Every patriarchal religion has a Forgiveness Clause. Forgive! It’s Holy! Get Whole again!  Why even the Dalai Lama says forgiveness is good for you. And not only that, any psychologist who spent all that money getting the paper-thingee to sit and listen to kinda redundant incest/depression tales will tell you the same: Forgive! Because it’s the only way you’ll heal…

The congregation and the couch-client, we all know, are primarily FEMALE. — Women trying to find succor from the layer upon layer upon layer of psychic/spiritual damage patriarchy inflicts on all women. The forgiveness clause is for us (and the kids later on with their damn class-action lawsuits). Do men forgive? Have the Palestinian patriarchal command forgiven the Israeli patriarchal command? Did the English Airforce forgive the German Infantry? Have the Crips forgiven the Bloods?? HELL NO. Men don’t forgive. Forgiveness is for gurrls. Men do war. Because men understand forgiveness as capitulation, as an admission of overwhelming powerlessness. As Robin Morgan pointed out in Demon Lover, her scintillating work on men and terrorism: They try-out their atrocities on us. A rarely-noticed side effect of these homelab scientific tinkerings is women nearly dead from pain, at a complete loss on how to ever function normally again. Regardless of the method/crime, the aftermath of male-induced trauma is the same: a smashed psyche (psychological fragmentation goes nicely with the dicing-up-our-bodies thing. Matches!) 

I know a Handmaiden Extraordinaire, het-paired at 18, lost her man-rock at 55 (why do white middle-class wifies seem to know less about men than anyone else on this planet?) A dispenser of two sons, she ignores other women, and finds feminists distasteful. See, her life was grand, financially secure, all Home and Garden Magazine until one day a man held a gun to her head, forced her in his trunk, drove her to the woods and raped her. Well she laid in bed and laid in bed, and even dreamed of pulling the switch on this prick. But that was then and this is now, and since her husband died, she is busily screening for a new PIV/financial security arrangement, and proudly told me she has now “totally forgiven my perp.” Woo-hoo! (“Not all men are like that,” she said contemptuously, cuz I am such a dumbshit. “My sons aren’t…”)