Motherless

Part 1: Where do we begin

I wasn’t going to write about this yet because the shock isn’t done percolating in me into a cohesive topic. The story that CNN exposed of the corner of the website, Motherless.com, where men come to share videos, and DIY tips, from their forays into drugging and raping their wives. A Rape Academy, so to speak. Many millions came to looky-loo or whatever they were doing here. I won’t put a link for you to click to see for yourself (not that you should) since it’s finally offline while being investigated by Dutch authorities. Still, I am still speechless.

We women aren’t doing well these days, if you can imagine and want to bother asking. Wait—brief clickbait bombardment interlude while we pause from the earth-burning to witness the plastic bodies stuffed into these absurd dresses for the Met Gala at $100K a pop for the sake of the Bezos—yay!

But then today I got a voicemail from my mom wishing me a happy Mother’s Day forthcoming (instead of the other way around as I should be calling her), and I’m planning on vending some homemade things during an outdoor holiday market with only one willing daughter, and the Town Hall custodian wished me a fine you-know-whatsit, and then I couldn’t avoid this anymore. I like to try to be timely here after all.

How do we pretend to celebrate this Mother’s Day when we all feel so tragically Motherless? So very lost, rudderless. Angry, betrayed, disappointed, and confused. Why would they call that website “Motherless?” How in the upside-down world—where an Epstein-filed disgrace like Trump is still our President—does any of this lunacy make sense?

I came upon this essay on Substack, What Happens When the World Is Motherless, that moved me enough to share with my forever friend Dana, who responded, “The fact that a pornographic website is called motherless is deeply fucked,” and “the world feels very fraught.” Indeed on both counts. Of course I’m preaching to the choir with Dana of the fem-lit, so I also shared with my (new!) boyfriend, whom I very much appreciate for appreciating the magnitude of the missive.

Elayne Kalila renders this fucked fraught world with staggering line breaks that rocked me (and offered some room to breathe in between her ripping prose):

I am sitting at my kitchen table reading the CNN article.

I have my tea next to me. The morning is ordinary. The light is coming in the way it always comes in. And I am reading a sentence about men lifting the eyelids of their drugged wives on camera to prove they are fully unconscious before they rape them.

I read it once and my brain stops and refuses to let it in.

I read it again.

Then I hear myself say it out loud, because that is the only way the words are going to land in my body.

“The website is called Motherless.”

And when I hear my own voice say it, something tears open. The horror moves through me in a wave that starts in my chest and keeps going. I am shaking. My hand is over my mouth. I hear myself say, out loud, to an empty kitchen.

What the fuck.

What the actual fuck.

What can possibly be next.

The f word is more frequent these days, you may have noticed. The word of our age. Our state of mind and body and dis-united states. The word you might use to describe drugging and raping your partner. As the author notes, this comes on top of The Files, the SAVE Act, the death of Roe vs. Wade. I’d swear to God if I thought there was one.

All other atrocities aside in this story, why in the whack world re: the Motherless part specifically? Why would a website showing videos of men doing this to the women they supposedly love, the mother of their children, be called that?

“Motherless” painting by Walter Langley, 1895

Kalila continues, unable to begin answering the question without setting the scene first on the site:

Motherless.com. Sixty-two million visits in February alone. Twenty thousand videos of what the men on the site call “sleep content.” Tags like #passedout and #eyecheck. In those videos a man lifts the closed eyelid of his drugged wife on camera, to prove she is fully under, before he films what he does to her.

A Telegram group linked straight off the site. About a thousand men strong. They trade dosages the way other men trade fantasy football tips.

Bottles of tasteless liquid for a hundred and seventy-five dollars a pop, shipped anywhere in the world.

Livestreams of assault at twenty dollars a viewer. Crypto preferred.

This is not the dark web. This is the indexed, legal, ad-supported internet. This site had more monthly traffic than most newspapers. And the name at the top of the masthead is Motherless.

She expands the site name to define how we all feel now in our age of fierce, if often somewhat forced, independence:

You have never once in your adult life laid your head in someone’s lap and been stroked until you fell asleep.

When you are sick you manage it. You order the soup. You cancel the meetings. You text your mother an update if you have one. Nobody comes.

When you cry you cry alone, usually in the bath, usually at night, and you clean yourself up before you come out.

Your body has been braced since you were a small girl and you do not remember what unbraced feels like. Your shoulders are up near your ears right now. Drop them. Feel how fast they come back up.

You learned to mother yourself before you were out of primary school because there was not enough to go around, and you have been doing it ever since, and you are tired in a way that sleep does not touch.

Widen the scope more, and we take this subject to a social framework. Our isolation, in this era of epidemic loneliness filled only with dopamine hits from our phone pings. “Motherless” means we lack more than transactional encounters. Take this further to the cultural, policy, political level and:

Birth is a medical emergency managed by strangers in a room with fluorescent lighting.

Death is a medical failure managed by strangers in a room with fluorescent lighting.

Menopause is a deficiency to be corrected.

Menstruation is a hygiene problem.

Aging is a cosmetic crisis.

The wisdom of a woman at seventy is worth less, socially and economically, than the smoothness of a woman at twenty five.

There is no cultural container for grief that lasts longer than a funeral.

We call a woman hysterical when she is telling the truth and composed when she has learned to swallow it.

The word crone, which once meant keeper of the deepest wisdom, is now used as an insult.

Your local high street has three nail bars and zero elders.

Dana’s Substack, by the way is called Future Crone, which she means in the best way. On the Archetypal level, the essay continues, we’ve lost the goddess mother, “who for tens of thousands of years was the central image of the sacred.” Now we have only this very male “God” and his God-made-fleshy son. What have we lost? Or hidden? Or killed?

Spiritually, where we used to be very populated, we now too stand alone, as Kalila writes,

We have built an entire civilization on top of a wound, and called the wound normal, and called the civilization progress.

That is motherless. That is the air we are all breathing. Motherless.com did not invent this. It is just the loudest part of a song we have been humming for a very, very long time.

I am grateful for this Kalila, able to articulate what I couldn’t find the words for right now. So I’m heavy this week on the quotes but sometimes it’s nice to just steep in this mother-wisdom, let it sink in, and share.

I am writing this list long on purpose, my love. I want you to feel the length of the severing. Ten thousand years of pulling the Mother out of everything. Two thousand years of putting her to death every time she tried to return. And here we are, arriving at the inevitable end of that arithmetic, and we are shocked that men built a website called Motherless and sixty two million people visited it in a month.

Motherless.com is the logical outcome. It is what you arrive at when you remove the Mother from the cosmos long enough. The men there were not imported from some other world. They are our world. They are our sons and our husbands and our fathers and the man who delivered your package yesterday. Some of them are us on a different timeline.

Of course this is where it ends. Where else could it end?

For me, it won’t end here but become, of course, my favorite thing, perhaps a three-part series. I am pending the arrival of Motherless Brooklyn to read from the library (a book about hoodlums who are fatherless too), and will explore my own feelings of disconnect with my own origins more personally after this awkward “holiday.” Until then, let’s try to re-mother each other.

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