69 Million Searches for Rape: Power, Sexuality and the Distortion of the Feminine

There is something profoundly unsettling about the sheer number of men engaging with violence against women, whether directly or through consumption, and it is not something that can be brushed aside as “just behaviour” or reduced to statistics that sit neatly on a page. When the numbers reach into the tens of millions, we are no longer looking at isolated acts or individual pathology, we are looking at a collective imprint that begins to shape the energetic field between men and women.

A field is created through repetition, normalisation, what is seen, watched, tolerated, and left unchallenged. And when that field is saturated with imagery, fantasy, and acts that degrade or violate the feminine body, it does something to the psyche and not only of the men participating, but of women who are living within that same reality.

Women feel this, often before they can articulate it. It registers in the body as a low-level vigilance, a contraction that appears without conscious thought, a constant awareness that the world they are moving through contains a level of threat that has been normalised at scale. The collective field of women is responding to this. What we are witnessing is the consequence of millions of choices accumulating into something larger than any one person — a distortion in how the feminine is perceived, approached, and treated. The feminine body becomes something that is acted upon, rather than something that is met in presence, dignity, and reciprocity.

If we are willing to go deeper, this is not only about men, it is about the conditions that have shaped desire, perception, and behaviour over time. We are living inside a culture that has relentlessly sexualised the female body, commodified intimacy, and normalised exposure to pornography from an early age, often before the psyche has the maturity to process what it is seeing. When millions of people are conditioned through repetition to associate arousal with domination, detachment, or performance, it begins to rewire how the body responds and how the other is perceived. This does not remove responsibility, yet it does point to a wider system at work — one that trains both men and women into distorted relationships with sexuality, power, and the body. If we are asking why this is happening at such scale, we have to look at the environment that has shaped it, not only the individuals within it.

And this is where the deeper impact lies. Because when this pattern is reinforced repeatedly, it alters the relational field itself. Trust erodes, safety becomes conditional and openness requires calculation. Women adapt, not because they are weak, but because they are responding intelligently to an environment that has demonstrated, again and again, that it cannot always be trusted with their vulnerability.

The anger that is rising in women is a coherent response to a reality that has been minimised for far too long. When you begin to comprehend the scale ;not just of acts, but of participation, consumption, and silent endorsement something can shift. The psyche can no longer comfortably deny what it knows.

We can Recognise that when millions of men engage, even passively, with violence or degradation of women, it leaves an imprint, it shapes perception and nfluences behaviour. It creates an atmosphere in which women must constantly negotiate their own safety and sovereignty .Something is being seen more clearly. Something that has always been there, but is no longer being softened or explained away. And once something reaches that level of visibility in the collective psyche, it begins to demand a different kind of response one that is no longer willing to carry the weight of it in silence.

And I can feel this in my own life, because I have had to walk away from relationships that did not honour me at the level my body knew was true. From the outside, it can look like other women are “in relationship” and therefore somehow more chosen, more settled, more secure. Yet when you look more honestly, so many of those dynamics are built on what is being tolerated rather than what is truly being met. Women staying in spaces where intimacy has gone silent, desire has disappeared, words carry subtle or overt violence, emotional presence is inconsistent, the body is endured rather than cherished, boundaries are negotiated down slowly over time, and where a woman’s deeper truth is quietened in order to keep the structure intact.

This is the part that is rarely spoken. We compare ourselves to the fact of a relationship existing, without seeing what is being held underneath it. The disconnection, the compromise, the ways women adapt to remain chosen rather than remain sovereign. And so there is a confusion that can arise, where being alone is seen as lack, when in truth it can be a refusal to participate in what does not meet the body, the heart, and the psyche fully. When a woman stops measuring herself against appearances and begins to feel into what is actually being lived, something becomes very clear — not all relationships are expressions of love, and not all partnership is safety, depth, or truth.

On a Jungian level, material like this points to something far deeper than the literal acts ; it reveals a disturbance in the collective unconscious around Eros, power, and the feminine and can be understood as a manifestation of the shadow. The shadow holds everything that has been repressed, denied, or disowned in the psyche. When desire, vulnerability, tenderness, and true relational intimacy are not integrated consciously, they don'tt disappear they distort. They move into the shadow and can re-emerge as control, domination, or the need to overpower rather than meet.

The imagery of sedating a woman is symbolically potent.It reflects a psyche that cannot tolerate the aliveness, autonomy, and unpredictability of the feminine. Instead of encountering a conscious, feeling, responsive other, there is an unconscious pull to neutralise her to remove her will, her voice, her subjectivity — so that she becomes safe to approach only when she is no longer fully present.

In Jungian terms, this speaks to a fractured anima. The anima is the inner feminine within the male psyche, and when she is undeveloped or distorted, the relationship to real women often mirrors that distortion. Rather than relating to a woman as an equal subject, she is experienced as something to possess, control, or act upon. The living feminine becomes threatening because it evokes feeling, vulnerability, and depth all of which the unconscious psyche may be defending against.

This also highlights the split between Eros and power. Eros, in its true form, is relational, connective, alive, and reciprocal. When Eros is not integrated, it can collapse into its shadow expression: sexuality stripped of connection, driven by impulse, domination, or dissociation. What should be an encounter becomes an act of control.

At a collective level, when you see this pattern appearing in numbers, it suggests that this is not just individual pathology, but a wider cultural shadow surfacing. Something that has been long buried in the psyche around sexuality, power, and the feminine is becoming more visible.

And in Jungian work, when the shadow becomes visible, it is not comfortable but it is also the moment where it can no longer remain unconscious. So symbolically, this is not only about the act itself.It is revealing a psyche that has not yet learned how to meet the feminine in her full aliveness — and instead attempts to reduce her in order to feel powerful or safe.

That is the deeper pattern being exposed and it is exactly why I am unwavering about women reclaiming their sacred sexuality. When a woman is not rooted in her body, her desire, and her instinct, she is more easily overridden, both by others and within herself. This work is a return to the body as authority, where a woman knows, without confusion, what is a yes and what is a no. From that place, her sexuality is no longer shaped by distortion or conditioning, but lived as truth — embodied, boundaried, and sovereign.

ITS TIME TO OWN IT LADIES AND DO THE WORK TO RECLAIM!

https://www.templedelarose.com/the-13-roses-feminine-sacred-sexuality

Collette

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