It happens in real life as well. Survivors of gendered violence experience this […]

Psychological Harm is Physical Harm 1: Abuse Shapes the Brain

The presidential debates, horrific as their results were, provided survivors everywhere with a strange, backwards gift. A recent piece notes: “It’s remarkable how many female viewers report feeling physically ill.” Trout has not touched any of them, not directly. Yet what survivors are reporting, watching him enter their living rooms via their TV screens, is that this kind […]

Out of the Attic: dissociation and social justice

Out of the Attic: dissociation and social justice This is a workshop created to help increase the general level of public knowledge about the spectrum of dissociative experiences and their connection to systemic oppression. Dissociative experiences are very common. Increasing awareness about how they feel and look, their causes, and how people can help or […]

Cipher

Gwen works at the Institute, the source of all knowledge production in the world. The Institute’s rectilinear stone columns and thin white cutstone steps fill her imagination, and her work fills her days. Slowly her orderly, linear world begins to crack at the edges. In the oldest part of the Institute, a woman in white stands in […]

We Need Allies, Not Gentlemen

This post is the most troubling I’ve ever written. I don’t have the answers, and I hope we can think this through together. But this needs saying. What hit me in the Isla Vista shooter’s murderous tirade on virginity was not the entitlement, the misogyny, or the cold calculation. What hit me, what has stayed […]

Dating Tips for the Feminist Man

This post is in honour of male feminists and their dating rituals. You’re a straight cismale who identifies as a leftie. Maybe you’re a Marxist or a socialist; maybe you’re an anarchist. You respect women. You would never act like a player. You fall in love with strong, smart, feminist women. You believe that our […]

On Gaslighting

I keep having the same conversation over and over. That thing where someone undermines your perception of reality, and says you’re crazy, or denies that something is happening that is in fact happening? When people we love and trust do that to us? It really messes with our minds. Over time, or when it is about important […]