Women, Power, and Fear

How to live in a world where so many people hate what you stand for

So I had a completely different topic lined up for today, and then yesterday happened in the United States, where I live. Yesterday, many of my fellow citizens elected an open misogynist and convicted felon instead of a qualified woman of color to steward our society forward.

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Today’s Story: I’m scared

When I was a kid, I knew little girls weren’t safe. And when I was seven years old, life turned out to be unsafe for me. After that, I knew fear very intimately. I learned how to normalize fear and hope it didn’t show. I learned how to be afraid of pretty much everything all the time. I am not alone. Fear is a woman’s constant companion. 

My childhood fears were very personal and built on certain norms that I didn’t think to question about the rights men and boys had to my body. I identified my attacker and he was given a warning, maybe. I don’t really know, but I know that he was never held accountable for his crime against me. And I lived in fear of running into him on the street for the rest of my childhood.

But I grew up in an era where even though I didn’t always feel safe from strange men, I had power my mother hadn’t had to make decisions about my body. I had power in the world that resulted from my middle-class white privilege and the ability to build and manage my own career and wealth. I witnessed social and personal commitments to civil rights for all races and expressions of gender that seemed on a healthy trajectory to eliminate inequity (if not bias) and allow everyone to be their authentic selves absent debilitating fear. I saw women around me emerging into powerful mindsets and gaining power in the world. I saw a Black man elected President. 

I hoped and believed that as a race, humans were evolving beyond our anger to create a world where so many of us didn’t need to live in constant fear.

But today, I see that trajectory bending back toward the dark times, and I can’t NOT see this election through a gender lens. Three times in twelve years an old white man, now a convicted felon, has run for the highest office in the land. When he ran against another, more qualified old white guy, he lost. Both times he ran against vibrant, more qualified women, he won. 

Looking at the pattern, I don’t think it’s defensible to blame the female candidates or their campaigns. I truly worry that the majority of our nation—women and men alike—simply do not trust women enough to give us power. I believe that the myths ginned up in ancient times about how women with power are evil still lurk close to the surface of our collective mindsets. I worry that as a race, humanity has succumbed to the fear in these myths instead of living in the reality of all the good things powerful women bring to the world.

And I don’t want to blame “men,” either, as tempting as it is to do so through the gender lens. I am personally surrounded by supportive, women-loving men, and there are many more like them. I can’t ignore the fact that plenty of women voted for this outcome. On both sides, we’re in this together across genders.

The truth is that today, we’re all afraid. A critical mass of people were scared enough to elect a thug, and the rest of us are afraid of what he will do with the power we’ve given him.

Fear is now our constant companion.

Eve in a Heart-to-Heart with Fear and Knowledge

Eve’s Story and Eve Reimagined are a new feature of InPower Women, based on my shift to provide more direct tools and approaches to help women heal their broken relationships with power.

Eve’s Story: Women are intimately familiar with Fear

If we’re all so afraid, what do we do? Anger is right there next to fear, so why not focus on our anger? To me, managing fear is more important because while anger can be turned into action fairly easily, fear cannot. Fear tends to sap us of our energy and hold us back from productive action. Fear too easily motivates us to compromise our values, hide our power, live in hiding, and play small. 

Playing small is not what is called for right now.

But fear is a daunting companion to engage. Its roots run deep, especially for women. Fear has historically been the primary tool used to damage women’s relationships with power, inside ourselves and outside in the world.

Even though I said above—and I believe—that our current relationship with fear is not men’s fault alone, we can’t ignore the history of our world in which men have been the primary wielders of fear towards women. There are, and have always been, good men. Just not enough of them. As always in human relations, however, the solution to freeing ourselves from fear isn’t to isolate ourselves from things that make us afraid, but to learn to live with them and manage our fear so it does not drive our actions. This is how we find the motivation to take constructive action, resist that which assaults our values, and stand up for ourselves and others.

Yesterday, I had the chance to chat with an InPower Women subscriber who lives in Spain, and she shared two things that caught my attention. (1) The press she’d seen on the US election pointed out that regardless of who won the US election, there would be people who felt disenfranchised, angry, and fearful, so we should expect civil strife from today forward in any case (check! see above), and (2) women are used to being “done to” when it comes to fear. This second comment caught my attention because it resonated with my own experience at the hands of a young man early in life. She was talking about how frequently men use fear–often intentionally but not always–to intimidate women into limiting (or abrogating) their power. I mean, we just elected a man who criminally assaulted women, bragged about it, and as recently as last week asserted the right to instill fear in women “whether they like it or not.”

And, of course, men do hurt women more often than cars, heart disease, or other women. While worldwide, “only” 30% of women have reported experiencing sexual or domestic violence, as many as 64% report feeling unsafe (a statistic which is about 26% higher in the Americas than in other parts of the world.) The vast majority (over 90%) of gender violence perpetrators are men.

This has been true throughout history.

The Code of Hammurabi c. 1900 BCE made rape illegal, but only because violating a woman’s body was considered a theft or violation of another man’s property, not because there was anything necessarily wrong with the rape itself. It wasn’t until 1993 that it became illegal everywhere in the US for a man to rape his wife. And it’s not like rape doesn’t still happen. This means physical intimidation of the worst kind has been legal in my country until after my children were born, there are cultures in the world that still sanction it legally, and many men in our Western society still feel entitled to demean, objectify, and harm women in office buildings, private homes, and in public. In 2017, the #metoo movement began a public, cultural conversation about many men’s entitlement to women’s bodies–only seven years ago. Today, there is evidence that a #metoo backlash is still underway and a reasonable argument to make that violence against women is “legal” in the sense that too many men get away unpunished for it.  

My point is that our bodies know how to experience gender-based fear at a cellular level. Physical acts of violence against women are buried in our cultural DNA worldwide, including for all generations of adults in our society across the globe. 

Of course, women are capable of producing fear in other women. We just tend to use softer forms of anxiety. Think ‘mean girls’ and ‘sharp elbows.’ That said, I can’t tell you how many conversations I have with men who, when it comes to misogyny and gender discrimination, ask, “Why don’t you ladies push back more?” My response often boils down to, “Because on a fundamental level, we don’t often verbalize or even always understand; we’re afraid for our lives.”

Don’t you think this is true? Read Laura Killingbeck’s compassionate-to-men and honest-about-women’s-experience writing about Man vs. Bear and her reality of encountering men when traveling alone. Every woman resonates with Laura’s practical and tactical efforts to manage men’s emotions into a happy state to preserve her own safety. So why, in social and office environments, do we do the emotional labor to be nice and not ruffle the feathers of the males around us? I don’t know about you, but yeah, underneath all my genuine niceness is a fundamental terror of an angry man. Much less many angry men. 

This base and core anxiety manifests itself in many other fears women live with every day, including the fear of being noticed (e.g., gaining the kind of visibility that might get you promoted) or of acknowledging any imperfection (i.e., such as making human mistakes you can learn from), and especially for being perceived as threatening to a man (for any reason, from impoliteness to unassailable competence).

These echoes of primal fear in our daily lives do a number on our sense of internal power. All these kinds of fears take a toll on our perception of our personal power and ability to be authentic. After all, if you can’t express your authentic, human, impossible-to-avoid imperfection for fear of punishment (perceived or actual), how can you possibly make enough mistakes to grow into your most powerful self?

And it does a number on our interest in, and ability to obtain, external power as well. Gaining power in the world has never been a reasonable promise of safety for women or men, but for men, it’s the power that makes them the target, not the combined weight of power and their very identity expressed in their physical bodies. Women who gain too much power are written out of history, burned as witches, doxxed and targeted in many other ways, including just plain ol’ office politics takedowns. What’s the incentive to pay the price to gain power in the world when so many fears come along for the ride?

Reimagining Eve: Plucking the apple

As if I wasn’t sad enough today, I became depressed writing the paragraphs above. I personally like to challenge my fears, and I have managed to route out a lot of those not based on reality but based on my own mind’s anxiety. I’ll be honest, there was plenty of fear left when I stopped to think about it, even before today.

But another member of the InPower Mastermind community who lives in a swing state made a comment in our holding-space-for-the-election chat yesterday that gave me heart. She said, “Witnessing Kamala's race to the White House has been healing in so many ways. I am blown away by the amount of support she's getting across gender, racial, and party lines. Yesterday my son came home from school beaming because Kamala won his 2nd grade class mock election. I love how excited he is by the possibility of this moment. Even if she loses this race, I find comfort in knowing that millions of Americans truly believe in the power of a woman to lead our nation…Whatever comes next will surely test our fortitude as women leaders.”

This made me feel better, and it reminded me that Kamala herself, and all the other female politicians risking their lives to maintain our civil society, choose to look that fear in the eye and move forward anyway to gain visibility, influence, and power. I know they won’t stop, and I know plenty of men will continue to support them.

It also made me think of Eve herself. She knew the price of plucking the apple from the tree. But she and the snake had a heart-to-heart, and Eve chose knowledge, the opportunity to birth the human race, and the ability to choose good over evil–under threat from a patriarchal and vengeful god. She knew fear, and she chose it. She chose it in order to do amazing things. She took responsibility for it. She paid the price of centuries of derision, and in a metaphorical sense we all have our lives to thank for it.

We might blame others–god, patriarchy, Augustine, and billions of violent men across the ages–for causing us to feel fearful, but once it’s landed in our hearts, the fear is ours. When we choose to stay in fear, we’re simply choosing to blame others for the fear that now lives in us. We can’t escape fear; no one can (including men), and it’s through managing our relationship with fear that all humans find growth, change, impact, and power. We may never be fully free of it, but we can name our fears, engage them, and evolve them to be less draining and more energizing.

In fact, the power to manage your fear so it doesn’t debilitate you begins the moment you accept that even though things outside yourself can cause you to feel fearful, you own the fear once it lives within you. I’m not advocating that any of us ignore fear’s cautions and advice or accept that we deserve it (we do not), but I am advocating that we all put fear in its place. I’m challenging every one of us to take responsibility for our fear and find ways to manage it by changing our beliefs so we can stop being afraid of things that truly don’t endanger us and take action to exercise whatever power we do have for things that do legitimately threaten us and those we love. 

So, where do I land in figuring out how to hold space for a community of people who want to help heal women’s broken relationships in power at this precarious moment? What can I possibly offer on the day after women’s opportunity to hold great power was struck dead in front of us?

This month, it’s tempting to challenge us with the “What would you do if you had no fear?” meme, which is powerful because it gives us the briefest glimpse into the doors that open in our souls and our lives when we step outside of fear. But given that I don’t expect the result of this election to reduce our fear of being women seeking, finding, and wielding power, I thought of a better question for us to live with over the next few months and years. It’s the question Eve must have considered when she reached for the apple. 

What would I do if I took responsibility for my fear?

That’s the question we’ll be using to reframe our personal stories and relationships with our fear this month in the InPower Mastermind community. I think we’re going to need to be in relationship with our fear for a while when it comes to women in power and the public eye. Get ready.

VIDEO COACHING TIPS: How to Shift from Powerlessness to Power

I’ll be honest: I’m personally struggling to feel powerful today, but it’s forcing me to decide how committed I am to the tools of personal power I have been advocating and teaching for years. This video, though set in a workplace context, reminded me that, yes, these InPower tools do work to help me and my clients shift out of powerlessness. The principle in this video–focusing on the things we do control–will be a key to next week’s advice on how to find and hold onto the power inside yourself when facing fear and finding your way to constructive action.

INVITATION: This month, as a public service, I’m opening the Mastermind to all subscribers free of charge. Join us next week in chat and on November 20th in Zoom to share your fear, your strength, and participate with a community of women working to make things better in the world. 

Please let me know in comments or chat if this message helped you, or other support you feel you need in the weeks ahead. It’s my purpose to help you.

InPowering Powerful Women,

Dana Theus
Executive Coach
InPowerCoaching.com

Follow me on my YouTube channel and LinkedIn, for InPower clips and tips, (2-3 minutes tops) taken from these newsletters, blog posts, client advice, and whatever I’m thinking of. 

This month in chat I want to support all of us in managing the feelings coming up in our world. Join us and share your experience on this interesting journey we’re now all in together.