The Tool We Use Becomes the World We Make

A Contemplation on Violence, Power, and the Feminine Voice

I often have to remind myself that I still live in a world largely shaped by the priorities, perceptions, and power dynamics of men—a world designed, over millennia, to elevate their comfort, ambitions, and ideals.

This pattern of human self-organization has persisted for thousands of years. Only within the last century or so have we begun to course-correct some of the gross systemic imbalances that have harmed and silenced women for far too long.

This is not a screed against men. No man alive today invented our religious, economic, or political frameworks. We were all born into these structures—men and women alike—and we’ve marinated in their norms since birth. As a result, we rarely notice how much our systems still center themselves around masculine definitions of strength, success, and significance.

It hasn’t escaped my attention that, in nearly every dominator system, final authority rests in the state’s legal right to use violence. That power to punish, imprison, or destroy undergirds the entire framework of modern law, and it echoes a historical trust in physical dominance as the ultimate arbiter of truth and order.

In that light, one might ask: is it any wonder that the systems we’ve created reflect the logic of conquest?

Most women know they won’t win a physical showdown with nearly half the population. That understanding has been hardwired into our lived experience, long before any argument heats up. So we lean into something else.

We use our words.

We use empathy.

We express, negotiate, soothe, and navigate.

Not because we’re weak, but because we know all too well that violence leaves both visible scars and hidden echoes. And because life, quite literally, flows into this world through our bodies.

We have survived the agony of birth and embraced the sanctity of nurturance. We know what it means to grow and love new life. So it breaks our hearts to witness the casual destruction of what we pour our bodies, minds, and spirits so intensely into creating.

And yet, when we challenge the violent premises of our modern social order, we’re often dismissed with a wave of the hand:

“Violence is just human nature.”

But violence is not “human nature.” It is human conditioning.

Women have spent generations resolving passionate, complex, and even agonizing conflicts without defaulting to violence. We’ve cultivated ways of mending differences without coercing submission. Perhaps it’s time the powers that be stopped trying to win—and started learning how to listen.

Because here’s what listening reveals:

The most intractable conflicts arise not because one side is right and the other wrong, but because both carry legitimate pain, unmet needs, and ancestral wounds. Every long-fought war begins with unhealed hurt. And when violence becomes the tool of resolution, we don’t resolve the hurt—we entrench the destructive cycle.

Temporary conquest only breeds future retaliation.

Subdued voices do not stay quiet.

Pain denied becomes pain multiplied.

We breed violence—by choosing dominance over reconciliation.

We encourage violence—by believing that security lies in being the biggest threat in the room.

We celebrate violence—by funneling the bulk of our collective wealth into weapons of mass destruction and calling it “patriotic defense.”

We elevate violence—by cheering for cruel, ruthless leaders who promise to destroy whatever we have been taught to presently fear.

We perpetuate violence—by building it into our myths, our media, our metaphors. We tell ourselves it’s noble when we wield it, though barbaric when others do.

But no world built on violence can birth true peace.

For the primary tool that we use to shape the next world will also shape the soul of that world.

If we build a new world through domination, it will grow up to fear tenderness.

Conversely, if we build a new world with compassion, we may finally recover our soulfulness and our grace.

I don’t pretend to know how to unwind thousands of years of inherited violence. But I do know this:

Our world will not be healed through out-violencing the violent. It will not be softened by domination dressed up as virtue.

What’s needed now is not a violent flip in the global pyramidal power dynamic, but a dynamic rebalancing between the focused strength of the masculine and the regenerative wisdom of the feminine.

Not in opposition; in partnership.

Not in conquest; in communion.

That, I believe, is how peace can be born anew, right here on Earth.