The Power of a Woman's Tongue
She can knit a community together—or tear it apart with a whisper.
A man can destroy someone's body.
A woman can destroy someone's reputation—which is to say, his or her relationships.
What exactly does that mean? What is a relationship and how can it be destroyed?
A relationship, at minimum, entails a mutual exchange of attention.
And not just any kind of attention, but qualitatively, an attention that carries with it the gaze of admiration, joy, peace, and so on.
If a woman damages someone's reputation—network of relationships—she is essentially making it so that her target receives less positive attention, or that her target is robbed of the goods of fraternal joy, the multicolored vibrancy of life.
When her sabotage is successful, the end result is that people want to spend less time around her target, and whenever they do cross paths with her target, they will only offer attention loaded with disgust, hate, dread, and the like.
Since humans are not merely individuals, but a sum of interpersonal relationships, there is a special kind of, uniquely human, damage that only a woman is capable of administering.
For while most animals are capable of violence, the reputational destruction of the uniquely human good of soul-to-soul relationships operates on a tier of its own.
On the flip-side, women have a unique power to infuse a family or community with the beautiful depths of relational riches, so it's all a matter of how she chooses to wield the sword of her tongue.
How AI would have Written this Instead
A man can kill the body.
A woman can kill the place you hold in the hearts of others.
A relationship is more than shared time — it is a sustained exchange of regard, a current of trust, esteem, and affection flowing between two souls. Its currency is the quality of attention: the gaze that carries admiration, joy, and peace.
To destroy a reputation is to poison that current. It is to seed suspicion where there was trust, to tint memory with contempt, to make the very thought of you taste bitter. In the mind of others, you are reframed until your presence draws fewer invitations, fewer smiles, fewer open doors. What attention remains comes loaded with disgust, dread, or pity.
Humans are not only bodies but networks of living bonds. Break enough of those bonds, and you do not merely wound a person — you socially starve them. They walk among the living, but the warm circulation of goodwill is gone.
Animals can maim and kill. But to dismantle the soul’s place in the human web — to turn friends into strangers and strangers into enemies — is a form of violence only humans can commit, and one in which a woman’s weapons have always been the sharpest.
Author’s Note:
In case it need to be said (it shouldn’t because you’re a smart reader), this post is about the comparative advantage of the feminine psyche.
Of course, men can—and some often do—engage in the subversive behavior described above as well, in the same way that women are also capable of physical violence.
But the point here is to note the following parallel:
Man’s capacity for physical violence is greater than that of a woman.
Woman’s capacity for relational violence is greater than that of a man.
And I’m talking about averages here (I’ve now given you two unnecessary clarifications, and for that, I hope you’ll forgive me 🙂).
The other purpose of this post is to keep you aware of the split-second capabilities of AI to upgrade—if not outright replace—both your output and mine, and to prompt you to prepare for the implications ahead. . .
—Drago