#metoo: Emotional Insight
Detail from The Rape of The Sabine Women by Peter Paul Rubens
Every single woman that I know has experienced a straightforward sexual assault — raped, groped, flashed — mostly by someone she knew. And from her working life, every single woman I know has a catalogue of the occasions when she was manipulated, intimidated, pestered, ignored, frightened or belittled simply because of her sex. She’s learned to put those away in a box. Because if you spend too much time thinking about it, you could get quite bitter.
#metoo opened all those personal boxes. The silence was broken, and many of us have spent the last few weeks recalibrating our memories, reliving some bad times, and talking about how sexual harassment (or worse) changed our lives.
Detail from The Rape of the Sabine Women by Luca Giordano
Which brings us to Harvey Weinstein, the British Houses of Parliament, Kevin Spacey and all — why is this series of scandals different? After all, we’d been hearing about Bill Cosby, that Ailes fellow and Donald Trump throughout the previous 12 months — not to mention Dominique Strauss Kahn and Julian Assange a few years ago. These were all powerful men accused of rape.
The difference is in the response — #metoo. You can feel the cultural shift as people start to understand that everyone is affected. This is not just about some politicians, or famous film stars; this is about your workplace and mine — or it may be about your allotment, your steering committee or your co-op. Weinstein is just the poster pig for a whole world of disrespect that almost all of us — men and women — have had to negotiate.
You could argue that people have been adjusting to what it means to have women making up half the workforce. After all, it was only a generation ago that women started going out to work in large numbers. Watch the fantastic — and bizarrely cancelled — miniseries Good Girls Revolt, set in a magazine office in 1969 — to remind yourself of just how far we’ve come. (Wait. The Amazon exec who cancelled it has had to resign. For harassment!) Since the Pluto-Uranus conjunction of the mid-1960s, there’s been a power struggle over women’s rights. Now, with the opening square of Uranus-Pluto, we reach an important turning point.
#metoo is part of the great Pluto in Capricorn purge of the established order that we’ve been witnessing — or party to — since 2008. Capitalism, patriarchy, western hegemony, white hegemony are all in the process of transformation. Old power structures are being dismantled. Ideas we took for granted are disappearing.
Pluto in Capricorn — 2008 – 2023
But this is a really important year within that period of a decade and a half. It’s the only time that Jupiter, the planet of magnfication, will be in Scorpio, the sign of Pluto’s rulership, while Pluto is in Capricorn. All the Scorpio stuff — power, sex, death, corruption, taxes, emotional insight — is going to be huge — and it’s going to be working on established power (Capricorn).
Already we see this at work. For taxes, look at the Paradise Papers; for sex & power: Weinstein; for power & sex: Parliament. Scorpio keeps secrets. Jupiter exposes them. Capricorn maintains structures. Pluto destroys.
Then there’s the perfect trine from Neptune in Pisces to Jupiter, which has given this thing tremendous popular momentum. In France they’re talking about a “tidal wave” of accusations. Neptune in Pisces is an overwhelming force — which is going to become even stronger when the lord of the Sea turns direct at the end of this month. Just a few days later, the trine will become exact — watch who gets swept away by a popular movement. We are all washing our filthy linen in public — but maybe it will come out clean in the end.
After that, Jupiter will move on quite rapidly to make a sextile to Pluto, a planet that loves the dirty truth. These two will connect exactly three times over the coming year, but they are working together already.
Jupiter in Scorpio, working smoothly with both Neptune and Pluto, does more than just reveal the turgid secrets of the past. Two heavy-duty, “collective” planets in water create a wave of emotional understanding — and Pluto provides insight. This is how the silence around sexual harassment was broken. Not everyone suddenly “gets it”, but a lot of people do. This is about a collective sense of empathy. There has been a collective shift in the idea of what is acceptable behaviour.
If #metoo brings about a change in culture, our daughters could go into the workplace and be valued for their brains and their talent. It might be too much to suppose that respect, good manners, decorum and kindness will start to be properly valued, but those personal Pandora’s boxes can never be shut again. Expect a fight back — there always is one — but the momentum is behind change.
Details of who did what to whom are not really the point — it’s how we behave from now on that matters.
There was a proliferation of sexual assault accusations (many were daycare worker abuses of children later proven false), including incest, in the late 1980s. Prior, any cultural discussion of this type was simply not encouraged or deemed socially acceptable outside of the legal system. I attribute America’s awareness of sexual harassment and misogyny to Anita Hill, with her riveting testimony before congress, denigrating Clarence Thomas’ character in 1991 and 1992. Anita Hill mainstreamed the topic and conversation.
I mentioned here before that the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of that same era seems to have left a hot-spot between 16* to 20* Capricorn that is perhaps currently activated by Pluto’s transit and aspects to Pluto. This hot spot activated by Pluto may be the reason why Kahn, Ailes, Cosby, et al were only the first rain drops of the deluge, as transiting Pluto again nears those degrees, and assault accusations now reaching a crescendo. Pluto will transit these degrees for several years, so it may be a while before the dust settles on this topic.
This is currently, predominantly discussed as a male-perpetrator and female-victim ‘thing’, with a few male victims thrown-in. Gender holds no exclusivity whether the victim or perpetrator. Apropos is one of Leigh Oswald’s comments that we assume we live in a civilized society, yet we don’t question what that really means. As Saturn moves into Capricorn, it will be the dispositor of both Jupiter and Pluto, and I suspect societal identities and definitions will dominate.
“male-perpetrator and female-victim” = patriarchy
Mike — wasn’t Saturn also at the end of Sag in end-of-the-eighties times?
Agree about Anita Hill — even though Thomas didn’t go down, that was a game-changer.
Saturn was conjunct Uranus at 27* Sag October, 1988 (Neptune at 7* Cap). Saturn was conjunct Neptune at 10* Cap November, 1989 (Uranus at 3* Cap). Saturn danced with Uranus and Neptune in early Capricorn 1988-1989, but was in early Aquarius when Uranus-Neptune had their actual conjunctions in 1993 at 18* Cap, though they were within conjunction from 1989 to 1998.
With Venus in Aqua ( me) 29 degrees I’ve turned the tables and verbally hit back. 🙂 .. ever since the late 60s so I’ve got plenty of experience. Taught my daughters to stand up against it too.
Aha — I have Lilith on that very spot and I give her credit for my “nasty woman” protective instinct.… but with all my Pisces, I tend to just leave … However, one of the bits I cut out of this piece when I was editing it was a ramble about how misogyny has shaped my career through my own avoidances and departures as well as the more obvious ways.
‘Because if you spend too much time thinking about it, you could get quite bitter.’
Indeed – but could one be blamed? Afterall this notion that sweetness is essential womans territory has kept us aquescient and turning the other cheek for millenia.
Bitter, like sour is just another flavour and an excess of sweetness is just as, if not more dangerous.
The add campaigns manipulate us with “you deserve it’ as we gorge on yet more cakes, choclate and sugary drinks etc stuffing down our feelings and
celebrating ‘comfort’, anaesthetising our justified rage and fogging our brains, making us fat, sluggish and passive.
Bitter on the other hand stimulates the Liver encouraging the release of Anger and Action.
I embrace Bitter in this Year of the Witch.
I love it! Bitter is Lilith, Venus is sweet (by tradition as well as observation).
More needs to be said about domestic/marital rape.
Hi christina,
how about the role of Lilith in all of this?
In the sixties, when Pluto and Uranus conjuncted in Virgo, Lilith was in Aquarius and later in Pisces.
Could you agree that in these recent years Lilith has been really active in making women more aware of their position in life because they become better educated in areas all over the world ?
Since ancient times there have allways been and in the future there will allways be people that get abused or worse (it also happens to men).
And yes : metoo – when I worked as a secretary I had a colleague who thought I could be treated like that. I surely showed him where he could stick his filthy hands, but I never informed my boss about him, why – I don’t know ! But I made sure he would not do it again to me.
mimi
Hasn’t Lilith just entered capricorn? Nov 8th. How interesting, now it’s time to turn all that bitterness, thirst for vengence into your own personal climb to do sth concrete (good, victorious) about it. I have a plan, as I’m sure many other women do too.
Today, Lilith is at 0°03! Maybe time to get serious about all things Lilith — we have nine months.
Black Moon Lilith ,I think, enters Capricorn Nov 8th?
The video clip of Uma Thurman’s comment, when asked about Weinstein, sums up everything right now.
This article in The Atlantic about Bill Clinton makes interesting reading.
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/11/reckoning-with-bill-clintons-sex-crimes/545729/