Last week, I started my Master’s in Future Research. Armed with a physical pen and a physical piece of paper, ready to suck up every last drop of knowledge like a thirsty little intellectual baby, I caught the words of the professor leading our first class: “One of the most important things you need to understand right off the bat is that we never talk about THE future (singular). We always talk about futures (plural). Why? Because there is no such thing as THE future. There is only a myriad of possible outcomes, shaped by the actions we take today, that will determine what our futures actually look like.”
Funny, I thought. The fascist tech bros who are actively branding themselves as the architects of our species’ future seem to be so confidently overruling this very first principle of Future Research. I’ve never heard a single one of them talk about futures, as in the plural tense. They only ever talk about the futureTM, as if it were not only inevitable but already hurtling towards us, leaving us no time to question it, let alone imagine something else. AI will transform our lives. Elon Musk and whoever else is rich enough will colonize Mars. We’re all gonna be cam-girls in the surveillance state. Automation will reshape work. Climate collapse is inevitable and we will have to adapt or better yet, burn alive. Most certainly, we better get comfortable sipping data-center polluted water from our biodegradable cups. Don’t you think these “visions” sound kinda predatory? Does anyone actually know a human being who appreciates this dystopian group project, and why are we all being dragged into it without our consent?
What does rape culture have to do with future-building?
Over the past few weeks, I’ve read countless think pieces on the Cornell case and the ways rape culture seeps into every corner of our everyday lives. It’s incontrovertible that this case tipped a lot of women over the edge of furry. A horrifyingly undeniable glimpse into the unfathomable violence inflicted on all living beings that too many men are taught to dominate, and exploit in the name of masculinity from the moment they enter this world from their mothers’ wombs.
In my time as an independent feminist writer and researcher of matrilineal societies, this case has joined an ever-lengthening trail of cases, studies, statistics, and lived experiences that all point towards the same devastating conclusion: gendered violence does not emerge out of nowhere. It is woven into the fabrics of an ever-growing, deeply entangled mess that only a patriarchal society could possibly manufacture. Rape culture bleeds through the fabrics of this mess and runs even deeper than gendered violence. Time and again, we tend to talk about rape culture as something that exists in the realm of sexual violence alone. You probably heard news outlets talk about the individual perpetrator and the individual victim. One “isolated” case after another. Which obviously, reporting on these individual crimes is crucial, but it does make me wonder how much further along we could be in dismantling this literal culture of rape if we were to address the systems that keep producing it with the same urgency. Rape culture is much larger than rape. In fact, I’m begging everyone to understand that it’s being called rape CULTURE for a reason.
It’s frat boys at an elite university saying “free pussy” and feeling entitled to first drug and then violate a woman’s body. It’s CEOs saying “free land” and feeling entitled to extract from the earth and displace the people already living on it. It’s governments saying “a war is necessary” and feeling entitled to send other people’s children to die for a cause they will never have to bleed for themselves. It’s corporations saying “consumer choice” while feeling entitled to poison the air, water and soil we all depend on. It’s in our food systems, our environment, our economy, our workplaces, our schools, our homes and yes, also in our future-building.
What makes the presence of rape culture in future-building so insidious to me is that we barely recognize it as an immediate, tangible threat. We know how to recognize danger when it comes dressed as a man following us home at night, but when the same logic of entitlement gets dressed up as a vision for the future of humanity perpetuated by a frightening amount of influential people, we barely fear it with same amount of urgency.
Their power move: controlling the narrative
The same way Israel is paying influencers thousands of dollars to make their genocidal state look vacation-worthy, the same way Meta is paying Kylie Jenner big bucks to make surveillance tech look dazzling and is censoring progressive voices while shoving right-wing content onto our screens, the same way AI companies are pushing a tech bro into the spotlight from time to time to fearmonger about how their “newest innovation” is going to kill us all — controlling the narrative is not a mere side quest of their distorted version of power, it is the main quest! It is how their perverted version of power colonizes our imagination, and ultimately convinces us that the future is something scary to surrender to, something that belongs to the people who already pretend to own the present. Clearly, these men want to own the future in some distant possible outcome amongst a myriad of other distant possible outcomes, but that’s not even the scariest part. What really pisses me off is that they want us to believe they are the only ones capable of imagining it. Hence why you’ll only ever hear them talking about the future in the singular.
It’s the same logic that sustains rape culture. First, we make domination seem natural, inevitable even. Then, we make resistance seem futile. Lastly, we make the world that domination produces seem like the only world that could possibly exist and for that matter, has ever existed. We convince people of the inherent delusional and childish nature of any proposed alternative, until the very act of imagining becomes embarrassing.
It’s mandatory to call out the individual horrors rape culture produces, which to be fair, I’ve seen mainly women do over the last years while a frightening percentage of men are comfortably vanishing into the depths of the manosphere and become activists for “mens-rights” rights or whatever. However, the reason I’m writing this essay is to motivate everyone who remains interested in social change that the same way we are screaming the names of these individual perpetrators this system produces, the frat boys who made life a living hell for Jane Doe for example, the same way we have to continuously scream the names of the people who are actively creating a living hell for all of us and call it building tomorrow.
Gender-based violence isn’t etched into our humanity. Neither is the destruction of our planet. This shit isn’t an inevitable glitch in the evolution of our species. It is quite literally the product of centuries of building societies around hierarchies that determine whose bodies, labour, land and lives are considered valuable, and whose can be exploited or even sacrificed. For as long as the’ve existed, those hierarchies have never operated along gender alone. They are deeply entangled with race, class, colonialism, sexuality, disability and the ownership of land and resources. Ecofeminists have long screamed about the connection that the same worldview that guts forests, commodifies animals, and draws borders around the living earth is the one that decides which human bodies are expendable and whose suffering can be buried beneath the machinery of progress.
Did you know that when anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday studied societies where rape was rare or virtually unheard of, she found that they all shared a deeply sacred relationship with nature? It should hardly surprise us that a culture built around submission to a single male God who demands dominion over our lives would also struggle to imagine a world where one person’s strength wouldn’t be defined by another person’s submission. We cannot build a culture that protects life while worshipping the power to dominate it.
So… are we fucked or do we fight back?
As I already mentioned, their power move is controlling the narrative by making their race to the absolute depths of hell look inevitable. Our power move is to take back that control. Not only by not buying into their billions worth of propaganda, but also by creating our own narratives. We need to first free up all this space they’ve managed to colonize in our imagination and put it back to work. Trust me, our brains are literally wired to come up with creative solutions to existential questions. This is what humans have been doing for decades.
Tying it back to the Cornell Case, it was a a young woman, Cereese Qusba, working at Cornell’s student newspaper who spent 23 months refusing to let this case disappear. Then, it was thousands of women amplifying it, adding their personal experiences and making gender-based violence impossible to overlook in the media landscape.
Now, I’m begging you to bring that same energy to future-building. We need better scenarios, and we need them yesterday. We simply cannot afford to let the people profiting from our collective despair have a monopoly on imagining what comes next. We need short stories that make alternatives feel tangible and we desperately need to reclaim the history of humanity from the colonial narratives that have taught us to mistake one particular version of civilization for the only one that ever existed.
None of us can predict the future, but I refuse to let a bunch of evil tech bros and senile world leaders convince me that their fucked up ideas represent any sort of natural state of humanity. There is nothing inherently wrong with humanity, there’s only something profoundly wrong with the systems a small percentage of us built and the violence it inevitably continues to produces. However, humanity is not a finished project and we’re not bound by some immutable law of physics to reproduce the same systems of domination until the end of time. We are a species capable of cooperation, imagination, tenderness, resistance, and radical reinvention. Across continents and timezones, we have organized our societies in countless ways, and imagined futures that our present selves would have us believe are impossible. We did it before, guys!! We can do it again!
Personally, I would rather drop dead than allow the people currently profiting from our collective misery convince me that misery is our natural habitat. I will not let those who are actively in charge of this dystopian group project enslave me into perpetuating their narrative only to reward me by ruining the living conditions for all the people I love so dearly. Their appetite for domination has to compete with my appetite for witnessing humanity in its natural state: a matriarchal organization of society in which power is defined by the ability to sustain life instead of to dominate it.
Ps: If this essay resonated, the Matriarchal Study Club is where these conversations continue. It’s a structured space to study matriarchal systems, discuss their modern applications, and actively implement them in our own lives. We’re done waiting for the world to change. From now on, we’re busy reimagining how to live inside it. Join us!!
Brilliant