Extra notes about Chapter 21 – The Allowing Quadrant
in the book, The Art of Receiving and Giving: The Wheel of Consent.
Other notes are found here.

Here’s the full song that I quoted from in the book:
I and I wanna spread the news
That if it feels this good getting used
Oh you just keep on using me until you use me up
Until you use me up.
– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3hBYTkI-sE

Quotes, Poetry and Song

Kate and I quickly develop a strong mutual bond because she’s a taker and I’m a giver/calculator/resenter.
– Steve Zimmer, https://themoth.org/stories/lost-in-the-supermarket

In a culture of domination, preoccupation with victimage is inevitable.
– bell hooks (All About Love: New Visions)

Many of us learned that passivity lessened the possibility of attack.
– bell hooks (All About Love: New Visions)

You are not paranoid. When a nonblack person reaches to touch your hair before asking, they are participating in a centuries-old tradition of conceiving of you as an object, an outlandish thing in the museum of everyday life. You are a spectacle. Dismiss those foreign hands, protecting yourself and your space. You are not public domain. They want to touch you because they are in awe of you. But do not be fooled: this is not a compliment. This is a learned trait of our environment: to touch what we think will not resist or what we have conditioned to not resist.
– Morgan Jerkins (This Will Be My Undoing)

I also have had a big aha moment about my relationship dynamic with my ex husband.  For years, I have felt manipulated, abused and perpetrated by him while never actually realizing that I was actually at fault too for acting from the shadow side of allowing by not having any limits or demanding that those boundaries and limits be honored.  As a result, I have allowed him to just take and take while being too afraid or lazy to stand up for myself and create a different dynamic.  After learning the wheel I have been able to recognize when I am allowing someone to overstep my boundary or dishonor my limit and I have been able to stand up for myself in a very empowered way.  This is so exciting to feel!
– Student testimonial from River Roaring

“This far and no farther” – The Political Side of the Edge of Allowing

What, you have no enemies? How can that be? Did you never tell the truth or stand up for justice?
– Santiago Ramon y Cajal (according to Eduardo Galeano)

We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
– Elie Wiessel

The trouble is that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you’ve seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There is no innocence. Either way, you’re accountable.
– Arundhati Roy

When it comes to racism, discrimination, corruption, public lies, dictatorships, and human rights, you have to take a stand as a reporter because I think our responsibility as journalists is to confront those who are abusing power.
– Jorge Ramos, on Twitter

It don’t matter if it’s some obscure place or some two-bit polluter. This is my territory. Every waterway matters, because they all belong to me, to you, to every citizen of the United States, and nobody gets to poison it. I don’t care how big or small you are. [re: environment crimes] They’re social crimes. It’s one group of people imposing their will on another group, to their detriment, for profit.
– John Wathen, Creekkeeper for Hurricane Creek

Somehow the killing of the giant spider, all alone by himself in the dark without the help of the wizard or the dwarves or of anyone else, made a great difference to Mr. Baggins. He felt a different person, and much fiercer and bolder in spite of an empty stomach, as he wiped his word on the grass and put it back into its sheath.
– J.R.R. Tolkein, The Hobbit

No one has to tell us these things. We just know. …We know what is expected of us and what we must do to be approved of. Women, especially, know that we are expected to keep the peace, smooth over conflict, unpleasantness and unhappiness, and always ‘make nice’ …. Most people belong to some group that demands loyalty. Telling the truth almost always breaks unspoken laws, the solidarity expected from members of that group, whether it be a family or a larger community.
– Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir

Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders…and millions have been killed because of this obedience…Our problem is that people are obedient allover the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves… (and) the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.
– Howard Zinn, Passionate Declarations: Essays on War and Justice

Perhaps there was a time when something unworthy was beginning, and a simple action from us would have prevented the damage, but we did nothing. At another time perhaps we were part of something that was developing negatively, perhaps in a relationship or at work, and we never had the courage to say how we felt; we simply went along with it. In this way we damaged our integrity and our dignity. It is chastening to look back and see how frequently our silence allowed damage to occur and perhaps shored up something that was cruel, negative. It is easy to feel regretful that we did not stand up clearly and courageously then. But we know that at that time it was hard, maybe impossible, to speak out, and we live with a sense of something unresolved.
– John O’Donahue, quoted by Diane Walker: http://woodenhue.blogspot.com/2009/04/zones-of-omission.html

As the incredible unveiling of #metoo has progressed, I’ve been in a community of people who are also unveiling new realms of sexual confusion and trauma. A pattern has emerged around a lack of communication—this usually happens in moments of sexual harm, but it also shows up in moments of desired intimacy, where a socialization of silence keeps lovers from saying what they really want and need.

Our silence is a survival strategy. Our silence has protected us against potential violence, an unfortunately common response of patriarchy and/or other kinds of power when met with rejection. Our silence protects us from being rejected. Our silence upholds social norms that teach us that it’s more important to be polite than to be honest, even when discussing our own flesh.

Silence played some role in helping us survive to get to this moment*. But silence will not get us to a place of power over our bodies. And it will not get us the pleasure we want.

*Please check out the work of generative somatics or Generation Five for more on survival.
– adrienne maree brown https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/the-pleasure-dome/use-your-words

The Erotic Side of Allowing

Men aren’t attracted to me by my mind. They’re attracted to me by what I don’t mind.
– Gypsy Rose Lee

He chases me down like a pack of wolves and snaps at me with all his teeth and all his mouths and opens me with all his claws and lays his panting tongues on my heart and laps up all the sweet yearning with which it is filled until I am empty and groaning.
– Dallas Angguish, Arrythmia (1-10), in Bend, Don’t Shatter: Poets on the Beginning of Desire

You wake me,
Part my thighs, and kiss me.
I give you the dew
Of the first morning of the world.
– Kenneth Rexroth, The Love Poems of Marichiko

The Shadow of Allowing

In a culture of domination, preoccupation with victimage is inevitable.
– bell hooks

Many of us learned that passivity lessened the possibility of attack.
– bell hooks

Am I truly nonjudgmental or does fear of confrontation run so deep I’ll simply allow anything in my presence?
– Susan Mrosek (The Pondering Pool)

Silence can only be used as a tool for survival in the short term, elsewise you’ll get gangrene of the throat.
– Bani Amor, https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/tiny-massacres

Reporting Rape

All too often, women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm’s way.
bell hooks (All About Love: New Visions)

Why is it that we wait to report or why is it that we never report? Why is it that rape victims don’t confront their perpetrators publicly or in a court of law, or seldom do?

One reason for that is that over 85% of the time, rapists are actually trusted, beloved individuals and this creates a difficulty, a cognitive dissonance with the victim. How do we navigate this deep betrayal of a trusted uncle or father or brother or cousin or neighbor or Girl Scout leader or Boy Scout leader or priest or father figure or mentor, great politician, pastor, beloved celebrity iconic father figure. Now we have that cognitive dissonance and we have to tell the world or our family that this person raped us? We have to fear being disbelieved by everybody else who loves this beloved guy?

Plus we want to make it right. We want to go back to the way it was before our trusted individual raped us. We’re trying to figure out Why did you do that? There’s all this doubt, and guilt – What did I do to help victimize myself? So that makes the telling even more difficult. It’s much easier if you’re just walking down the street and get raped by a stranger, but again 9 of 10 sexual assaults are by trusted people close to you.

That’s also why the victims often go back to the perpetrator, to try to make it right, try to understand it, try to confront, or they give gifts, trying to repair. So rape culture and rape apologists say “If you were so scared why did you go back to your rapist? If he was such a threat why did you take a job with him?”

Then because of the drugs or the trauma it’s difficult to remember things chronologically, so we remember things in this discombobulated nonlinear way, which the defense attorneys call inconsistencies.
– Lili Bernard, http://lilibernard.com/ in themetoodialogues.com (program 32)