A Woman Alive Today

First, the Body

If your heart is breaking

Grief and fury at what is being done to women aren't signs that something is wrong with you. They're signs that your heart works. But a body can only hold so much at once.

• Put the news down for today. The stories will still be there tomorrow. You don't have to read every detail to honor the women in them.
• Breathe out longer than you breathe in. Five cyclic sighs are the fastest calm the body knows.
• Go outside. Put your hands on something alive.
• Find other women. Rage shared becomes strength. Rage held alone becomes illness.

When you're ready, the room called Grieving the World holds the teachers who know how to carry this without closing your heart.

A Practice for Returning to Yourself

Moving without being watched

Many of us learned to see ourselves from the outside: how we look, who might be watching, whether we're taking up too much space. Liberated movement turns that around. You move exactly how you feel, with no mirror, no audience, and no right way to do it, until the eyes of others fall away and you're back inside your own body. It can feel purifying and anchoring.

The unwatched dance: about twenty minutes

1. Make the room yours. Close the door. Draw the curtains or dim the lights. Turn your phone face down, or out of the room. Clear a little floor. If you live with others, tell them you need twenty minutes alone.
2. Arrive. Stand with soft knees and close your eyes. Take three long exhales. Feel your feet, your weight, your breath.
3. Ask your body what it feels. Not your mind: your body. Heavy? Tight? Restless? Tender? Furious? Name it silently.
4. Let one small movement begin. A sway, a roll of the shoulders, a hand that wants to rise. Don't decide it; follow it. Let it grow as big or stay as small as it wants.
5. Move the feeling. Let anger stomp and push. Let grief curl, sway, and fold. Let fear shake. Let joy spin and leap. There's no wrong shape. If tears come, let them; they're part of the movement.
6. Let your voice come too. A sigh, a hum, a groan, a growl, a song with no words. Sound frees what movement can't reach alone, and many of us were taught to swallow both.
7. Shake it off. Shake your hands, arms, shoulders, hips, and legs for a minute or two, then let everything loosen.
8. Come to stillness. Stand or lie down. Hands on your heart and belly. Notice what's different now.
9. Close gently. Write one line about what your body said, or simply thank it.

When the watcher shows up

Somewhere in the middle, you may suddenly feel watched, even alone in your room: a flash of “I look ridiculous,” or “who do I think I am?” That's the internalized gaze, the outside eyes you learned to carry inside. You don't have to fight it. Notice it, breathe out, and say silently, “Not now. This is mine.” Then return to the feeling in your body. Each time you come back, the watcher loosens its grip a little.

Ways to make it easier

• Keep your eyes closed, or dance in the dark.
• Choose music without words, so the body leads instead of the lyrics. Or dance to silence.
• Start with one song. Three or four minutes is a complete practice.
• Make it a ritual. The same day each week, a candle, the same first song: your body will learn that this is its time.
• Dance with other women, when you're ready: a women's circle, or a dance-in-the-dark night where no one is watching anyone.

What researchers have found: objectification theory (Barbara Fredrickson and Tomi-Ann Roberts, 1997) describes how girls and women are taught to view their own bodies from the outside, and studies link this “self-objectification” to body shame, anxiety, and dulled awareness of the body's inner signals. Dance and movement therapy studies report less body shame and more body appreciation, and a 2024 BMJ review found dance among the most effective forms of exercise for easing depression. Authentic Movement, developed by Mary Starks Whitehouse and Janet Adler, is practiced with eyes closed, following inner impulses. No Lights No Lycra, founded in Melbourne in 2009, holds dance nights in the dark so no one is watched.

For more practices for the body and its feelings, walk into Your Sovereign Self.

A Sovereignty Protocol for Women

Music medicine: songs that lift you off the floor

Music is one of the fastest roads into the nervous system. It can slow a racing heart, loosen a clenched jaw, and bring back tears that have been stuck for months. It also hands us stories to live in. The songs we play on repeat quietly tell us who we are, what we can bear, and how far we're allowed to rise. When a woman is rebuilding herself, choosing those stories on purpose is a kind of medicine.

For weeks I listened to almost nothing but Kimo. It picked up the straggler version of me and took me on a gentle journey inward, like drifting in and out of sleep on a peaceful bus ride through the dark. It lifted me up off the floor, got me standing, told me to stand up straight, and kept coming back to remind me: chin up, eyes clear, heart open, but fully aware. It did quiet, unflashy healing work. Then Strictly Private picked up where Kimo left off, and lifted me higher still: elevated, sacred, out of reach. Music has always been a main line into my soul. This year it helped my nervous system remember how to steady itself, and helped me choose the story I live in.

The protocol: four movements

1. Steady (the first weeks). Choose one gentle, warm body of music and let it be your home base. On these pages, that's the Kimo playlist: songs about rising slowly, breathing again, and choosing who you are. Play it softly, every day: while you make tea, on walks, and especially in the hallway as you drift toward sleep. Don't analyze it. Let it carry you.
2. Stand. When you feel ready, listen standing up. Let your spine lengthen, your chin lift, your shoulders drop. Let the music tell your posture what your mind hasn't believed yet.
3. Rise. When steadiness holds, add music that lifts higher. Close the door, turn up the Strictly Private playlist, and let your body move. This is where the unwatched dance belongs.
4. Choose your story. Notice which songs leave you smaller and which leave you taller. Quietly let go of the ones that pull you back into old stories about your limits. Keep the ones that sound like the woman you're becoming.

Your music may be different from anyone else's, and that's the point. The protocol is the shape: a steady home base first, then standing, then rising, and always choosing.

What researchers have found: in Music in Everyday Life (2000), sociologist Tia DeNora interviewed women in the U.S. and U.K. and found they used music deliberately as a “technology of the self,” to calm down, gather energy, work through feelings, and become the person a moment asked of them. A review in Trends in Cognitive Sciences (Mona Lisa Chanda and Daniel Levitin, 2013) linked music to changes in the body's stress, reward, and bonding chemistry. In a 2013 study (Myriam Thoma and colleagues), listening to relaxing music before a stressful task helped the body's stress system recover faster. Music people choose themselves tends to ease pain and anxiety more than music chosen for them. Psychologist Dan McAdams has shown that the stories people tell about their own lives, their “narrative identity,” shape their wellbeing, especially when those stories turn hardship into growth.

For more, see the Library's doorway Can music choose the story you live in? and The Dance Floor Reading Room.

Solidarity

I am Jane Doe

Content note: this section discusses sexual assault.

In September 2026, a former Cornell student filed a civil lawsuit alleging that in 2024 she was drugged and gang raped at a fraternity house, and that a message in a fraternity-wide group chat invited others into the room where she lay. According to reporting by The Cornell Daily Sun and national outlets, the District Attorney declined to bring charges, members were said to have coordinated what to tell police, and some of the accused were allowed to reduce their punishment by writing essays. The accused deny the allegations, the university disputes parts of the account, and the case is now being reviewed again.

As people raced online to uncover who she is, women answered with three words: I am Jane Doe. If she can't be found, she can't be blamed, threatened, or shamed. Thousands of women stood in front of her.

The ones who said nothing

What enrages so many women isn't only what a few men are accused of doing. It's everyone who allegedly saw the message and stayed silent. Psychologists have studied this since the 1960s. In a group, each person waits for someone else to act, and responsibility thins until no one moves: the bystander effect. The cure is known too. When students are taught to recognize danger and intervene, sexual violence goes down; a large trial of the Green Dot program in Kentucky high schools showed it. Silence is taught, and so is courage. Raise sons, and friends, who are the one who speaks.

The Hidden Danger

If you're afraid to look

Content note: this section discusses drugging and sexual violence.

In 2024, Gisèle Pelicot sat through a public trial in France as her husband and fifty other men were convicted of raping or assaulting her while he kept her drugged, for nearly a decade. She refused anonymity so that “shame must change sides.” In March 2026, a CNN investigation found online networks where men traded methods, images, and videos of drugging and raping their partners. The chat group CNN traced had about a thousand members. (The widely shared figure of 62 million was the monthly traffic of the entire site that hosted some of the material, not the number of men involved. The truth is terrible enough.)

Many women now wonder about nights they can't remember, and are too frightened to search. If that's you, you don't have to look alone.

• Talk to someone trained for exactly this. In the U.S., the RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline is free, confidential, and open day and night: call 800-656-4673, or chat at online.rainn.org.
• If you fear images of you exist, StopNCII.org helps get intimate images blocked across major platforms without your having to share them with anyone. For anyone who was under 18 in the images, NCMEC's “Take It Down” service does the same.
• If it happened recently, many drugs leave the body within 12 to 72 hours. Go to an emergency room and ask for a toxicology test and a forensic exam, even before you decide whether to report.
• If you want to protect a friend, watch for sudden confusion, memory gaps, or a person who seems far drunker than she drank. Stay with her, get her home safely, and never leave her with the person who brought the drink.

If you are in danger right now, call 911 or your local emergency number. If you're in crisis, call or text 988.

The Reading Rooms of the Wing

Six rooms

1. The Long Silence: the witch trials, the laws that made women property, the histories that were erased, and medicine built around men's bodies. Until 1974, a U.S. bank could refuse a woman credit in her own name. Only since 1993 have federally funded medical trials been required to include women.
2. The Body as Territory: bodily autonomy, the beauty myth, the pressure to look like a girl forever, menopause, and taking the body back.
3. Power and Predation: the Epstein records, the Pelicot trial, the drugging networks, campus cases, and the bystanders. Every item is labeled Documented, Testimony, or Research.
4. Matriarchy, Partnership, and the Woman-Led Vision: matrilineal societies living today, and women who built a new system while the old one still stood.
5. Men, Women, and the Divide: the man-or-bear question, the manosphere, victim blaming, and the loneliness of men.
6. Grieving the World: Gaza, war, cruelty in the news, and how to carry a broken heart without closing it.

The Question Everyone Is Asking

The man or the bear

In 2024, women were asked whether they would rather be alone in the woods with a man or a bear, and many chose the bear. Men were stunned. Women weren't. A bear doesn't plan, doesn't film it, doesn't tell its friends, and no one asks what you were wearing. The answer isn't really about bears. It's about how many women have learned, firsthand, where the danger usually comes from: most sexual violence is committed by someone the woman knows.

At the same time, many men are lonelier than ever. The share of American men with no close friends rose from 3% in 1990 to 15% in 2021, and some of the loneliest are being pulled into online worlds that teach them to blame women for their pain. bell hooks wrote that the domination system wounds boys first, by teaching them to cut off their own feelings, and then sends them out to wound others. Naming that isn't an excuse. It's a map of how the cycle could end.

What Comes Next

Building the second system while the first still stands

Women everywhere are calling for something different: a way of living that is woman-led, that centers the protection of children, and that values community over conquest. No one can switch one system off and another on overnight. Every real transition has started with a vision, and with people quietly building the new thing alongside the old.

• It has been done. In 1975, about 90% of Iceland's women stopped working for a day; five years later, Iceland elected the world's first democratically elected woman president. In Liberia, Leymah Gbowee and thousands of women sat in protest until the men signed a peace agreement.
• It is still being lived. Among the Mosuo of China and the Minangkabau of Indonesia, families are traced through the mother. The Haudenosaunee clan mothers chose and could remove their chiefs, and they inspired the first American suffragists.
• It begins small. Women's circles, mutual aid networks, land trusts, cooperatives, seed libraries, and childcare shared among neighbors. Each one is a piece of the second system.

The root of it all is Riane Eisler's distinction between domination and partnership. The future women are calling for isn't the old pyramid with a woman at the top. It's a circle. Read more in Sovereignty: A Practice.

If you want to share what you're living through, or help build this wing, write to Luli.

Facts as of October 2026. Last reviewed October 2026.

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