Women are angry over the Kavanaugh
hearings.
We’re a generally ticked-off group, for
well-documented reasons, but nobody can live with anger as their dominant
emotion. We dissipate a lot of energy in
trying to stay alive, to maintain love affairs, to work at something that doesn’t
sap the spirit, to get educated, to stay healthy – and beyond all this, we are
the family caregivers, responsible for the small children and the older people.
It’s amazing that, periodically, we
still have enough energy to come together and agitate for our rights. But it’s happened before, and it’s happening
now. The “Me too” movement is still going strong, because it’s composed of years of buried shame, fermented into anger. And the Kavanaugh hearings are like the
putrid miasma of all our experiences, all the times we’ve blamed ourselves
instead of hunting down our attackers.
Most of us have absolutely no doubt he
did it, because his tone and words echo every man who glories in his impenetrable
male privilege. Women know the
type. His moods shift like quicksilver,
he’s manipulative, and he’s the victim whenever he doesn’t get exactly what he
wants.
A lot of women have been triggered by
these hearings, remembering experiences we’ve bundled away in the darkest
closets of our memories. Is it time to
look at these memories, to ask ourselves why we didn’t call the police, or even
tell our families? Why were we so
paralyzed? How do women learn so young that we have such meager rights, even
over our own bodies?
In October, Venus is in Scorpio, the
sign that most strongly connects to buried trauma, and to everything tucked
away in the caverns of our psyche. And as
the month begins, Venus is already slowing down to go retrograde. It will spend October going over old ground,
excavating graves, mourning what is dead, looking for signs of life, finding
forgotten truths and abandoned emotions.
I’ve been predicting that Kavanaugh
would be confirmed because Pluto is trining his Jupiter, and to me that looks
like an influential new position. Of
course, he’s already influential, against his will, as a springboard for a cultural shift. Venus retrograde looks like it
might delay things, and that’s already happened. But will it be enough to keep him off? I doubt it.
But there’s one thing we know, even if
Kavanaugh manages to plant his beer-loving butt on the Supreme Court. The people may seem easily distracted, but we
all have a long memory. When something isn’t
fair – like that stolen Supreme Court seat – we remember.
And we women remember every time a man
has harassed us, chased us, threatened us, or humiliated us. Most women can count dozens of occasions like
this. We’ve learned to ignore, to laugh
it off, to swallow our discomfort, to weigh the consequences of reporting these
crimes. Maybe we won’t be doing as much
of that, now that we’ve all seen this ugliness in broad daylight.
It will take a huge social
transformation. After all, why did Thelma
and Louise go over that cliff? It’s
because Louise knew she wouldn’t get a fair trial, after she shot the man who
was trying to rape Thelma. So it’s not
just that men have to stop assaulting women, it’s that there has to be justice for
any woman who responds with equal force. If there isn’t justice, then there’s just some
form of self-sacrifice, and most of us have generally figured that the safest
course is silence.
Whenever women surge forward, there’s
fierce pushback. Mercury and the sun
begin the month in Libra, the sign of balance and justice, so questions of
right and wrong are in the forefront. Many
good people want to do right. But this
month both Mercury and the sun square Pluto, the planet that rules Scorpio. And so there’s tension between the outward
tidiness of law and order and the raw emotion of the deep psyche. On one side, there’s what we know, believe,
and subscribe to. On the other side,
there’s what we would rather deny, avoid or forget.
But with every woman who speaks out,
what is forgotten lives again. We women
have spent our lives alienated from our bodies, our anger, our agency. This is a month for reclaiming all of that. Our power lives deep within us, and, at this
moment in history, it’s driving the forces of change.
