War, Embodiment, Men’s Grids

The violence in which women live our lives makes groovy experiences like “being present” and “grounding in our bodies” and “joy and flow” inaccessible for many – sometimes for whole lifetimes. When patriarchal men and systems treat women’s bodies as resources, they draw their grids showing market cap and targeting sights on drone video right through us. All violence is personal. Bombing and displacement of populations is no different. Bombing a synagogue on Saturday. Bombing the girls' school on the base. Bombing all the universities and hospitals in Gaza. All very, very personal.

War, Embodiment, Men's Grids | by Esmée Streachailt

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Yesterday, the US regime threatened to destroy Iran and its entire Persian history and people. "An entire civilization will die tonight. Never to be seen again." For many Persians, this meant putting their bodies on the line. Bodies as buffer zones. By force or by choice, they stood watch on bridges and at power plants in hope of preserving their people and culture. The terror, the impossible hope in their bodies is like the feeling of hoping an abusive father won’t kill a mother this time. Terror is exhausting, debilitating even. I was thinking about the power plants and the fact that the hottest temperature recorded last year was in Iran. In Ahavaz, the high was 53.7C/129F. The image of people on a bridge, that was from Ahavaz – City of Bridges, on the straight, a major oil production center. It would have been devatated.

The water shortages are already so desperate that I remember a rumor about evacuating Tehran. So destroying the power plants would lead to inestimable deaths this summer, the slow but intense misery of cooking inside one’s own body, dying of thirst. THAT is what this regime threatened. THAT is very like what Israel has done to Gaza. That too is embodiment on men’s grids, the vectors of their greed and fear.

People all over the world felt it, the worry, fear, frustration, rage, bewilderment. All that ran through our bodies like fever. It did mine, at least, this fear for the lives of these far away others. I can tell many people, our nervous systems, were also feeling this. It was all over the socials. No one has much love for the Iranian regime. But Persia, these people, made a world of such wild gorgeousness over time. How dare anyone, anywhere, in this day and age, threaten or enact such erasure of human love and inventiveness. Of course, these men, genocides everywhere, they have no felt connection to cultures, to human creativity and the warm vibrations it brings forth in the body. They literally cannot feel that, that connection across two people or two peoples through what we make and offer to each other’s pleasure. I have no love for all these patriarchies, but Medusa’s gleaming eyes, what human beings dream into existence can be exquisite, enlivening. That is what the sociopath, the narcissist, the rapist and murderer who must become the structural pinnacle of a patriarchy cannot feel in his body. This music is nothing to him.

This yearning and grief for life. They cannot feel that.

Most of MR’s readers have never been forced to leave home by huge impersonal forces. This is why I keep asking us not to “yes, but they….,” not to "what about" when one or another of us points out some inexcusable shit some man or some government does.

The razing of Gaza began while THE RADICAL NOTION was still in publication. Our 11th issue was haunted by atrocities of Oct 7 and the atrocities in response to those atrocities. Two war-crimes do not make a moral justification. This personal essay about working at the humanitarian level of war and disaster appeared in that issue:

So when Medusa Rising think about embodiment, we’re thinking about finding our groove as some recent work shows, sure, but we are also thinking about all the jittery, shuddering, ground shaking violence that patriarchal projects bring against ArcheMama’s grooviness. That’s the impulse behind my calls to feminists to stop centering men’s projects, including their nations, in our politics. That’s why I’m asking us to very specifically not center their goals and logics for war. And it’s the motive for my goal-dream-wild hope that feminists can stop breaking faith with each other over the shitty decisions men make in the name of their shitty little projects.

Yes, right now, as acted out, as framed in their religious and apocaplyitc rhetoric, I’m including Likud and supporters of the Gaza genocide (some of whom are women, I know) among the shitty little projects. And Hamas. And Hezbollah. And the MAGA US. And Putin’s regime. And IRGC and mullahs (talk about sex trafficking scandals) in Iran. And the Houthis. And Boko Haram. And the Taliban. And did you notice how I didn't name a nation in total? That’s because these are not the projects of these nations in total – and framing everything that way lends them a legitimacy in which they are not covered.

But, it also leaves room for the voices of women in those countries and those displaced by their violence. All 3,000,000 of them. Just in Gaza, Iran, and Lebanon. Whose vulnerability to men’s predation is now hugely increased. It won’t matter who “wins.” As GH reminds us in her TRN piece, displacement is usually a ten year, even life sentence.

It leaves room for all the Muslim and Jewish women working together for all these years to stop this madness. For the voices and actions of women who are trying to Solve The Problem rather than remain mired in the problem bemoaning the terror the problem rains down on us all like oil from the sky. We can’t solve the problem while remaining loyal to the institutions that keep it running. We have to use them, sure, we have to push on them, sure, we have to evolve our own parallel institutions that will emerge from their rapidly approaching wreckage. And we can’t do that if we’re playing Schizms instead of Consoritums.

Meanwhile on the very same Tuesday, from the other side of the Moon: this is us feeling all this magnificence and terror in our bodies, both feelings connecting us, borderless, human.

Esmée Streachailt is the founder/editor of Medusa Rising.