Stop Blaming Men Part 2: Why Focus on Women? Aren’t We All in This Together?
Dear RUBY,
I read your response about patriarchy and the feminine nervous system. But I still don’t get it! Why make this so gendered? Aren’t you just dividing people more? Shouldn’t we focus on everyone’s healing, not just women’s?
— Confused (and Curious)
Dear Confused (and Curious),
I love this question because it’s the one that sits quietly behind so many DMs that start with “I’m not a feminist, but…”
Let’s start here: you’re right. Everyone deserves healing and liberation. Everyone.
And equality in need doesn’t mean equality in experience.
When I focus on women’s healing, I’m not saying men don’t suffer. I’m saying: women have been trained to carry the suffering of everyone else for centuries.
The Felt Truth: How Patriarchy Lives in the Body
Most women I work with can sense this in their bodies before they can name it in words. The tension in the jaw that never relaxes. The habit of saying “I’m sorry” in every other sentence. The way pleasure feels both thrilling and unsafe.
This social conditioning is made somatic at the systemic level, not just personal body language.
Patriarchy isn’t a villain in a story or a man in a suit; it’s a nervous-system inheritance. It teaches women to prioritize harmony over honesty, caretaking over truth, and The Beauty Myth over aliveness.
And now? Women stive for harmony at any cost, metabolize anger before it reaches the throat, and smile while burning. The result? A generation of women who mistake peacekeeping for peace. And the status of being pleasing for the felt sense of power.
Why Gender Still Matters in Nervous System Healing
Dr. Hilary McBride’s research on embodiment shows that women internalize “being looked at” before they learn to look within. That external gaze lives in our muscles. It changes how we breathe, how we age, how we love.
If you want to heal a collective wound, you start where it bleeds. I understand why that can sound like exclusion. But in truth, beginning with women isn’t narrowing the circle of access. Instead, we enter through the most precise point of rupture.
Working with women inside systems of oppression restores agency to the body that was trained to obey. It teaches the nervous system that power and peace can coexist.
Polyvagal theory (Dr. Stephen Porges) explains why: our nervous systems constantly scan for safety cues, what he calls neuroception. When that safety depends on pleasing others, autonomy feels like danger.
So we work at the point of paradox. Where sovereignty feels dangerous, until power and empathy learn to run side by side. And when that happens, everyone feels it.
So yes, we start with women because that’s where the rupture lives. Decades of trauma and attachment research show that when the feminine nervous system unlearns fear, relational safety rises for everyone around her. One healed body becomes a small ecosystem of peace.
What Happens When Privilege Gets Named
When privilege gets named, the nervous system of the privileged often goes into fight-or-flight. The body hears truth as threat when comfort has been confused with safety. Defensiveness is just adrenaline wearing a moral costume. It’s the chemistry of a system realizing it’s being seen.
Social neuroscience backs this up: studies by Jennifer Eberhardt and David Amodio show that challenges to social identity activate the amygdala and sympathetic nervous system, producing physiological threat responses. In short, identity threat = body threat.
The Collective Reframe: Healing Beyond the Individual
Patriarchy hurts everyone, but it doesn’t hurt everyone the same way. Men are told to disconnect from emotion; women are told to disconnect from power. Both lose access to intimacy and wholeness.
When a woman stops performing calm to keep the peace, the whole system has to learn new ways to connect. Something honest happens in the room. Truth arrives. Connection wobbles, then rebuilds itself with sturdier hands.
Every time a woman regulates her nervous system toward safety and truth, she makes the world safer for everyone around her. That’s why we begin here.
You don’t have to love the word patriarchy. Call it the old story. Call it the water we’re ready to drain.
But let’s not pretend the playing field is even when the ground itself has grooves worn by centuries of one-sided labor, silence, and self-erasure.
You're right, blame divides. But naming the system isn’t blaming the people in it. What we’re doing here is remembering how to stand in our own center.
Why Feminine Embodiment Work Heals Us All
When women heal the patterns of over-giving, self-doubt, and suppression in their own bodies,
men, children, and communities benefit. This is how lineage repair happens, one nervous system at a time.
That’s why I focus on women. Because when a woman learns to feel safe in her own body,
she teaches everyone around her what safety feels like. And that’s how violence ends, quietly, cellularly, for real.
With love and ferocity,
Ruby
For more on the brilliance referenced:
Dr. Hilary McBride — embodiment researcher, PhD (Counselling Psychology, University of British Columbia). Footnote: McBride, H. L., The Body Is Where Life Is: Exploring Embodiment and Trauma (see podcast/interview). EdPsychSpecialEd+3The Trauma Therapist Project+3Hillary L McBride+3
Dr. Stephen W. Porges — creator of Polyvagal Theory (autonomic nervous system research). Footnote: Porges, S. W., “New insights into adaptive reactions of the autonomic nervous system: The Polyvagal Theory,” Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine, 76:S86-90 (2009). Stephen Porges PhD+1
Dr. Jennifer L. Eberhardt — social psychologist researching implicit bias and identity threat. Footnote: Eberhardt, J. L., Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do. Stanford University+2aaml.org+2