Riding in a car with a group of friends, two women and a man. We were in our early 20s, so really we were more like girls and boys. The boy was driving, and the three of us girls were crammed close in his small car. The radio was playing a new song, “Leaving Las Vegas” by Sheryl Crow. The girls already knew the chorus and were singing it loud loud loud. I pointed out that while Sheryl herself sings the chorus lyrics, there was a group of men in the background singing Oh oh oh. So if we wanted to be accurate, we needed the only boy in our group to back us up.

The boy waited a minute, gathering his thoughts. For context, this boy was kind, friendly, and chill, and mostly didn’t hit on us, which meant something. But what he said when I asked him to sing with us was so shocking that it’s still burned in my brain. With a snort of contempt he replied, I’d rather chop off my own dick than be a backup singer in a girl’s band!

We fell silent, and stayed that way. My stomach churned with revolting disgust at the boy’s words, as if I were suddenly sitting in a steaming pile of shit. The boy shuddered, as if to shake off the moment. His hands were on the steering wheel, controlling our safety, and I suddenly felt unsafe. I felt the dark and tangled roots of his sexism choking the life out of me, and I never hung out with him again.

The rise of women on the radio was wildly exciting, especially after years of atonal male Grunge singers who had dominated the industry for years. But it came with a price. As women’s voices rose and eclipsed those of all-male Grunge bands, a lot of men got cranky, and by that I mean contemptuous and disdainful, and also jealous and seething with envy. I was a young musician trying to start my career during the end of the Grunge era in Seattle, and experiencing that sexism firsthand was brutal. (I previously wrote about that in this essay for Oldster Magazine.)

I needed an antidote, and that same year I found it in a movie that you already know.

Jane Campion’s “The Piano” instantly struck me as a miracle, though I couldn’t quite understand exactly why that was so. In retrospect I think it was the first movie I’d ever seen that featured a distinctly female gaze. Its sensual beauty, its unique and inclusive casting, and its celebration of female desire as a force for good had a powerful effect on me. I think I watched it 5 or 6 times in the theater, finding new things to love with each viewing.

I found it particularly compelling that the adult lead, a Scottish woman played by Holly Hunter, was mute. No clear explanation is given for her muteness, but her daughter normalizes it for everyone around them as they travel through the rough but gorgeous wilds of their New Zealand island. You may recall that they land on that beach due to an arranged marriage with a local settler, played by Sam Neil, a gruff man who doesn’t see a need to rescue the woman’s piano from the boggy beach.

But the piano is vital to her self-expression. Playing music is her source of joy, her spirituality, her gift to the world, and she can’t be without it. She enlists a neighbor named George, played by Harvey Keitel, for help. They tromp back to the beach for a piano rescue, and as he watches her playing he is deeply enchanted by the transformation that comes over her. There begins the love triangle that forms the spine of the story.

She and George start a secret affair that is sexy and loving. He doesn’t try to get her to speak. He accepts her the way she is, and feels lucky for being with her. His support and acceptance of her has a powerful effect. She goes through an enormous transformation that eventually surfaces, literally and figuratively, surprising herself and everyone around her.

By the end of the story she has jettisoned the husband, and she and her daughter are now living with George. Secure and immersed in her new life she is finally, at her own pace, learning to speak.

This example of male support and encouragement kept me going through some hard shit. I was learning how to be a feminist who loved men and wanted to have them in my life. Collecting examples of good men, men who respected and encouraged women’s voices, was essential to the development of my Power Voice. Along the way I chose men wisely, and you know how I know? Most of them are still in my life. My voice feels relaxed and happy when I talk to them, just as it did all those years ago.

This week’s Power Voice journal prompt:

1. What are some examples of good men, men who supported women’s voices, in the movies and media that you loved when you were young? How exactly did they do it? (EX: “Nobody puts Baby in a corner!”)

2. List the men in your life who had “The Piano Effect” on you. Which ones actively encouraged your voice, and how did they do it?

3. If there are young men in your life, how can you encourage them to support women’s voices? What are some examples from your own experience that you can offer to them?

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Hello to our readers all around the world! I started this series last year, in the wake of so much global darkness and uncertainty. I need hope, inspiration and wonder to thrive, so I started hunting for amazing breakthroughs in medicine, longevity, tech, science, climate solutions and other areas to lift me up. Sharing them with the Womancake community has been my pleasure, and I’ll continue to do it every month so we can all stay as positive as possible.

Let’s start with some genuine PUSSY POWER (aka vaginal health news): A recent study concluded that women over 55 who are using vaginal estrogen enjoy a 51% reduction in sepsis, 22% lower hospitalization rates, and a whopping 73% reduction in mortality! Read that again!! These stats show that vaginal estro is highly effective in combating the effects of UTIs, which can be devastating as we age. Making vaginal estrogen part of our personal care routines is a wonderful and life-affirming action we can take to keep ourselves healthy and alive. Some more good news: many new studies also show that women with a history of breast cancer CAN use vaginal estrogen, as it’s applied locally and stays mostly local in your system. Anecdotally, I can share that two women in my life who are breast cancer survivors just got the green light from their docs to start on the estrogen creme. I also use it, and have found it to be excellent, and I actually wish I’d started on it a few years earlier, like in my mid-40s.

How about a blockbuster scientific discovery for mother Earth and all humankind: scientists have grown man-made cells that can feed, grow and reproduce. (Pictured above through a microscope). They’re alive but contained, and cannot survive outside the lab. What does this mean? Oh, nothing much… just that we can now use these amazing little guys to do things like create brand-new medicines, make sustainable fuels, or grab huge amounts of carbon from the air. I MEAN WOW!! This mind-blowing research was led by a female biologist at the University of Minnesota, and she and her colleagues have founded a non-profit that will fund more research so that everyone can benefit from their work. Take that, corporate science guys!

Let’s jump to some fantastic news about immunization against bad stuff: data now shows that, along with protection against you-know-what, the Covid vax also provides some protection against regular cardio-vascular issues, and the hospitalizations and deaths that go with them. If you follow this series, you know I’m a huge fan of vaccines. I’ll be first in line whenever the all-cancer vax is available, but until then, I’m keeping up with my seasonal vaxxing, including this one.

Let’s do a breakthrough in understanding about extremely sensitive people: a new study appears to show a strong association between ADHD and severe chronic pain. I don’t understand much of the scientific jargon here, but the study offers a helpful directive that people with chronic pain should be screened for ADHD (as well as anxiety and depression), and that managing those symptoms may be the key to lessening the severity of their pain. There might be a chicken-or-egg thing going on, as pain can make you feel depressed and anxious, but it’s worth looking into.

Lastly, let’s investigate a midlife fitness breakthrough: A new AI survey of 1,700 people in their 50s shows that those with strong chest and back muscles are less likely to have a heart attack. Whether this is some magic inherent in torso strength, or simply that these people are more fit in general, has not been determined, but this is compelling info. Look, I hate planking as much as the next person, but I do it three times a week during my workouts. I hold it for just over a minute, then collapse on my yoga mat, panting and groaning like I’ve just scaled Everest (I know, I know…!). It took half a year to work up to planking for just over a minute, but now I’m going to add another minute by the end of 2026, cause torso power is (apparently) protective.

BONUS BREAKTHROUGHS!

Here’s a personal beauty breakthrough: although I was raised by hippies who believed that goat’s milk bar soap could clean every part of you perfectly well, I always gravitated toward more refined products for my face. But I just discovered this clean, hippie-adjacent (it’s made with kale!) well-priced face cleanser that gives me a gorgeous glow I’ve never had before. A little goes a long way, and I’ve found the full-size pump version to be too much, so I buy the smaller size in bulk. Bonus: it comes in a glass bottle, reducing microplastic exposure.

Would you like a blockbuster cooking breakthrough? Hubs and I don’t eat red meat very often, but when we do, it’s gotta be good. How about this 3-ingredient roast beef recipe, which comes together in 5 minutes, cooks for a few hours, and always turns out perfectly. The last time I made it I grabbed a sprig of rosemary from a local garden and plopped it right on top of the meat, and it dripped down and flavored the whole dish perfectly. Next time I’m going to sneak some carrots and celery in there!

Speaking of food, SNAP benefits have been cut in half, and now there are more hungry families everywhere (yes, even in your city). Donate to your local food bank here.

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The razored edge of the grace of God is a place I know well. I can walk right up to it, lean over, and stare down at what could have happened if things in my life had been just slightly different.

When I say “God”, I’m referring to Spirit, or the Universe, or whatever higher power floats your boat. Or maybe it’s fate, luck, chance or karma that I’m talking about. The thing that seems to arrive from an external place, and stops you from making horrifying mistakes. The thing that produces the most gratitude.

Living near the edge soaks me in bracing clarity, like a spiritual ice bath. There are people in my past who went over the edge, and most of them never came back. They gained freedom but lost the beautiful world. Their sacrifice is unfathomable, yet also understandable, and this paradox sometimes fills me with interstitial melancholy.

But I also feel joy, I still have that capacity. Have you found that, in the wake of everything that’s going on in the larger world, joy kind of sneaks up on you? Recently I took a walk with a friend of 30 years. We exchanged updates and commiserated about our trials and laughed our asses off at some classic GenX shit going on with our friends, and at the end of it she hugged me the same way that she did when we were 22, and I felt like I got mugged by joy.

Joy always feels like a fire roaring up from inside, pushing on the edges of my hopes and fears and just like, clearing the way. Here is a joke that sparks joy: What did one strawberry say to the other? “If we hadn’t been in the same bed, we wouldn’t be in this jam!”

Sexual edging has returned to the dialogue. It’s that thing where you bring yourself to the edge of orgasm, and then pull back for a bit, then do it again a few more times. Try this! Your body will thank you once you finally cross over.

Across the street the neighbors are adding an edge to their hedge, and here is the part where I tell you that all my life I’ve wanted a hedge, because hedgehogs! But it turns out they don’t live in the Pacific Northwest, so I went to Instagram. I saw one wearing a weird hat and scuttling across the edge of a thick shag carpet. I wonder if it makes him think of home.

I don’t know what this essay is about. I’m going through a Big Life Event right now, and it’s all I can do to stay focused on what’s in front of me. But in the spirit of helping you strengthen your Power Voice, as I resolved to do at the beginning of this year, I will say this: in order for your Power Voice to grow stronger, you have to raise your volume and push it to the edge. I don’t mean that you should go over the edge into laryngitis! I’m saying that you have to push yourself to a place that feels emotionally uncomfortable. This is what we call a growth edge, and it’s where all the good shit happens.

Try it and let me know how it goes in the comments?

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Last week I wrote about the power of smallness to make big things possible. This week I’m gonna flip everything around.

Now I want to talk about BIG. The kind of BIG that makes you shaky with hope. The kind of BIG that appears in your life like a genuine miracle, and can feel unsafe, because others envy it so much. This is the kind of BIG that changes yo…

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Hubs was in a whimsical mood last weekend, so we diverted from our usual lakeside walking path. He’d heard that a beaver dammed a river nearby, and we strolled along its banks for a while, searching for whatever a dam looks like. We spotted a cluster of dense reeds, not unlike a thatched roof, but couldn’t get close enough to determine if anyone was hom…

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But OK, assuming that this won’t last, I’m thinking about leading a “Power Voice for Midlife Sex” workshop, just for the Womancake community. I’m gonna draw on my background as a Planned Parenthood volunteer, my career as …

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Hello to our readers around the world! I started this series last year, in the wake of so much global darkness and uncertainty. I need hope, inspiration and wonder to thrive, so I started hunting for amazing breakthroughs in medicine, longevity, tech, science, cl…

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Hello to our readers all around the world! It’s me, Alicia Dara, Editor-In-Chief of Womancake Magazine, a source and platform for women over age 40. This year I’m focused on helping you find your Power Voice, the one you’ve been waiting for your whole life.

Paid readers get access to items like these:

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The ferocious pressure and exuberant burst of Spring has always felt feminine. Every year I feel its quickening in my blood, in my womanhood, yet I still don’t know how to define these things. What the hell is femininity? What is womanhood, and, for that matter, who decides?

Even as a teen girl in the 80s, when rigid gender codes ruled everything, I had …

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Hello to our readers around the world! I started this series last year in the wake of so much global darkness and uncertainty, because I need hope, inspiration and wonder to thrive. So I started hunting for amazing breakthroughs in medicine, tech, science, climate solutions and other areas to lift me up. Sharing them with the Womancake community has bee…

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Hi! So many of you DM’ed me last week regarding my piece about Sinead having an early impact on my Power Voice that I’ve decided to devote all of May to female singers. For many of us, women in music are often the first examples of genuine female power that we encounter in the culture. Yet male musicians are often lionized for de…

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Good lord, this is hard. I’ve tried a hundred times to move forward in our Power Voice training without talking about Sinead, but I can’t.

Every woman has a figure in her childhood whose Power Voice showed her what true freedom could look like. Sinead appeared in front of me like a fucking god, radiant and menacing and hypnotic. I felt her in my 15-year …

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Hello to our new readers around the world! I started this Five Amazing Breakthroughs series last year, in the wake of so much global darkness and uncertainty. I need hope, inspiration and wonder to thrive, so I started hunting for amazing breakthroughs in medicine, tech, science, climate solutions and other areas to lif…

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I’m guessing that if you didn’t know the answer before the Pande…

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Yet there are times when I feel this phrase bubbling up from deep inside, always in respons…

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Hi. Wow. Hoo boy. But OK, let’s do our monthly Five Amazing Breakthroughs report and see if we can’t lift ourselves up a bit. I started this series last year, in the wake of so much global darkness and uncertainty. I need hope, inspiration and wonder to thrive, so I started…

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We are not inside this particular storm. We are on the outside, along the skittering edge of its chaos. You can see it geographically, the theater of war is way over there across the map. Yet we feel it.

We feel it. How are you coping? This morning I woke up with a feral desire to hear a particular song, “Everything In Its Right Place” by Radiohead. (Tak…

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Yes, well. It’s here again: International Women’s Month. If you’re like most women I know you’re probably not feeling, shall we say, all that good about it. Fuck. It would be great to live in a place where women’s rights are consistently protected, strength…

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Would it shock you to learn that your Power Voice is a finite resource?

I would LOVE to tell you that it’s a wild, abundant force of Nature, and that once you find its source inside yourself it will flow forth forever.

Nope! Like everything else in…

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