Send us Fan Mail What does it mean for men to take responsibility for violence, patriarchy, and the culture that allows harm to continue? In this Weekly Dispatch, we look beyond the latest story of sexual violence or abuse and ask a harder question: What keeps these patterns happening again and again? The conversation explores how patriarchy is sustained by fear, control, silence, and the normalization of harmful behavior. But it also asks what becomes possible when we move from domination to service, and from simply feeling outraged to becoming more accountable in everyday life. We explore: • Why patriarchy continues and why individual incidents can be misleading • What men can actually do about gendered violence • How silence and normalization allow harmful behavior to continue • What male accountability looks like in practice • How bystander intervention can interrupt harm • The connections between gender, race, power, sexuality, and other systems of domination • What it means to choose service, responsibility, and care over control This isn't about finding a perfect response or suggesting that one person can solve a deeply rooted social problem. It's about recognizing where we have agency and learning to act differently, one choice at a time. The central question is simple: When we see harm happening around us, what are we willing to do? Rev Wakil's Substack Article "What Are We Doing Men? A Reckoning on Violence and Silence - Enough: A Call for Men to Confront Violence Against Women The quote from Rev. Elias Farajaje-Jones: "Our notions of race and ethnicity must include an understanding of the elements of class, gender, sexualities, geography, spiritualities that go into the shaping of notions of race; how race, gender, sexuality, geography, spiritualities go into the shaping of notions of class; how race, class, sexualities, geography are factors and facets of the shaping of gender; how the demonizing of the dark leads to the war against women and their bodies from the Inquisition until the beginning of the dismantling of women’s reproductive rights is connected to the masculinization of the healing industry, to the hardening of Christian religious dogma in northern Europe, to the driving out of the Goddess, to the destruction of the Earth, to the mass killing of kweers of all colors, is connected to the expulsion of the Dark Other, i.e. the expulsion of Muslims and Jews from Spain, is connected to the Afrikan slave trade and the invasions of the Americas, Asia, and the Pacific Islands, where indigenous peoples, Afrikans, and Asians were enslaved and massacred (and continue to fuel a fear of brown-skinned immigrants and the brutal murdering of dark-skinned peoples, women, kweers, etc.) because they were considered to be like women: incarnations of evil; incarnations of unbridled lust; like women, they were considered to be too connected to the body and to sex; and where the earth was destroyed because, like women, the earth was considered to be wild and needing to be dominated; like dark-skinned peoples, it needed to be dominated and controlled. This interlocking vortex became reflected in our language, where all that was evil was “dark” and vice versa. The Dark Other was soon not only people with brown skin, but anyone who was other: people living with disabilities, women, kweers, etc. Link to complete transcript of this lecture (long!) Support the show We very much want to hear your thoughts. Please join us on Substack for our community chat. This podcast helps anyone dealing with loss. It can guide you with end-of-life planning and death-positive resources. Check out our introductory episode to learn more about Annalouiza, Wakil, and our vision/mission to normalize and destigmatize conversations about death, dying, grief, and loss. You can find us on SubStack, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and BlueSky. You are also invited to subscribe to support us financially. Anyone who supports us at any level will have access to Premium content, special online meet-ups, and one-on-one time with Annalouiza or Wakil. And we would love your feedback and want to hear your stories. You can email us at endoflifeconvo@gmail.com. We want to be transparent that we use AI tools to help us with titles, show notes, editing, and introductions. ...
