This is Delicious Dignity, where we cultivate a self so potent, so clear, so vital, so truthful, that our life is all the more luscious for it. Let's call ourselves into being, shall we? Hello, lovelies. Somewhere in one of my episodes on this podcast, I told you that one of the ways you know that you're on purpose or that your work or your life is aligned with who you are in your soul is when your work and the things that you do change you just as much as you change it. I think that's what the word alignment truly deeply means. That's what it means to be aligned with something. That's what it means to be on purpose with something. Even if it's just for a short while, that's how you know it's really important to you and your soul. And I think nowhere is that more clear for me than in this podcast. Because, in case you haven't noticed, I took a huge break of posting an episode every single week. I went from that to posting every two weeks to now there being a whole month and a half between episodes. And the reason why I've been doing this is precisely because I have stopped self-abandoning as much in this podcast. I wasn't ever doing that to a high degree, but I realized that there was this line between encouraging myself to record an episode and pushing myself to record an episode. And I did not want to push myself anymore. And I talk a lot about how I've moved away from hustle culture in a big way in episodes four and five. So if you want to review those, you can. But the work of self-abandonment and recording these episodes for you have made me sort of be like a hawk watching where I have abandoned myself and tweaking every area of my life to not do that anymore. There's this myth of consistency that the world holds us up to, and I don't think that's realistic. And that's precisely why I don't want to hold myself to this consistent posting thing, because my body is not consistent, especially a perimenopausal body. I have four phases in my hormonal cycle per month. So who am I to expect that my desires, my body, my life, my actions will be consistent every single day? And why do I hurt myself by saying I'm not a good enough podcaster, just not a good enough person because I don't have this consistency in actions. I have consistency in values, but not necessarily in actions and in the way in which I express those values. And that leads us into patriarchy. And that's why I think patriarchy and understanding patriarchy is one of the ways in which we can really start to pull out of this pattern of self-abandonment. For this particular example that I started off with, I feel like a lot of evil and toxicity gets excused and even encouraged by these so-called virtues of patriarchy, which is pushing, effort, standardization, consistency, more and more and more and more, be a content machine. And that's what I'm questioning in my personal life right now, as far as the podcast is concerned. And in this particular episode for you, we're just going to explore patriarchy as it relates to self-abandonment specifically, because I don't think that we discuss that enough when we talk about patriarchy, right? What have you heard about patriarchy? You often hear about feminism and feminists, you hear about men and how they take power away from women or don't give them any, etc. You hear about all of that, but you don't hear specifically about self-abandonment and how patriarchy thrives and even encourages self-abandonment, especially in women, but also in men. I would even say one of the roots of patriarchy is self-abandonment. Now, before we go into the throes of patriarchy and what it means and all this doom and gloom, right? I don't want you to ever feel when you listen to this podcast that somehow we're just being negative or we're going into some kind of trauma dump. We're not doing that at all. But we do have to look at a thing so that we can name the thing, so we can either sidestep or deal with the thing. Before we go into all the details so that we can understand the beast that we're looking at, I just want to give you the solution right up front so that you never feel like we're gonna get to the solution only at the end after we've gone through this long journey into hell, right? And the solution is simple, but it's not simplistic. And the solution is create patriarchy-free spaces for yourself. And by virtue of creating it for yourself, you create it for other people. That's the solution to this whole episode. That's the dignity we're gonna talk about in this episode. Now, as to what that actually means, you're gonna understand that more and more. What does it mean to be to create spaces where patriarchy is not the norm? That we will understand throughout the episode. But I just want you to know there is a solution. And I don't want to oversimplify it by saying that, oh, this is a solution, but I also don't want you to feel like there isn't one. Because this is a system that's existed for thousands of years, and it can feel overwhelming and that you're helpless and powerless, but you're actually not. So in this episode, I'll define patriarchy so we all start at a firm foundation, and I'll go into more importantly the waterfall effects and symptoms of patriarchy, give you stories from my own life, and pick instances even from pop culture that you may not have noticed as patriarchal or patriarchal-inducing, just so that we know how to see. We know what to see and like what we're actually looking at, right? So then you can understand why you self-abandon, how you self-abandon, and you can see it in other people. So you're not confused or doubtful about what you see. You can know it, label it, correct it, and sidestep it. And I think that sometimes we feel like when we see something wrong, we have to pick up the weapon and fight it and be upset about it. And of course, that's one way to handle things, but that's not what we're talking about necessarily. We're all tired. We all don't want one more thing on our plate to deal with. It's just we talk about this so you don't end up hurting yourself and thinking that you are the problem. Because once you can see the systems behind the oppression, it'll make it less easier for you to self-abandon. Self-abandonment won't be your norm, it will be the exception, and you won't let others do the same. You stop pathologizing yourself, you stop thinking that there's something wrong with you, and instead you see it from a higher perspective where your compassion meets your wisdom. And isn't compassion a form of awareness? Instead of beating up yourself, which is normally the type of awareness a lot of people have, we have an awareness now that's neither complacent nor derogatory, that understands everything, sees everything, takes responsibility, but does not take on blame, guilt, or shame. And maybe just maybe we stop helping or aiding other people to self-abandon, even when we do it unconsciously, we stop it because, as an example, one of the symptoms of patriarchy is that it pits women against each other. An example of that is mothers against daughters. If you see a lot of mothers in a lot of different cultures, they force their daughters to self-abandon in the name of virtue, in the name of morality, in the name of what it means to be a woman. Right? You've we've seen mothers tell their daughters to sit a certain way, talk a certain way, behave a certain way, compromise their boundaries, be a good little girl just to be just so that she is convenient to everyone around her. And when so when we understand patriarchy, we automatically stop unconsciously or consciously helping and forcing other people to self-abandon. So let me define patriarchy for you real quick. Um, and then we'll go into a little bit more of an explanation in different aspects, right? I've always already given you a few aspects of how it shows up, but then I'm gonna talk to you about everything from the medical industry to cosmetic surgery, everything. And so we'll go more into that. But let's talk about what patriarchy is. It is a system. Okay, that's number one. It's a system, it is the machine that makes our world turn. And we're all just like the products that come out of this machine. And you could call it a social system, but I would argue it's social, it's governmental, it's political, it's medical. It's a system underneath all systems, and it's a system in which males hold primary power, dominating power, they even hold authority on the moral front, they hold privilege, and they hold control of assets. Now, the degree to which males do this, for example, in Afghanistan, it's a hundred percent. A hundred percent males hold all of this. In other countries, they may hold 80%, 70%, or 60%. The way I'm explaining patriarchy to you is that that is the default setting. That is the system underneath all systems. Now, I never wanted to learn about patriarchy because I sensed it, right? We all sensed it, especially as girls, how boys are treated different from us, how we have these incredibly cruel and unrealistic expectations on us. And we sensed it from a child, but we never wanted to actually go into it because we sensed how devastating it would be to know what we already sense but don't want to name. So I have a lot of compassion for women who don't want to go into this or think about this, and even men, because when you finally see it, it can cause so much grief. But then once you get over that, then you start having a lot of compassion because you start to see all those massive amounts of shame and self-doubt and confusion being your primary state, that maybe it's not necessarily a psychosis or a personality problem. Maybe that's just how systems make you feel on the daily. I used to second guess myself constantly, thinking about every single thing I do. I thought I was fundamentally wrong inside, that I'm not nice enough, friendly enough, approachable enough. And I would abandon myself chronically because the system made me believe that who I truly was was not lovable, was not respectable, or even welcomed. So I understand why it's so much easier to put your head in the sand. I get it. We're either in we're in some kind of fear response where we want to fight, flee, freeze, or fawn. And for a long time I didn't want to talk about patriarchy or go into like the science of it, if you will, because I was having a freeze response. I just didn't want to go into it. I didn't want to overwhelm my nervous system with all of it. So I understand if that's also your feeling. But I want to say that on the other side, there's so much compassion and love for you, and I really hope you take this journey. I used to think that the only way to like deal with patriarchy is to just ignore it and move on. But I think now looking back, I think the only way to get out of this is to acknowledge that we're afraid. As a woman, I'm afraid I will never find an equal male partner. I'm afraid that I can never trust anyone, including women, especially patriarchal women. I'm afraid that I that I will just feel inordinate amounts of fear and grief, and I won't be able to cope with it. So just acknowledge you're afraid. You know, before we even go into this episode, just acknowledge what you are afraid about when it comes to patriarchy. Maybe if you're a male listening to this episode, you are afraid that you will see all the ways in which you have benefited from patriarchy and then feel shame and guilt for it. Maybe you will be afraid of learning what women actually think about the men in their lives or the males around them. And you will feel rejected. I feel like a lot of people are really afraid of rejection, so they don't want to see the truth. But just the simple act of acknowledging what you're afraid of, there's your wisdom, and there's where we can start with the truth. So back to describing patriarchy. One of the aspects of it is everything is male-centered. The recorded history is from a male-centered narrative. Even family history or stories we tell is around the males. The mythologies that we know revolve around the male point of view. You can see that most clearly in the story of Adam and Eve. How the entire narrative is centered around what Eve will or won't do for the male and what she did against the male. It's also about identifying with a male symbol. So what is good, what is normal, what is valuable is associated with males and masculinity. An example of this I gave you was consistency. It is so easy for a male body to be consistent because they don't have the hormonal upheavals monthly or in their life the way women do. We can lose up to 40% of our bone mass by menopause or through menopause. Males don't have that. I heard a woman describe the female experience of what a woman goes through hormonally as castration. Imagine if a male was castrated and all of the hormonal effects that follow after that, that's what a woman is going through. And again, she had to describe it from a male perspective for us to understand what's happening to a woman's body. And she needed to do that. I'm not saying she was being patriarchal and saying that, but she needed to give a male example to understand the female experience. Another example of what is good or normal or valuable centered from a male identity is we see all of this in virgin or whore mentality. A woman can only be a virgin or she can be a whore. That's really how the construct is. And it's never about a woman exploring her sexuality or exploring her sensuality, understanding the way her body moves and how she feels in different areas, like understanding the way she can achieve an orgasm. It's just about virgin or whore. Does she sleep with a lot of men or is she pure? And that mentality only benefits one gender, and it's not the female gender, and it's not any other gender. And then when we talk about male domination, we see the authority that males hold. You see positions of leadership that males hold. I remember my ex-boyfriend's mother once said, Well, women can't be in positions of leadership because they get their period. And therefore they can't be in positions of leadership. And we have to question the whole idea of leadership as being exclusionary of a woman's hormonal cycle. You see, if leadership can only be defined by what a man can and can by what a woman can or cannot do in a male template, then it's not really leadership, it's patriarchy. And the assumption that a woman cannot work during her period is false. We see a lot of women working during their period, now, whether it's healthy or not, that's besides the point. But her idea of leadership came from the fact that a woman cannot perform or cannot be good enough because she has a hormonal cycle. Same for positions of wealth and influence. If you think about how many of our female ancestors ever had wealth or influence, ever, ever were in a position of authority, the way so many of our female friends and our even female coworkers have today. We never had any of it. My mother definitely didn't have any wealth or influence of her own. My grandmother certainly didn't. My great-grandmother definitely did not. Even the idea of a woman having wealth, influence, and authority is a relatively new concept. So I would say that we don't even know what it looks like for a woman to have authority. We have no idea because all our assumptions are based on the male template. We have no idea what it means to be a leader. Not really, because all we know is based on the male template. And I know I've been talking a lot about the impact on women, but let me talk about the impact on men. Now I know I'm conforming to a gender binary here, male and female, but that has been a lot of my life experience. And that is why I'm able to speak on both binaries, and I don't know about other gender associations, mostly because I haven't experienced them as thoroughly as I have experienced these two uh gender binaries. It's not because I'm being exclusionary, I just don't feel like I have the authority to talk on those subjects or the experience. The way I have seen how males behave under a patriarchal system is the following. So this is not based on science or literature, this has been purely based on my observation. Number one, hypersexuality. This includes addiction to pornography. It includes addiction, and pornography for a male is everywhere. Everything from a YouTube video to Instagram posts to OnlyFans. Like if you look at how our society is structured, everything is about hyper hypersexuality. It's this idea that males are these mindless sex freaks that only think with their nether regions, and that's how they make all their decisions. And we have culturally accepted that as the norm to the extent to which males also believe this. To the extent to which, if you see a lot of male empowerment is or the so-called male gurus touting empowerment for males, you see that they focus on sex and they focus on getting sex or having sex. It's all about that as the entire male experience. And there's a kind of mindlessness that comes along with this hypersexuality. It's almost like half their brain is gone. Internally, like they have no soul or no like sense of sensuality or beauty or wonder because those come from a sense of creativity and nourishment and nurturing. But those are not words that you would ever use to describe a man in the typical social cultural context. When in reality, when I have seen truly healthy males, I don't know if any of you have, but when you've seen a truly healthy male, have you noticed how he's incredibly nurturing and incredibly calm and sort of on the ball, like they don't miss a beat. There's a kind of calmness to them that makes your whole body relax around a healthy male in a way that I have just never experienced that from a female. I've only ever experienced that in a male. And it's why I really believe in the divine masculine, because I've met these men. I've really met them and I've known them. I've I've I've I feel like it's been a privilege to know males like this. You just sit next to them and it's like all the activity in your body just comes to a peaceful standstill, to the extent to which I remember one time thinking to myself, I was like, instead of going to a church and meditating or sitting on my meditation couch and meditating, I just want to sit next to a healthy male and I'm automatically meditating because it's so natural for me to go into a meditative state when I'm around one of those males. But that is not how masculinity is described under a patriarchal culture, because patriarchy cannot benefit and cannot propagate itself with males who are calm, who have sublimated their sexual impulse into creativity and nourishment and care and just this kind of nobility and grace. And I know a lot of times grace is associated with the female experience, but for me, the most graceful people I've ever met have actually been males. Like they have a natural grace about them that I just can't explain. But it's there. Imagine if all the advertising to males was associated with grace and beauty and calm and creativity. I don't know if they would be able to sell so much product in the culture in which males are expected to be hypersexual and kind of mindless. There is a kind of um also incompetency that I see with how patriarchy almost encourages males to be incompetent in daily life tasks like cooking or cleaning or being able to just have the ability to know how to shop for groceries in a good way, like or how to chop vegetables. Basic things like this, it almost forces an incompetency because to be competent at those things makes you what I've heard Andrew Tate call a cuck or a. Guy who is submissive to women or not competent enough. Imagine not being able to feed yourself good food as a way to be a man. It's kind of ridiculous. There's an incompetency there, and everything is focused on their amusement. Whatever amuses a male is the highlight of a patriarchal experience. If a male is not amused, then he is not somehow a man. And this amusement is almost always centered around a sex thing or a porn thing. And the final thing I've seen, what males are like under a patriarchal culture, is that they're self-destructive. I've never seen this more than I have in corporate culture. And by the way, I give you all these examples from my life, not because these are the only examples, right? I'm giving you all these examples from different areas of life so that you can get some idea of how this affects every little area of your life. And you can start to see things with a different eye, an eye that's more compassionate, but also more wise and discerning. Okay, disclaimer over. The self-destruction thing. Here's an example of where I've seen it. In the corporate world, I used to hear, I remember entering the corporate world when I was 19. And that's when I first heard the phrase work hard, play hard. It was almost exclusively said by men. I almost never heard a woman say those words. And I thought it was the most stupidest, ridiculous statement I've ever heard in my life. Because what these males would call playing hard, they would call drinking to the point of being completely incompetent and unavailable, to the point of being sloppy, that would be their playing. It would be going to strip clubs, that would be their form of play. Watching sports would be the form of play. It would never be about actual play, it would be about checking out. So I always said that the correct phrase was working to an insane degree and then checking out just as insanely. That's the correct phrase. Work hard, check out harder. But it was packaged and branded as play. And so the idea of play for a male was always about checking out. And it promoted a kind of self-destruction. And that's how patriarchy works for males. Because if you can keep males hypersexual, mindless, stupid, incompetent, amusement-focused, and self-destructive, you can control them. And the best way to control a male is by controlling access to women. And we'll talk about that later in the episode. Because I really want to introduce you to this book called Caliban and the Witch. It's a very difficult book to read, but I want to introduce you to a concept I learned from that book, and that'll happen in a minute. But before we get into that, I want to go back to the solution I gave you at the beginning of this episode, which is creating patriarchy-free spaces. Now, telling you all that I just told you, can you see how you have some ways in which you can create patriarchy-free spaces? So let me give you an example of what to include in a patriarchy-free space. What might that be? First, let's say what a patriarchy full space will look like. Okay. A patriarchy, a full of patriarchy space includes prioritizing men and the male experience, uh, domination and holding power over a certain group of people or persons or animals or children, normalizing the oppression of feelings, viewing the expression of feelings as weak or bad, uh, feeling shame for having needs, feeling shamed for resting or slowing down. A lot of this I'm taking from the book by Bethany Webster, who described the mother wound and how a lot of us have a mother wound and it's because of patriarchy. So that's another great book to read as a reference. The other aspect of a patriarchy full space would be needing to produce to feel valued. This is kind of hinting at what I described at the beginning of this episode with the podcast. Violating boundaries is an aspect of patriarchy. It's almost as if, and that by the way, is directly related to self-abandonment because violating somebody's boundaries, not respecting boundaries, thinking that boundaries are a light suggestion is an aspect of patriarchy. A sense of scarcity, of money, time, love, energy, resources. Everything is always scarce, and you need more and more and more and more. I think that's where a lot of people produce content from. They produce content from that sense of scarcity. Feelings of being isolated and disconnected, objectification and objectifying women, especially or objectifying people in general, comes from that place of disconnection. Because if you can treat somebody like an object, you can disconnect from them. Not seeing people as people, seeing them as objects. Obedience and compliance are the norm. Anything that's viewed as feminine or is remotely feminine sounding is looked down upon or frowned. Males are their default human being, they are the default blue uh blueprint. And yeah, any kind of deviant behavior, which basically means anything that makes you a person with differing thoughts, views, sexualities, races is wrong. Going back to what I said with all of the symptoms of patriarchy that we just described, if you had to make a patriarchy-free space now, you just do the opposite of whatever we described. And maybe you can't make it 100% patriarchy-free, but if you can make it even 60% or 70% patriarchy-free, that would be great. For example, one of the places that I have felt is relatively patriarchy-free is the pottery studio that I go to now, and I'm very interested in pottery and doing all this like working with clay and painting and building things. It's just been lovely. And I get to play. I don't have to feel perfect, I don't need to produce, I don't feel shame, I don't feel like males are holding power over me. I don't feel like my feelings are oppressed in any way. And I get to play and create and work with my hands and learn new things. That to me is a patriarchy-free space. So a really good way to go if you can't find one or build one yourself is to go to an art place. Usually they are relatively patriarchy-free compared to all of the other art spaces, but you have to be mindful of it because obviously a lot of the art world is dominated by males. As an example, Picasso being a complete and utter despicable human being, especially to women, and his artwork is celebrated, right? We have to be careful of those things. But I'm not talking about that kind of art. I'm talking about a space where you can make art and live in art, and usually that's relatively patriarchy-free. That's a little area to invest your time in. Maybe you create a local book club where you read books written by women or by queer authors or by different races and religions from you. These are just examples of what I mean by patriarchy-free space. And you can use what I told you above and go to Bethany Webster's work as and look at what she describes as patriarchy and try to create a space that's about that. And what that will help you with is give you some time to get to know who you are as a self, as a person, and love it and refuse to abandon it. Because one of the things patriarchy does, I think, is that not only does it cause you to self-abandon, it actually causes you to not have a self at all. It just simply makes you a cog in the machine or a production of the machine. So that's what I feel like creating patriarchy-free spaces and even the attempt to create patriarchy-free spaces changes you. And what I don't mean by patriarchy-free, by the way, just so we're clear, I know you all are very intelligent, but I still have to remind you: patriarchy-free does not mean male free. Um, males are definitely included, they're just not the center of the experience. That is all. So let's talk about the female experience and self-abandonment and patriarchy. So, in order to survive in this world as a woman, especially, right, you have to become like the patriarchy, or you have to risk being unsafe, cast out, experiencing financial insecurity or sexual insecurity, or physical insecurity, emotional insecurity, mental insecurity. It's almost as if you have to either become them or you have to risk a lot of unsafety if you don't become them. I see this also, and again, another example of where I've seen this is you know, these online business coaches or these people that tell you on how they make a lot of money. And you see this coming from males mostly, but you see also a lot of females promoting this kind of lifestyle by the ones who drank the male Kool-Aid, so to speak. And they're always about hustling and working hard and be a content machine. And I just feel so sad for the women business owners who listen to these people because a lot of women, if we were given a choice, we don't want to operate that way. We, in fact, a lot of women who build their businesses or who build their passion project or and turn it into a business or podcasting or making art or pottery or being coaches online, whatever it is they're doing, a lot of women built these businesses to be free from that cycle. But in reality, what happens is they end up adopting the same cycle they would have in a corporate job in their own business. Only now they have very little cushion and very little support. And they're being told to hustle more, create more, do more and more, more and more. And then maybe somewhere in the distant future, they will get the results that they want to see. And this is what I want to introduce you to the patriarchal double bind. And what that is, is a it's a paradox where women face these contradictory expectations that cannot be reconciled. So, as an example, I have been told, oh Dilshad, you have to be very passionate and very sexy to be encouraged or like looked upon positively by men, but at the same time, you have to be this virgin, this pure being who um who doesn't say much, who's always the good little girl, very polite, very sweet, very submissive. And it's like, on one hand, you want me to be this very sexy woman, but on the other hand, you also want me to be a virgin. That whole virgin whore complex, I see that a lot. Like it's not explicitly said, but it is implicitly encouraged and even wanted in a woman. Another thing that I've experienced is oh, you should have a really good job. You should have money, so you have to be competent and assertive. But yet, if I am competent in some ways, I am punished for it because I don't have enough submissiveness. I don't have enough warmth in my being, I am too firm in my boundaries. I should be a woman, I should be assertive in my job, but I should also be very forgiving and submissive in my relationships. We're pushed to adopt masculine traits or seemingly masculine perceived traits, like being assertive, but then we're also violent, we're punished for violating traditional feminine or perceived feminine norms, like sweetness and politeness and cutesiness and being a good little girl. That's the bind. It's like either trap, either option will result in some kind of punishment, self-abandonment, or deprivation. If a woman stays with her traditional roles, her agency, her power in the world, her career, her competency in the world is basically finished. If she speaks up and she challenges those norms, what does she risk? She risks uh ostracization, you know, she risks being labeled as aggressive, she risks not being loved or uh being alone. If a woman is sexy, then great. But if she's molested because of being sexy, it's her fault because she's sexy, so of course she's molested, right? You have to be confident, but not too confident. And so this creates such an incredible push-pull mechanism inside of a woman that it really limits her ability to act in the world because both sides she gets punished sometimes severely for taking that action. And yes, men also experience some kind of bind, but for a male, he's not gonna be shot, stoned, sexually assaulted for stepping out a line. For a woman, there is an actual physical danger of being a certain way in the world or being her true self. So what does she do? She self-abandons because self-abandonment is necessary to survive, at least until we begin to have agency and power and control and knowledge over our own lives. So a lot of women who were in my practice, they would say one of two things to me. They would say, I'm really confused. And I would look at them and say, You're not confused. You're only confused because of this patriarchal bind where you don't know what the right action is because you see that you're going to be punished no matter which side you take. So you say you're confused instead of saying you're in patriarchy. So, in order to not self-abandon, women will say they're confused in order to try to figure out what is the best way they can not get punished for something or not feel violated for something. And then a lot of women will wonder why they feel so alone or why they don't feel loved. And it's it's almost as if that if you refuse to self-abandon, you risk not being loved or liked, you risk being alone. If you don't adopt the masculine traits, you risk not being seen as competent or strong, or that we can't do the same things that men do. There is this very popular social media quote that's been going around that I think now is the best time to introduce it to you. And the quote goes like this. And I don't know who said it. I tried and tried and tried to find the original person of this quote. Original person of this quote, the person who originally said this line, but I couldn't find them. So if you know them, please let me know. The line goes like this: discernment will make you the villain in the room where denial is the culture. When we are discerning, we are the villain, so we will adapt. And by adapt, I mean we will self-abandon. A woman adapting to patriarchy is almost always self-abandoning somewhere. We see how men get away with the absolute worst atrocities and we get disillusioned. We get angry, but if we're angry and disillusioned, then we are the angry feminist. We see other women uphold patriarchy in their marriages. There was a female judge that gave teenage boys who sexually assaulted a girl get zero prison time because the judge, who was a female, said that she feared for the boy's future. And we look at women like this and we think, what is going on? We just face more grief, more disillusionment, more anger. And the more grief and disillusionment and anger that we see because we're discerning, we can look at things, the more we're called aggressive or angry or somehow bad women because we just can't smile enough. That's another example of the patriarchal bind. So, in a lot of ways, to go back to the beginning of this episode, a lot of women don't want to learn about patriarchy because they sense that they will become disillusioned and angry and upset. And it will rise to the surface and it will make them less desirable and they will be punished for it. In a way, it's a survival mechanism to not learn about patriarchy. Yet at the same time, I submit to you that all those feelings that they're so afraid of feeling, they're already there. They're just under the surface. It's just about bringing them to the surface because all women that face patriarchy are filled with resentment and anger. Period, full stop. Period, full stop. Right? And it's just about bringing it to the surface and confronting it. And from previous episodes, we talked about the just world hypothesis as an example. And that's where we, as babies or as children, we believe that the world is fair. When we realize that it's not fair because we can't really understand that that's how the world is built, we blame it on ourselves. We say we are the problem. And not only that, that's what we learn as a baby. And then when we grow up, we realize the world is not fair. We think, okay, we've reached a point of maturity where we've now understood that we have the just world bias. We're transcending that, we realize that it's not our fault. Everything is not because we are wrong inside or bad people. And we think that that's the ceiling. That's the adult ceiling of realizing that this is the truth. But what is one level above that truth, even? This is when you've not only become an adult, but you've become a wise elder, especially as a woman, is when you realize that the world isn't just not fair, it's specifically cruel to women. And when you realize that truth, that's when you start to understand your patterns of self-abandonment. It's a truth that a lot of women will avoid. And in order to avoid it, they have to self-abandon. And now, more so than ever, we're seeing expose after expose on what the patriarchy has been doing. And some women are digging their heels in and saying, oh no, like, you know, there's no such thing as patriarchy. While others are wondering if the love story, the soulmate, the Disney princess movie story that they were told was ever really real. Can they ever find a mate? Can they ever find a companion, especially for heterosexual women? All of this that I just told you is example after example of the different sides and the different feelings that patriarchy will build in you to almost encourage you, necessitate you to self-abandon. This is why I think that true ancestral healing will always begin with dismantling patriarchy. That's why you know all these gurus out there that talk about ancestral healing, generational curse healing, trauma recovery, you name it, any therapy or spiritual practice out there that does not tell you, teach you, or make you work with the effects of patriarchy, I would say is almost a lie. At some point in any spiritual or therapeutic practice, we have to go over the systems that we are under that cause us to behave in these so-called toxic ways, which may just be a way to cope with the world. Bethany Webster makes this point in her book. She says, traditionally, women have been taught that it's noble, even necessary to carry other people's pain, especially a male's pain, and that emotionally caretaking is our duty, and that we should feel guilty if we deviate from this function. And in this case, guilt is not about conscience, it's about control. Because this guilt, it keeps us depleting ourselves, that is, self-abandoning ourselves, ignorant of our own power and assuming that we have no power at all. And to think for even one second, as a woman or even as a man, that this emotional caretaker role that has been dumped on women was actually never a role for women, that in of itself can blow your mind, especially a woman who comes from an Asian culture, you know, where caretaking, especially emotional caretaking, is literally the only way to be a woman. And not being that woman causes so much guilt because we think we're not being good people, because we don't emotionally caretake someone. For me, refusing to emotionally caretake my parents or my friends has been such a game changer for me. Because while I will be emotionally available and present for people, I will not assume responsibility for their feelings. So the idea that you can let people have their feelings, that you don't have to rush in to caretake them, that's a form of respect for yourself and for them. Overfunctioning as a woman, trying to take care of this and that and this and that, and juggle this, these many balls in the air and be very feel very proud of yourself for doing so. This overfunctioning is what causes this imbalance and disempowerment in women and continuously self abandoning yourself. Because when you are juggling 20 different things, the first person that you will drop the ball on. Is you also in Asian women I've seen they will purposely project inferiority and vulnerability and and cutesy, sweetness, smallness, innocence thing, this image, and they want their daughters to project the same image because they think that if their daughters did that, it'll protect them from rejection or shame or being alone. So that's how mothers will scapegoat their own daughters. Will cause their daughters to self-abandon themselves. Because if my daughter is too big or too visible or too powerful, she'll end up being rejected and alone. Because no male wants a woman like that, right? And I think a lot of us can relate to that. I'll give you another example of patriarchy in a way that you might not have noticed, and that's in cosmetic surgery. So there's this concept called the mar a logo face. It's especially common in white Republican Trumpers, women specifically, and you see that in the gaunt cheeks, the sunken in eyes, the lip fillers. It's almost like they look like a dried-up mummy, but with fat lips. It looks like they're wearing a mask. And this is a sign of patriarchy because they're trying to signal their allegiance to Trump. And if you've noticed, they all look exactly the same. And what's really sad for me to see is I'm seeing it now even in India. I'm not just seeing it in the United States because a lot of people in India sometimes copy the US culture and try to make it there's that after-effect of colonization where we try to copy the colonizer because we think it'll give us power. And I see a lot of rich ladies in India copying this Mar a logo face, the gauntness, the sunken in eyes, the fat lips. It's just, it's a subconscious decision to have allegiance to a specific patriarch, whether it's their own husbands or whether it's Trump. So look that up and see for yourself what I mean. I want to give you a story from my life. This happened around when I was 22 years old. I want to tell you this story specifically, not just about what this male person said, but how I specifically reacted. And this is such a good example of self-abandonment, women, and patriarchy. Okay. This is what happened. I was 22 years old. I was sitting at this table at an Indian restaurant with a colleague who I thought was a friend. And he was describing a funny story that his friend was telling him where he took a woman home from the bar and she was drunk and he was having sex with her from by the way, this is total trigger warning content. Please skip ahead five minutes if this is going, if you know that you're sensitive to this. So just yeah. I just want this is a very telling story, and I think it's very important to tell it. Otherwise, I would not tell it on this podcast. He brought her home to have sex with her, and what he said he did, or what he was telling the joke, the joke was that since he was having sex with her from behind, he went and he asked his friend to come and have sex with her from behind, and she was so drunk that she didn't know. Meanwhile, he goes to the window and waves at her from the window. And the joke is that, oh, she gets so confused because she thinks she's having sex with him, and then she doesn't realize she's having sex with another guy. And he starts laughing as he tells this story, which is apparently a common or a funny thing to do when you have sex with a woman. I was so shocked and disgusted and even scared of the men I was sitting with because they started laughing. They thought it was funny, and out of my mouth, before I even could stop myself from saying it, I couldn't believe what I just heard. I immediately said, You do know that's rape, right? That's rape. And the way he looked at me, I will never forget his face. He just stared at me with his eyes big. And the look was one of, like, oh shit, that's maybe what it is, but also that this girl cannot hang with the boys. It's that look that men give you when they realize that or they think that you're a feminist as though it's a dirty word. And he immediately went silent. And he and he stopped saying the story, and he stopped elaborating on the story, and all the guys on the table just quietly kept eating their food. And I kept looking around at all of them, and I'm like, what did I say? Did I say something wrong? Like, I was so confused. I'm like, you do realize this is rape, right? And I didn't say it out loud, but I was just like, what is going on on this table? And I quickly tried to make him feel better. I quickly said, Oh, you know, but I guess it's just a joke. It's just a funny story. Nobody actually does this. And I started trying to make other jokes. I quickly tried to like make a pun joke to lighten up the mood, to make everybody else feel like I could hang with the guys, or that I could just I belonged on the table, or that I wasn't a stick in the mud, I wasn't a prude. And the whole time I was left with this sick, sick feeling. And that's what's interesting here. It's how I reacted. I blurted out what was essentially the truth of what was happening. And then I tried to make him feel better about what I just said. I left my feelings, abandoned myself and my values to emotionally caretake and grow up a male that I had no business in doing so. And I feel bound by it in a way because my money was tied to this job. My whole security was tied to this job. So better to abandon myself and my values than challenge the status quo and become the unpopular one, even though that's what I did initially. That was my instinct was to be like, oh my God, I'm afraid, I'm shocked, I'm disgusted. But then I had to override those feelings, emotionally caretake him, make myself more palatable and convenient, right? So for those, I hope there are no males listening to this that think, oh, this was just a joke. This apparently is not a joke. There's a colloquial term for it. It's called the houdini. This is actually a thing. I was hearing it for the first time, but this is apparently a thing in male culture. So that this is a joke. There's a term for it. The non-consensual act of it, the deception, treating women as an object that requires deception as core feature, not an exception, but that's the feature of this whole story is to deceive a woman. And the punchline of the story depends upon dehumanizing a woman. All those things are the aspects of this story. And my 22-year-old self didn't have all these fancy words to describe to you what I just described to you, right? All I knew was shock and disgust. And then I immediately overwrote that to emotionally caretake a man. By the way, for those of you who are listening, I would like you to understand that rape by deception is a criminal offense. By the way, it's actually a criminal offense. That's a crime. It is a thing. Sexual coercion is a crime. So I just want to use those words and give you those words just so you know you have it. But again, deception and coercion is usually a tactic males will use to get sex from women. You hear about men talking about how they will convince a woman to have sex with them, how they will do all these things to have sex with a woman, how they will get upset that a woman won't have sex with them if they buy them a drink. These are all subtle deception and coercion tactics. The idea is to make a woman abandon herself or trick her into abandoning herself. I want to go over this because one of the things I used to do is I would study or just look at the psychology of psychopaths and sociopaths and serial rapists and serial murderers. And if you listen to some of their interviews, if you have the stomach for it, or if you're just simply interested in what makes somebody so cruel, what's so interesting across all of them and what made them successful, and I put that in quotes, at what they did, is that they were experts at recognizing women and people who abandoned themselves for the sake of being polite or sweet or acceptable or complacent. And that is how they got them to be their victims. You also look at what narcissists say about people they've been able to manipulate, and they will talk about people, they know somebody is easily manipulatable when this person regularly gives in to their demands and overrides their own intuition and instincts for the sake of pleasing someone else. I hope I have made my case for you in this thesis that patriarchy survives on self-abandonment. Now, I promised you I talk about Caliban and the Witch. I think it is a really important book because what struck me most about this book is how history repeats itself and also just how sad it made me to see that the history is repeating itself right now in this day and age as we speak. Her name is Silvia Federici. She's the author of the book Caliban and the Witch. And the name means it comes from Shakespeare's The Temptess Play, and it symbolized two archetypes or two people in the play, Caliban and a Witch, who were violently subjugated by the rise of capitalism in that play. She named her book Caliban and the Witch because the whole book is about how capitalism and therefore patriarchy violently subjugates women and men. She's making her case that how the ruling class enforced early capitalist accumulation of wealth through racism, misogyny, white supremacy, and the policing of human bodies. Caliban and the witch were two people who had who had to deal with that in the Shakespeare's Temptist play. So that is why she named her book Caliban and the Witch. This book is centered a lot around capitalism. And she talks about capitalism was built on separating the means of production from the producers. So separating the means of production, such as land, from the producers, like the farmers or the peasants. And by separating those two, the system was able to establish a capitalist system. And they did this separation mostly by violence and theft, not by any fair trade of separating land from farmers, etc. So basically, you've created a property-less workforce and you've created a concentration of wealth enabling this production. That's what she calls primitive accumulation, and that's what her whole book is based on. Now, a function of capitalism, how they use to establish a capitalist system, is through misogyny and patriarchy. And that's a part of the book that this episode applies to. Of course, the whole episode applies, but specifically how patriarchy was used to disempower women and why it was used to disempower women. So this separation from producers and the means of production created a master slave dynamic. The people who owned the property, or the noblemen or the whatever you want to call them, they owned the property and the people had to produce stuff on their property. So they were the slaves. Master slave dynamic. Now, in order to keep these peasants or the slaves under their control of the master, the master would give these slaves someone else to control so that they could feel in power. So this master slave dynamic was a tool that you use to make people feel like they have power, but they actually don't. In order to create a continuous flow of production on their property as masters, they would make the slaves feel like they had power. How would you do that? You would make the male slaves feel like they had power over the female slaves. The point that she made, and of course she does a much better job of going into the history and everything, the point that she made was women are the first to be controlled so that you can control men. Women are used as a tool to control men. Misogyny is actually a tool to control men. Patriarchy is a tool to control men. And the way you do that is by pretending or giving them power to control women. The way they did it back then is to force women to become prostitutes or live very, very poorly, so that they had to barter their bodies for money for survival. Now, of course, they're doing it in a whole bunch of ways. You see it with abortion, you see it with our rights taken away. You see Afghanistan right now completely shutting down all female agency. And I don't think I fully understood that patriarchy is a way to control men until I read this book. You could have explained it to me conceptually, but I would never have understood it unless I saw the history of it time and time again. And this is what she says in the book. She says, women are the land men could conquer and have without the land that they actually could have owned. Proletarian women, proletarian meaning member of the working class who does not own the means of production, like factories, tools, or land, proletarian women became for male workers the substitute for the land lost to the enclosures or capitalism. Women are the land men can conquer when they don't have anything else to conquer. Anyone could appropriate and use a woman at will. This made me have so much respect for my female ancestors and what they went through, I can't even tell you. Is it any wonder why women have so much shame, so much guilt just for existing? Because for thousands of years we were made to feel guilt for existing. We were ridiculed, we were put down, we were infantilized, our bodies were for someone else to take, our minds are for someone else's use. Even animals had more rights than we did. And I just ended up having such a new appreciation for the female wound and how far we've come with what so little we were given. I mean, it's only been, what, 50 years? At least in America, I mean, less than that in other countries where women have truly begun to have some kind of thing that we can call freedom. And look at what we've done in such a short amount of time. And now I want to quote directly something from her book. The power difference between women and men and the concealment of women's unpaid labor under the cover of natural inferiority have enabled capitalism to immensely expand the unpaid part of the working day and use the male wage to accumulate women's labor. In many cases, they have also served to deflect class antagonism into an antagonism between men and women. Wow. Do you understand that? Like, do you get that? Like the rage that we feel against the extremely rich and wealthy, the disproportionately rich, the top 1% owning all this land and entire countries and jet planes and all of that, instead of channeling our anger where it belongs onto the people who literally assault this planet, we instead channel that rage between the sexes, between males and females. And she, like many other authors, have described what witchcraft and burning of the witches really was about. Anyone could be labeled a witch if they were even slightly rebellious or insubordinate. If you resisted this change in the separation from your production, from your means of production, you were called a witch. If you made a tea, you were a witch. If you ever went to a gynecologist, you're a witch. If you ever had sex with a man who's not your husband, you're a witch. If you ever made a herbal concoction, you're a witch. If you ever took birth control, you're a witch. It was all about controlling women and therefore controlling men. So I submit to you that when you create your patriarchy free space, watch for any master slave dynamic going on. Who feels powerless and therefore who do they need to have power over to feel more powerful? Watch for that and clear the space of that. We really do stand on the backs of people who dare to fight back. Can I just say, and I have so much respect, I have so much respect for our ancestors, I really do. And the last part I want to talk about is the word colonization as a function of patriarchy. Because I think all these things go together: colonization, capitalism, patriarchy. Because in the colonized world, where essentially white men went around colonizing other countries, the word witch was essentially synonymous with the world word infidel, devil worshiper, uncivilized, barbarian, savages, right? They are all the same flavor. They were just called different things. So in essentially, like let's say with the white people world, in the colonizer world, the word was witch. That was who described a rebellious, insubordinate person. But in the colonized world, in the countries that the colonizer colonized, those words became, yeah, there were witches and witch burnings, but there was also infidels, devil worshippers, unchristian, uncivilized, barbarian, and savages. They basically meant the same thing: people who won't comply. They had to dehumanize and fear what they wanted to enslave. And I think I know that winch hunting, witch burning, has now become woven into our bodies and our minds and our lives, so that now we do it to ourselves. We burn ourselves as our own witches inside our own minds. And we call it having an inner critic, but really it's so much more toxic than that, is it not? We literally burn ourselves at a stake of our own making. We abandon ourselves and then we're cruel to ourselves on top of that. And you see now in these colonized countries to this very day, long after the colonizers have left, the effects of colonization still remain. We still see a lot of colonized countries trying to emulate colonizers, trying to be less savage, less uncivilized or barbarian, you know, where to the point to which where they don't wear their own culture's clothes anymore. They wear Western clothing. They think that the Western world is more chic than their own culture, their own colors, their own architecture, their own food, even. So that memory, that cultural memory of being called a witch, uncivilized barbarian and savage is still there within us. And we do it to ourselves. We call ourselves barbarians and savages and uncivilized and witches now. Only like I said, we've repackaged it into the inner critic. So, my lovelies, wasn't that a deep dive, all-over journey into patriarchy and self-abandonment? But I hope you can see that when you create a safe space, a patriarchy-free safe space, you can really start to get back that part of you that has lost its dignity to so many external forces, understandably so. And you can reclaim it little by little, 1% at a time, here and there, like I've done with this podcast, like I'm doing in my pottery, like I'm doing with my friends, my family. You can start to do this little by little. It is actually not that difficult. It just requires courage and gumption. And I know you have it because you're listening to this podcast. Nobody who wants to learn about dignity is weak. You know what I mean? Can you imagine a weak-minded person sitting through this entire podcast? I don't think so. I don't think so. They would not do that. You are just strong for listening to this, for just even recognizing that this is a thing you need to listen to. And if you want some journaling prompts to like further kind of liberate yourself from this pattern of self-abandonment, especially as it relates to patriarchy, here are some prompts, okay? And maybe you can just listen to them and just note down your first reaction and then sit down with them later on and then go through it in a more detailed way. But here we go. Okay, I'll just give you the prompts. Note down what your first reaction is. First question Who do I enslave? What parts of me do I enslave? Where am I not free? Where do I civilize myself in order to avoid persecution? Where do I gentrify, whitewash myself in order to avoid persecution? Where have I naturally been a witch and then been made to feel guilty for it? Where do I practice the master slave dynamic? So let me give you a few examples so that you understand, because these questions can be extremely triggering, right? Especially the word slave and persecution and all of these words. So we need to stop being afraid of big words that have a lot of baggage behind them because that's what this is, right? We need to stop gentrifying our own words. So who do I enslave? Okay, so if I was answering these questions, who do I enslave? I often enslave myself. And sometimes I used to enslave my dog. I've talked about this in another episode where when I first had my dog, I didn't understand that I needed to see his personality and adapt the training to fit his personality. I was taught that I needed to train him a specific way, and this was the only way to train him. So I enslaved my dog and made him conform to a method of training that was simply not for him to be trained by. And then, of course, I shifted my methods, and now, of course, we have a great bond or whatever. But in the beginning, I was very confused. He was very confused. We both were confused, and he did not feel free, and I did not feel free. So I enslaved myself and I enslaved my dog as a recent example. What parts of me do I enslave? I specifically enslave the part of me that gets angry because I don't want to be showing my anger and my rage. So I enslave that part of me and I try to pacify it or not say anything at all when I'm enraged. And I gave you an example of that story with the guys at the dining table in the Indian restaurant. I totally enslaved myself then, right? I said it and then I almost tried to eat back my words. Where am I not free? These are hard to say now because I've been working on this actively. So I'm trying to find examples from my past life, if you will, where I can talk to you about the answers of these questions and give you examples. But anyway, where am I not free? I remember feeling not free to give myself lots of physical space. I felt like in order to be a good, financially sound person, I had to give myself smaller and smaller physical space so that I could save money and be a financially competent person. I would give myself less space in order to feel like an adult. When in reality, I needed more space to feel well and happy and creative and fulfilled. So there is one example of that. Where do I civilize myself in order to avoid persecution? I think a lot of times I don't wear my own culture's clothing. And I don't feel proud of wearing it because A, I feel like it's not as comfortable to wear as Western clothing because the world is built around a Western mindset. Things like saris or salvarka mises or things like that just don't fit the lifestyle, but I've made my lifestyle westernized. In a way, I've civilized my lifestyle, so I can't wear the clothing of my choosing. Where have I been a witch and been made to feel guilty for it? I think I'm a witch in literally every area of my life: medicine making, natural remedies for things, painting, pottery, like in every place of my life. Like I have this very witchy side of me, and it's just what I wear. It's who I am. And I feel guilty for it pretty much all the time, or at least I used to. Now I kind of just laugh about it and accept it. But before I would kind of feel a little bit like I had to be careful who I say what to. And of course I do have to be careful who I say what to, but I no longer hide it or explain it away the way I used to. Where do I practice the master slave dynamic? I can't particularly say that I do anymore, but I do remember being a master slave dynamic with my parents, where they were the master and I was the slave. I had to conform to their idea of what it meant to be a good girl or a good person or a good daughter. I practiced the master slave dynamic with my culture that expected me to behave a certain way, talk a certain way, act a certain way. I definitely was a slave to it. I seen a lot of people be master slave dynamic to religion, where they make their religion their master and them their slaves. I think most of religion is just patriarchy. And a lot of new age culture is also patriarchy, where it encourages master slave dynamics. And I'll just leave it at that because I did do a whole episode on why I left the new age culture. If you want to look that up, you just look search in the search bar, New Age Culture, Delicious Dignity, and it'll pop up with the episode. But yeah, that's an example, really quick example of the prompts. I thought I'd give you some examples because it just helps with you figuring out where you want to focus next in your life. You don't have to solve all your problems. You just have to say what's next and what can I tweak by 1%. That is all. Okay, my lovelies, it's been so good to speak with you. I please consider leaving a review wherever you're listening to the podcast, because that helps push the podcast out to other people. It also helps more people um get a lot of soul nourishment and food, which I hope this podcast is giving to people, and I know it is. So yeah, share it with your friends and leave a review. Let me know, or at the very least, send me a message and tell me what you thought. If there were concepts you couldn't understand, or if there was something I needed to explain more, or a different subject you'd like me to talk about, please let me know. It's a quick you can send me a voicemail even. You don't have to send me a text message. If you prefer doing voice messages, you can do that too. Just click the link in the description of the podcast. Okay, my lovelies. May your dignity move beyond twisting itself into pretzels to accommodate a hostile culture and instead effortlessly respond to the beautiful unfolding of the moment. May your dignity effortlessly respond to the beautiful unfolding of the moments in your life. Let me say that one more time. May your dignity effortlessly respond to the beautiful unfolding of all the moments in your life. Much love to you. Bye.