"The Cornell 7": It's an Inside Job

On masculine and feminine energy, misogyny, and the change we keep waiting for but can start today! 

"Most men are bad."

The words fell from my 16-year-old daughter's lips and I felt two things at once. First, a deep protective ache: my baby, two years from leaving for college, sees the world this way. My kids are still growing up in a world where women feel unsafe all the time. Second, startled. After all the work I've done to mitigate gender conditioning in my parenting, the world still brought her here. And underneath it all, the low hum that never goes away: When will we wake up more fully? What will it actually take?

This kid has a penchant for the broad brush, and we were in the middle of a concert stadium. Not exactly the ideal setting to unpack one of humanity's most profound and painful questions.

Still, I pressed her gently. What did she mean by "most men"? How could she be so sure? And then given the setting and her resistance to chatting it up, I let go for the moment. 

The real answer came later, in a quieter moment over a puzzle at our dining room table. She let me in a little further, and it became clear her conviction carried the weight of evidence.

Men commit the overwhelming majority of serious physical and sexual violence. That isn't a broad brush. It's the data.

I asked how she sees her father, her brother, my father whom she adores, and the whole constellation of men in her life, none of whom she can picture harming anyone. How does a girl square the statistics with the men she loves? Who is safe? Who isn't? And how on earth is she supposed to tell?

Around the same time, she had asked me, "Did you hear that seven boys at Cornell gang raped a girl and all they had to do was write essays?"

I'm news abstinent by choice, so when my daughter, who doesn't follow the news either, brings me a headline, I listen. That same week my son, her big brother, texted from college, fed up: "Why r ppl like just figuring out that frats r evil? Have we rly lost our critical thinking skills completely?"

Similar broad brush and all, kid, I'm with you.

We've rehearsed our response to stories like this so often we could perform it in our sleep: shock, outrage, then the usual suspects. The government, capitalism, racism, fraternities, institutions and, always, the patriarchy.

Those systems are real. They have funneled power to men for centuries, dressed domination up as leadership, and built fortresses around those who do harm.

And… I want to invite you into a crucial, potentially world-changing understanding: Patriarchy is the outward expression of a much deeper imbalance. One that lives, in different ways, in every. single. one. of us.

It's an Inside Job

At its root, dismantling the pervasive violence, domination, and oppression that plague our world is an inside job.

Okay, Nicole. WTAF are you talking about?

I know. Hang in. And let me be clear up front: this doesn't dilute responsibility. Violence belongs to those who commit it. But if we want it to stop, we have to look at the conditions that keep producing it. And here's the "good" news: those conditions live inside us.

I have the enormous privilege of spending much of my life in spiritual spaces. Between the witchy wisdom of my yoga teacher, the tuning of my algorithm to the teachings I engage with daily, and the inner work foundational to my coaching and ya know, living practice, I spend a lot of time considering human behavior through the lens of energy and the cosmic long game.

Central to my understanding of the world is the metaphysical principle that everything is energy. (Backed by science too ya know!) We constantly influence and are influenced by the energy around us, and what we cultivate internally shapes what we create externally.

Masculine and Feminine Energy

Within this framework, every one of us embodies both masculine and feminine energies. These terms aren't about men and women. They have nothing to do with anatomy or expression, and I know the binary language is imperfect. They describe complementary qualities present in all of us.

Feminine energy expresses as receptivity, intuition, nourishment, emotional wisdom, holding, and allowing things to grow.

Masculine energy shows itself in doing, action, structure, direction, boundaries, building, and bringing things into form.

Both are good. Both are essential.

Think about building anything meaningful, a business, a relationship, a life. You need vision, care, and the capacity to receive. You also need action, structure, and the capacity to move things forward.

Wholeness requires both.

Too much feminine energy without masculine leaves us without direction, boundaries, or the capacity to act.

Too much masculine without feminine becomes relentless doing, control, domination, achievement without meaning, power without compassion.

This is the imbalance reflected in patriarchy: generations of elevating dominance and conquest while devaluing emotional wisdom and care.

The problem isn't masculine energy itself. It's masculine energy so disconnected from its feminine counterpart that power becomes domination, strength becomes aggression, and other human beings become things to control.

Here's how it moves. A person cut off from their own feelings can't feel anyone else's. A person who has never learned to receive only knows how to take. Put enough of those people together, in a team, a boardroom, a frat house, and the imbalance stops being personal. It becomes culture. Culture becomes normal.

And what's normal gets protected.

And we all carry it. REGARDLESS OF GENDER.

One of my favorite, most frustrating experiences is when someone marvels that a woman has said or done something misogynistic.

"But she's a woman!"

Yeah. Misogyny lives in all of us.

We have all been shaped by the same systems. Women can perpetuate patriarchy. Men can embody profound feminine wisdom. Any of us can feed the very patterns we say we want to dismantle.

This isn't about blaming men or idealizing women. It's about recognizing the conditioning that has shaped us all.

The Split Is Inherited 

Our culture trains us well for this split. It trains boys out of their feminine: don't cry, toughen up, win, don't need anyone. (Every sports metaphor ever.) It trains girls out of their masculine: be nice, be agreeable, don't take up too much space. Oh, but also achieve, just not at anyone else's expense. Oh and also, your body is not yours and make sure it pleases everyone else. 

Different messages, same fundamental harm. Both leave us running on half our energy.

We have spent generations teaching people to live as fragments of themselves. And then we've built a world out of those fragments.

We Hold So Much Power 

If the imbalance isn't only out there but something we've internalized, each of us has a place to begin.

Not by waiting for governments to change, institutions to become enlightened. And not by waiting for the next generation to somehow get it right.

By examining what lives inside us. Right now. Today.

Where do I mistake control for strength? Silence my own knowing to keep the peace? Value productivity over presence? Confuse vulnerability with weakness? Use power to dominate rather than build?

Where have I learned that being loving means having no boundaries, or that being powerful means having no softness?

And what would it look like to reclaim the parts of myself I've been conditioned to abandon?

For some of us, the work is learning to slow down, soften, feel, receive, and surrender control. For others, it's learning to take up space, establish boundaries, speak with conviction, and act without apology.

For most of us, it's some very complex, beautiful combination of both.

Accountability matters. Justice matters. Laws, institutions, and structural reform matter. But responding to harm is not the same as transforming the conditions that allow it to flourish.

In Practice

I build my business with tremendous care for the humans in it. I make space to hold how decisions land on people. Brené Brown's work on vulnerability as the heart of courageous leadership shapes how I lead.

And I GET SHIT DONE. I make a lot happen. Just never at anyone's expense and always with forethought about how what is happening could impact the human experience.

When things get messy, and they always do, I slow down FIRST. That pause isn't avoidance, and it's definitely not submission. It's strategy. It makes the next move clean, wise, and as safe as possible for the people it touches, and it always pays off, for the work and the bottom line.

That's feminine and masculine working together. Receptivity informing action. Care shaping what gets built.

And that pause is the practice. Noticing when I'm gripping for control or shrinking to keep the peace, and coming back to center before I act. It's daily, it lives in the body, and it's available to every one of us. And I do it 100% imperfectly.

This is how internal transformation becomes cultural transformation. Those choices, multiplied across families, communities, and generations, are how systems change.

We cannot create a world rooted in wholeness while continuing to live in separation from parts of ourselves.

We cannot demand compassion while treating our own vulnerability with contempt.

We cannot demand equality while remaining unconscious of the ways we diminish ourselves or others.

We cannot demand a different relationship to power without examining our own.

And we cannot keep waiting for someone else to heal what lives, in some measure, in all of us.

This is not an argument for doing inner work instead of changing the world. They are inseparable.

I keep coming back to my daughter in that stadium. "Most men are bad" isn't true, but I understand why it feels true to a 16-year-old girl still today. I don't want her to grow up bracing against half of humanity. I want her to grow up among boys who were never taught to cut off half their energy, and for her never to learn that shrinking is the price of safety. I want my son to become an adult in a world where he believes that people and systems DO change.

That world won't emerge solely from dismantling what exists. We have to become capable of building something different. When we interrupt those patterns in ourselves, our parenting, our relationships, and our leadership, we begin creating different conditions.

So the question isn't only, "How do we stop this from happening again?"

It is equally and primarily:

What am I perpetuating, without even realizing it, and what am I willing to transform within myself?