04/10/2022
Red is coming SOON:
From the author:
"In our culture, the imagery around every facet of femininity, abuse, trauma, shame, healing, and power, especially within the societal constructs of r**e culture and purity culture has one thing in common: it is overwhelmingly red.
From Eve’s forbidden fruit, to Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, to Amsterdam’s Red Light districts, red serves as a patriarchal symbol of shame, and as a warning to disobedient and immoral women. Red manifests as naïveté to Snow White and her poisoned apple, and it arrives as adventure to Dorothy and her ruby slippers. Songwriters employ red dresses and red lips as objects of desire, and artists lean on red-hued themes in much of the art inspired by feminism, abuse, and generational curses.
Red is everywhere.
The more we notice the use of this imagery, the more we notice a kind of segmentation that happens. There is a clear line of demarcation between red employed as power, and red employed as weakness - especially as it pertains to trauma and healing. Trauma survivors are subjected to categorization in one of two ways: they are pigeonholed as either victim or victor, and those categories are largely mutually exclusive.
If we look to our own experiences with trauma, we often find that it is all in varying shades of red, but that it is impossible to categorize ourselves as either victim or victor. There is no boundary line. We are not one or the other; we are both.
Red is an invitation to embrace every facet of your journey, and to reject the notion that you need to choose between honouring pain and being victorious over it.
Nothing is ever just one thing."
