So fed up with men using women’s brilliance as raw material and then calling the finished product their voice.
Men are trained to see themselves as thinkers, leaders, theorists, the ones who name the world and are recognized for the naming. Women are made into the machinery around that recognition: muse, editor, mirror, listener, emotional processor, intellectual midwife, the one whose labor sharpens the thought before it becomes public.
People will say it looks like influence. Admiration. Conversation. Inspiration. Proximity. A man standing close to a woman’s flame and feeling changed by it. And yes, influence is real. We are all shaped by what we read, who we love, who challenges us, who opens a door in the mind. But there is a difference between absorbing and metabolizing.
A man can absorb the heat of a woman’s thought by orbiting it. He can pick up language, rhythm, structure, even a certain moral force from standing close to what she has made.
Metabolizing it would ask something else of him. It would have to move through the body. Through practice. Through restraint. Through the places where the work costs him comfort, access, power, certainty.
This is part of what men often miss when they take from women’s work. They treat the language as an idea, when for many women the language is the residue of surviving what had no language yet.
When that kind of work gets ingested without being metabolized, something feels distorted. The language may sharpen, but the writing still carries a hollow place. It has borrowed heat without the life that made the burn necessary. It gives the work a spine it did not grow from inside, and then performs originality.
This is where influence crosses a line.
A man can admire a woman and still feed on her. He can praise her and still use her. He can feel grateful and still begin building authorship out of what she made visible.
That is the mechanism I want us to see.
Theft does not always arrive as theft. Sometimes it arrives as reverence. Gratitude. Inspiration. It can move unconsciously, carrying a woman’s language, structure, labor, and force into a man’s public stature.
Then, when she names what happened, she is expected to be generous. To understand influence. To trust intent. To accept private gratitude as evidence that nothing was taken. She is given the long hallway of his bullshit explanation instead of the simple dignity of his curiosity.
And this is part of the trap: the woman is made responsible for protecting the man from the consequences of recognizing what he has done. Her clarity becomes the problem. His innocence becomes the room everyone rushes to preserve.
Women’s minds are not open ground for men to cross, claim, and build legitimacy on.
Women’s clarity and architecture are not resources for men to consume and repackage as their own arrival.
If a man is truly moved by a woman’s work, let him stop turning her scar tissue into the proof of his depth.
We can name patriarchy out there all day. What I’m interested in, is the deeper work of dismantling where it lives inside of us. That’s where culture change can begin.
That is what this and future salons are for.
A Gemini New Moon salon, exploring voice through the lens of internalized patriarchy: how patriarchal conditioning shapes the way we speak, soften, silence, explain, perform, and translate our truth, and how these patterns can sever us from our own power and distort our connection with others.
We’ll begin by landing together, then I’ll offer a short teaching on Gemini’s connection to voice, internalized patriarchy, sovereignty, and connection. From there, we’ll move into introductions, guided reflection, and live conversation.
This is an affinity space for women (cis and trans), femmes, and thems impacted by misogyny. No TERFs welcome.
June 13, 2026
11:00 AM to 12:30 PM Pacific Daylight Time
$45 plus fees on Eventbrite
10 seats available. Held live on Zoom. Not recorded to allow for an honest room.
Hope to see you there! 🐝
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Alexandra Winteraven (they/them) is a queer, nonbinary body-led deconstructionist, writer, teacher, and facilitator working at the intersection of inherited systems, structural analysis, cultural emergence, and tracking pattern at the level of the body.
With more than a decade of experience as a somatic depth psychotherapist, Alexandra brings a trained eye for body, relationship, and the deeper structures shaping human experience.
They are known for naming incongruence with clarity and care, and for working with people who are no longer able to live inside familiar shapes that no longer fit. Their approach is relational, no bullshit, and uninterested in performance or bypass. Alexandra’s work is about what actually changes when insight becomes embodied, relational, and lived. It is oriented toward honesty, responsibility, the cost of real change, and collective transformation.
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