The Basement Is Open

The world your daughters are living in. And your sons.

There is something I need to tell you about the world your daughters are living in. And your sons.

In March of 2026, CNN published the results of a months-long investigation into what one survivor — a French lawmaker who had herself been drugged and assaulted by a sitting senator — named publicly as an online rape academy. A single website with sixty-two million visitors in one month. Over twenty thousand videos of women filmed while unconscious, organised under their own taxonomy: #passedout. #eyecheck — that last one referring to men lifting the closed eyelids of sedated women to camera, to verify for viewers that they were fully unconscious before the assault began.

Linked private Telegram groups. Nearly a thousand members. Men from every continent sharing dosing advice, sourcing “sleeping liquids” for global delivery, livestreaming assaults at twenty dollars a viewer, paid in cryptocurrency. Using the language of brotherhood. Of mentorship. Of craft.

Six weeks later, a study published in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence offered the wider portrait. Researchers surveyed 2,689 young men in the United States and Canada — anonymously, because identified men underreport — and asked whether they had ever used any of thirty-six documented strategies to have sex with a woman they knew had not consented. Ninety-five percent said yes. Nearly nine strategies on average. Sixty-five percent succeeded. Seventy percent experienced no negative consequences.

Here is what I want you to understand about the timing of all of this.

In Australia, marital rape was not a crime until 1976 in South Australia — the first common-law jurisdiction in the world to criminalise it — and not until the mid-1990s across the remaining states and territories. Not ancient history. Not a different civilisation. The mothers of people reading this sentence were alive when it was legal for a husband to rape his wife in most of this country.

We have had, at most, one generation of legal protection. One generation of a culture formally acknowledging that a woman’s body belongs to herself and not to her husband. And the data tells us, what one generation of law has and has not been able to reach.

Law changes behaviour at the surface. It does not reach the root.

I have been writing two books for the last year. They will both be released next month.

I began it in May 2025, during a panchakarma retreat in India, when something cracked open in me that I had been holding at a distance for a long time — the years I spent working as a Dakini in Melbourne, in spaces that were dark and secret and underground, with men who arrived immaculate and hollowed out and wept before they knew they were weeping.

What I witnessed in those rooms was not aberration. It was pattern. The same pattern, wearing different faces, different suits, different degrees of wealth and power. Men who had succeeded completely at what the culture asked of them — and in that success, had lost access to everything that would have made them human.

The first book I have written is called When Eros Overthrows an Empire: A reckoning with desire, shadow, and the collapse of false power. It is about what happens when a society severs desire from the sacred and calls the severing civilisation.

To be civil = to be courteous, formal, polite, respectful, mannerly, cordial.

And civil, is how they keep us controlled, locked off from our primal instinctual nature — which is key to our aliveness, our power and our capacity to maintain sovereignty.

Understood?

About the two-thousand-year mechanism by which erotic energy — driven underground, stripped of its cosmological meaning, denied every container that might have given it direction — erupts as the thing we are now measuring in studies and exposure investigations and the statistics of assault that rise, decade by decade.

It is also — and this is the part that matters most to me — about what was taken, and what is returning, and what becomes possible when desire is met with something other than shame.

The Dakini has always known this. Every tradition that held Eros as sacred has always known this. And the deliberate dismantling of those traditions — the burning of the temples, the criminalisation of the devadasis, the conversion of sacred sexuality into sin, into pathology, into commodity — is not background context for the crisis we are living through.

It is its direct cause.

This book is medicine for men. It is medicine in the oldest sense — something that works at the root, that asks not only what happened but what was missing that made it possible.

Because what was missing was Eros in it’s purest nature, which is erotic intelligence: the understanding that desire is sacred, that it moves toward genuine meeting or it distorts, that it requires a container or it erupts, that it was always trying to reach something more than hedonism and temporary satiation.

The book will be released to the public next month. I am opening a waitlist now for those who want to be among the first to receive it.

If this landed somewhere in your body — if something in you recognised what I am pointing at — then this book is for you, or for the men in your life, or for both.

The pavement is cracking. What is rising is older than the suppression.

Join the waitlist for When Eros Overthrows an Empire below.