Ballerinas With Bayonettes ◊ How Woke Allegations Can Backfire On Themselves

◊ Certain defenders of victims such as many associated with the #MeToo movement propose that one should believe and collectively act together on anything a victim claims — while failing to recognize the danger in adding so much gravity to one freeze frame of their story. This potentially stagnates and overburdens their progression of unbinding from trauma-based narratives which mask the real perpetrators and causes. Each moment of perspective is a frame from a series along a long, organic moving picture of the victim's healing, integration and learning process.

◊ To add collective baggage and accountability to amplified statements (with a new need to defend against added backlash for speaking out) to a single frame simply doesn't apply enough healing and can dangerously backfire against the victim. Suspiciously, this is to the great advantage of those responsible for the trauma. Manson's new single, much like Chapter 1 of this current Chapter 2 series of albums, provides tools that work from the inside for victims, rather than the outside. This is done through contemplation tools and symbolic artwork which inspire internal connection to feelings and thoughts of these matters — while even still providing community relationships around the song meanings which are non-intrusive to the person's biography yet supportive to this type of personal growth and healing from trauma.

◊ The music uses education and inspirational artistic models about emotions of trauma which enhance wider context in order to support pattern recognition or other awareness practices, providing for deeper introspection and/or "outerspection within". Putting the emotional trauma of abuse into a wider framework of study, such as patterns in society, allows larger recognition of how these factors play out in the micro — inside the victim's subtle thought processes, assumptions, senses of how to strategize or define potential gain or loss etc etc. This coincides with the well-known method of awareness practices such as meditation to slowly and effectively rise above trauma. 

◊ In fact, this was my experience. Thanks to Manson's insights (along with studies into the music of Maynard James Keenan), I realized that I had falsely accused someone in my family of serious abuse — something which caused years to unravel — and I eventually found much more evidence of the real causes and perpetrators. This healed my family, turning it from a fully broken family, to one of increasing resolution and harmony. It's not just a tragedy that I didn't have these tools sooner in life. It's also symptomatic of what's missing from popular culture — the willingness to acknowledge the arts as a better tool for healing than social media call outs and character assassinations. 

◊ A great example of this type of work is found within the music video of the song. Wearing a 'face cage', which may represent complex insights into censorship vs free expression, he artistically offers a self-portrait of his face like a most terribly traumatized person, gesturing of a pain which has reached a more extensive psychological longterm impact. As an artist, he's very prone to these types of potraiture arts in facial expressions, and yet the words shared along with the portrait are of this greater scope — lending to subtle awareness practice in studying how the face seems to come across. This sets a good example of how a victim may artistically journey through their own emotions and perspectives without necessarily having to condense their pain into social media action like #MeToo. 

◊ Finding this next level of depth in the new song meant a lot to me, as this was the direction I had taken years ago in my defence video for Marilyn Manson's innocence from allegations — an art flick called The MMII ◊ Mariyn Manson Is Innocent. There I investigated the prominent story of Evan Rachel Wood, exploring how this seems to have happened to her. She strikes me as an icon of this exact phenomenon, since her leadership in the #MeToo movement as a public artist and activist has magnified the burden of her experience. I defended her innocence along with Manson's this way, as a rare take on the controversy.

◊ Considering how unusual my deep listening and understanding approach towards Evan was within a media slew of defence materials for Manson that antagonized her heavily, I was honoured to find that Manson has shared my sensitivities to her struggle to such a degree that he would voice this in his music. I don't sense that Evan would feel safe having this conversation with Manson, but I hope that my article would find her with love, because what I would say to her is just this. I see that perspective in Manson's piece here, and I see genuine respect towards Evan in this way — which is hard for him to voice to her publicly among the chaos of these heated collective disputes. I think she may pick up on this in the music. I see healing may be possible between Evan and Manson and I view myself as a true healer who may lend to this unfolding.