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Some Men In Positions of Power Do Sexually Abusive Things To Women (Weinstein Was Not Alone)

Image for Raising awareness of sexual assault

October 17, 2017

Some men in positions of power do sexually abusive things to women.

There are also instances where men in positions of power do sexually abusive things to other men, and there are some significantly less common instances where women in positions of power do sexually abusive things to either men or to other women — but the most common pattern we see in far too many settings is for some men in positions of power doing sexually abusive things to women in the context of their power position and situation.

We know that sexual abuse of women by men in power happens and is damaging women, because it is happening today in very visible ways in a wide range of settings.

The attached article is one of many articles and current news media reports that speak very directly to those abuses. Those articles and media reports show us clearly that those issues of sexual abuse by men in positions of power happen in enough settings and situations with so much regularity that we can see and discern actual patterns of behavior. Any time we see patterns of behavior in any area, we know there are instincts in play in that area that create those patterns.

Why do we know that instincts are at play when discernable behavior patterns exist? Instincts are the only logistical and functional probability for creating that much similarity in multiple settings. The reality is that extreme and consistent similarity in behaviors of any kind, across a wide range of settings, must have instinctive roots and underpinnings in order to create the consistency.

Only instincts can create patterns that exist across cultures and back into history. Anytime we see a pattern of behavior that shows up in multiple settings and over extended periods of time, we know that there are instincts that function as the connection factor creating those behaviors.

History is the story of actualized instinctive behavior. The basic patterns of history are created by the interaction between situations and instincts — and those patterns have their consistency because we all have the same instincts and we apply them both individually and collectively to the settings, circumstances, and situations we are in.

We have instincts to be hierarchical, territorial, tribal, and directly protective for our children and for the children of people in our group — and those instincts all create cultures in each setting to achieve their goals.

We use cultures to achieve our instinctive goals. That is the universal pattern. We have strong hierarchical instincts — so every setting builds a hierarchy of some kind into its culture. We have Popes, chiefs, kings, captains, and chairs — and people in every setting feel right at an emotional and intellectual level supporting the hierarchy that is created by our culture for that setting.

Our survival instincts extend to us having a strong goal of having our children survive, so every culture builds its own sets of rules, guidelines, and behavioral expectations that help us meet that goal of having children survive in every setting.

Sadly and unfortunately, several of our most basic sets of instincts have an impact on the behaviors and the individual sets of decisions that cause men in power in some settings to do abusive things to women.

We need to understand those basic packages of instincts and the reasons they exist in order to change those behaviors for those men, and to create different and better behavioral expectations and patterns for the future.

Survival is a primary goal of that whole culture-building process for each group. Survival of a culture depends on the children of that culture surviving so that they can, in turn, have their own children who will, in turn, also survive. At a very basic level, our cultures have created behavioral expectations and rules and roles for both men and women that are directly aimed at having the children in each setting first come into existence, and then survive.

We have defined roles for women in our traditional cultures that gave women safe places to give birth, feed, and protect their own children. We have defined roles for men that were created to compel men to stay with their families and continue to hunt and pursue food in order to feed their families after their children are born.

Both the InterGroup books and our blog on why women have been discriminated against in so many ways in so many settings help explain those roles and behaviors.

Our cultures understand us very well. Mothers have very strong maternal instincts — and those instincts work so well that mothers almost never abandon their children. Cultures have not needed to build incentives or rewards for mothers to stay with their children because maternal instincts have such power that they shape behavior and expectations in extremely consistent and dependable ways that guide behaviors for mothers everywhere.

Paternal instincts are also real, relevant, and good to have — but those instincts are significantly less effective on their own as an instrument for keeping many men with their families for years after the birth of their children. That weaker set of bonding instincts for men created a potentially functional risk for families because the families might die if they do not have food.

So societies have very effectively bribed men to stay with families by giving them both sex and power in exchange for continuing to hunt and provide food for the mother of their children, and the children that they created.

Power was given to men as an incentive by designating them as the head of families. Men held head of family roles in all traditional cultures — and those roles were attractive because they created a context for the activation of Alpha instincts for each man.

Alpha instincts can have great power to influence behavior for both men and women — but they tend to have particular impact on men. In any setting, whoever achieves the alpha role in the local hierarchy tends to get both emotional and physical rewards for holding that position. There can be strong neurochemical rewards for being the chief or king in any setting.

People with those rewards in their lives tend to work hard to keep them. Just like the lion prides and the horse herds where the alpha lion and the lead stallion will fight other males with great energy, and even anger, to maintain the role of top stallion in the herd or top lion in the pride — males in our society have been known to fight and work hard to both achieve and maintain alpha status in their group.

Gang leaders today clearly illustrate those patterns of behavior. Gang leaders have great and direct personal power with the members of their gang, and they each tend to fight hard to continue to hold that status over their group. Gang leaders expect their members to obey, remain personally loyal, and fight to defend them as leader against threats to their status.

Anyone not supporting the gang is considered a traitor. We have very strong and clear instincts to both hate traitors, as well as to never personally want to become a traitor.

The instincts rejecting traitors and keeping us from becoming a traitor need to be understood in all settings, because they can make it hard to reach out to people from other groups in Peaceful and productive ways.

The leader role in all of those settings has clear sets of rewards and levels of emotional impact. Families in our traditional cultures have very consistently given similar status to heads of families. Our cultures have built strong powers into the head of family role, and we have expected people to be loyal to their own family leader. The people in all of those clear and pure alpha roles in tribes, governments, religions and families have very consistently worked to maintain their alpha status until death.

The Game of Thrones model of creating rightful heads of families and kingdoms from the rules of their culture, where all the family members are expected to remain loyal and possibly even fight to maintain that rightful role for their alpha leader, are a fairly accurate representation of how those roles used to exist at broader levels in our culture. People watch Game of Thrones and tend to feel that there is a legitimacy in those behaviors that makes sense, because it ties closely to how our instincts shape our cultures and belief systems on issues of hierarchy and turf.

Men in our traditional cultures received some of that same Alpha status and reward process just from holding head of the family status. Cultures used a sense of power to compel men to remain with their children and families.

Most cultures also used sex as a bribe for enticing young men to link with a family. The cultures used sex as a bribe by making sex illegal outside of the family structure. Men had to marry in order to have sex in almost every culture. Men with strong sex drives in our traditional cultures could only satisfy their drives legally within the context of marriage.

Sex can be an extremely good part of people’s lives. Sex can be a very good thing for people. Sexual activity can trigger pleasure and a sense of well-being. Having positive, satisfying, and consensual sexual relationships can be a major blessing for people in every setting and time frame.

We should not be opposed at any level to sex. We should only be opposed to sexual abuse.

At this point in our history, we should now make some explicit and clear community decisions about how we will deal with sexual activities. We should also be clear about what role we want our community and our overall society to play in deciding what kinds of sexual activities should be supported and encouraged, and what levels of protections we need for anyone coerced or forced into sexual activities or unwanted sexual interactions.

Sexual activity — when it is done in various non-damaging ways — can trigger positive neurochemicals for both men and women. Sex can enhance the quality of life for people who want it, and who retain it as a positive element of their lives.

The attached online article about abusive sexual behavior by powerful men in a variety of industries and settings shows us clearly that we have damaging, destructive, and dysfunctional sexual behavior happening in too many settings. We should collectively both understand why that happened in those settings, and we need to be clear about what we need to do now to keep those behaviors from happening again.

There is a logical and extremely important next step in the process of keeping those behaviors from happening again — and the first step is to now take a clear, strong, and collective public stand condemning and rejecting those behaviors and not allowing them in our future.

We have condemned many of those behaviors, but we have not collectively declared in very visible ways that they will not be accepted or acceptable in the future.

The first important and very basic thing we need to do at this point in time is to publicly reject and condemn those behaviors. We need to make people safe, and we need to make it mandatory that those behaviors become visible when they happen and people know they are happening.

Those abusive behaviors in all the industries mentioned in the attached article happened, in part, because they were not visible to us all as a society. They were invisible for a number of reasons, and we do not need to address each of the reasons now — but we do need to make the clear and intentional decision now to make those situations visible when they happen again.

Women who were abused in each of those settings clearly did not have a sense that our society would support and defend them if they reported the abuse. They were often right. We did not do a very good job of supporting far too many of those women when they told people they were abused.

We need to do far better on that set of issues and on our collective and individual responses to that information now.

We need to make it clear to everyone that those abusive behavior patterns are not acceptable — and we need to openly let each woman who is abused know that the rest of us are on her side and will help her to reject and resist the abuse.

We need to be very clear that intentional physical encroachment, abuse, and rape are all criminal behaviors, and we need to invoke the provisions and processes that we have build into our laws that deal with criminal behaviors.

We need to set the clear and explicit standard that sexual activity needs to be between consenting adults. We need to act in the strongest and most effective ways to protect children against pedophiles and predatory sexual intrusions and interactions.

“Consenting adults” means that only adults are involved, and sex is not forced or coerced. Sex should also not be physically damaging. We need to make the consenting adult standard a very public intent and expectation. We need to explicitly and intentionally train all men and women in the expectations we have for communicating what constitutes both requests and consent for sexual activity.

We should not police or mandate any particular sexual interactions or sexual activities as being either right or wrong — and we should allow each sexual relationship to make those sets of decisions in their own context.

Contextually appropriate, fully consensual, mutually agreed upon sex that does not cause physical damage to any person should be our guideline and our goal.

We need to be very clear with ourselves as a society about how we want beneficial sexual activity to be a part of the lives of people who want that activity to be part of their lives — and there should be no instance where that activity is forced or coerced by anyone — including men holding positional power of any kind.

We are in a very good place right now to make some significant progress on that issue. We have several highly visible examples of behavior that we are now collectively condemning as a community — and we need to take advantage of that current visibility and community consensus to build better expectations for both future behavior and future reporting of abuses in those areas.

We need to decouple the expectation of mandating sex from the activation of our Alpha instincts in all settings.

We are at a point where we need to create a values based culture for America on both our sexual interaction issues, and on all of the other key issues that will help us be inclusive and aligned with each other in important ways as we go forward to create the America we all want to be part of for us and our children.

We need to create a values based sense of Us for America that creates win/win outcomes for every set of Americans — and we should use our expectations about the prevention of sexual abuse as one of the values that we all agree to include in those shared values and expectations, because win/win outcomes for men and women clearly include ending that sexual abuse for everyone.

The addendum to the book Primal Pathways points us in those directions. The earlier blog post on this website about discrimination against women points in the same directions.

We are becoming extremely diverse as a nation. More than half of our births in our country this year will be to our minority mothers. Our pathway to diversity is functionally irrevocable, irreversible, and clearly inevitable — so we need to make our diversity a huge asset and we need to continue to thrive as a nation by including people from each gender and every group in effective ways in the American Dream.

We can let our diversity divide us — or we can let it make us better, safer, and more successful as a nation.

Success is better.

The InterGroup books are intended to help make that success possible.

We need to start by making sure we end the abuse of women, and we need to create a culture of safety, respect, and inclusion that gives us all the best chance of succeeding.

We need to make sure that if the same journalists covering the abuse in all of those industries now wrote a piece, or created a report on those same industries five years from now, the worst excesses would all be historic, and none of the horror stories would be from current behavior.

That can be done. Culture change is not easy, but it can be done and it is an incredibly effective tool when it is well done. If we create a community expectation that abuse is wrong, all cultures will reinforce themselves and we will find a rich vein of support for that set of expectations.

We just need to be very intentional and explicit in making those expectations part of what we believe and do.