one of the central moments of puberty as a girl is when you realize that your god given moral equality, your imago Dei, does not protect you from physical asymmetry. inequality stops being abstract and it becomes bodily knowledge. it feels like the whole universe has conspired against you to play some cosmic joke. this especially happens around the first time an adult man's attention towards you becomes sexual... an almost universal experience. you're still young enough to feel like a child, and suddenly you're in a situation where a man can want something from you that you're not going to be able to stop him from taking.  the knowledge follows you into your intimacy. the person you first love may never hurt you, but he still has a coercive capacity you cannot fully return. in a room by yourselves, you're at the whims of a man's potential for violence. the modern world has worked to diminish a man's physical ability to harm you, so often now it comes out as emotional control... maybe toxic sadness as a form of perverted rage. I guess this is a field that at least women can dish as good as they get for all of the better and worse places it has gotten us to. all of this sits underneath heterosexual intimacy more often than people are willing to admit. there's something additionally crushing realizing that it's not just regulated to interpersonal relationships, but that history organized itself around this asymmetry. rape is written into every single mythology in the world. the fact that men can overpower women has been converted into social authority, into law, religion, ownership, marriage, legitimacy. I think of the Rape of the Sabine Women, I think of all the men who painted it into existence further and further drawn to the portrayal of naked women's bodies, of sexual coercion as a fantasy and topic. a myth depicted over and over and over again by artists in a way that rhymes with the type of possessive taking the Romans of the story did, it's for others pleasure, prestige, and contemplation. the artistic afterlife keeps asking the women to be bodies first, instruments of the Roman harmonization story second, and women third.  I think of the Sabine women who in the story were compelled to alchemize the grief of their own abduction into universal compassion, that their suffering was not legitimized, it was not made meaningful, until it was useful to the social order that had harmed them. they are compelled to transform the grief of their own abduction into mercy for the men who took them, the men who came to reclaim them, and the society built out of their violation.  their anger would have torn the story apart, and so they are made to find another way. no one has to fully face what happened to them. the Sabine women are made responsible for ending the violence created, and as such they are required to become the story's conscience to save their families -- their fathers, their sons, and maybe even the husbands who took them. everyone except themselves.  there was a specific moment in my puberty where I had all of this click for me, and most people who have gone through young girlhood puberty. the sense of dread that flooded into my body, like the weight of a million ancestral cries at your back. I think it's why so much of women's discourse ends up back at sexual trauma and abuse. people act like women are obsessed with it, or reducing everything to trauma, but it is the deep wound in the feminine psyche, and nearly ubiquitous in one measure or another.  sexual violence is the place where so much of this meets: physical asymmetry, emotional intimacy, reproductive vulnerability, social disbelief, and the historical assumption that women’s bodies are available to men all meet. maybe this is all downstream of the trifunctional hypothesis, productivity, and in this case women's work and fertility as a footnote subservient to the martial and sovereignty functions. it is a world that feels like this known asymmetry  is ordinary, private, inevitable in the modern context maybe you can overcome some of it through tool use. guns, laws, money, social technology, other women, collective organization. I mean A LOT of civilization is the attempt to make physical strength less socially important, not just in response to sexual violence. but even still it hangs in the air like the sickly smell of rotten eggs. I think this is why girl power matters so much, even when it seems childish or embarrassing or excessive. girls need a counter-history strong enough to survive this revelation. the witches & warrior women & goddesses & pop stars & female lineages & all of the cringey girlypop historyslop are *not just* there to tell girls they are capable. its there because without them a girl can look backward and feel like she comes from nothing. without it, it ends up feeling like a millennia for men, but only a few decades for women.