Elephants, we now know, are naturally an intelligent and matri-focused species of mother-and-grandmother-led clans who honor kinship ties, value elder males as role models for young males, and have resonant emotions. (By man’s increasing, unwelcome and unnatural intrusions into their lives, some elephants are beginning to act out in violence, in parallels to gang violence and shooting deaths by human beings who are still mainly men with some women starting to victimize first instead of being a victim.)
When traumatized by man’s dominance and violence, an elephant’s body memories can combine as physical and psychological forces leading to that elephant’s death. Dawn Adrian Adams, Ph.D., describes this scientific reality on behalf of elephants at What the Elephant Never Forgot.
What nobody seems to have asked is whether elephants trained in captivity can learn to revel in their “inner submissive” as the pathway to a subordinated peace in a male-dominant and violent world as some women can.
With the emotional similarities researchers are finding between elephant beings and human beings, as the conscious beings who have words (and blogs) we ought no longer let the question of women’s psychological entrainment to subordination be hidden — behind violent male-dominant cultures that spawned the mainstream man-made male-God religions (Islam, Judaism, Christianity) and the man-made political philosophies (Hinduism, Buddhism, Atheism, Socialism, Communism, Capitalism) that by their action and symbolism elevate men over other conscious life forms — whether it’s elephants or women whose lives are being diminished.
[Compare photo of elephants with photo of woman’s body from the website of a truly creepy website pitched to wives of the submissive type, and I’m not going to link to the site because it is so very sick — but if this titillates you in even the slightest degree then consider how damaged you have been by the longest war and its eroticization of dominance and submission, something we and not elephants have words for, something particularly the women among human beings and elephants suffer and die for, in the longest war.
Some women in some parts of the world keep bravely taking action. The women (and some men) who are enlightened elephant researchers are bravely taking their stand for TRANS-SPECIES
CONSCIOUSNESS against man-made dominance — and some women take up the cause for other women. For example:
In speaking against Islamic religion’s women-only veil (headgear symbolic of male dominance of women) and physically violent male Islamic means to keep women in line with what men want — so she could speak for giving women a better option of respect and personhood in their own right — Fadela Amara founded “Ni putes ni soumises” (Neither Whores Nor Submissives). This is also the title of her book which won the “Prix du Livre Politique” of the French national assembly.
Where Islamic culture reigns (as in French immigrant neighborhoods), a male punishment against girls who rebel is the so-called “tournante” – gang rape. Samira Bellil was the first to describe this phenomena in her book Dans l’enfer des tournantes (translated, in gang-rape hell). Three male gangs had raped Bellil before she found the courage — after caring treatment perhaps analogous to what Dawn Adrian Adams, Ph.D. might provide an elephant — to tell her story. Samira Bellil participated in “Ni putes ni soumises” until she died at age 31 of stomach cancer. (Here her obituary from the Guardian–UK.)
Considering the proximity of her stomach to the bodily site of three gang rapes by men against this young woman, would we connect the physical trauma as PTSD to the physical sickness and then her death? If she were an elephant, we would.
TheLongestWar 