Content Warning: This post contains direct discussions of sexual and domestic violence, institutional betrayal, and graphic descriptions of state executions.
Can we actually talk about what is happening with this Venus retrograde in Scorpio right now? Because the real-time fallout of this transit is kind of terrifying but also liberating at the same time. Running from October 3rd to November 13, 2026—with a messy little detour back into Libra on October 25th just to make sure we really feel the contrast of our fractured dynamics—this isn't your cute, aesthetic little astro phase. It’s a psychological demolition derby.
Venus handles love, our self-worth, and the archetypal feminine, but when you drop her into the unyielding, radioactive waters of Scorpio? The party is officially over. Scorpio doesn't do superficiality or polite dinner-table small talk. It acts like an absolute detective, digging up every single hidden resentment, toxic power struggle, and ancient relational trauma we tried to bury.
What’s even crazier is that this specific cycle features a monumental Scorpio Venus Cazimi (when the planet meets the clarity of the Sun), which is officially wrapping up the final Scorpio retrograde of a century-long cycle. Let that sink in... we are actively closing out a massive, multi-generational chapter on how humanity handles intimacy, sex, and emotional sovereignty.
This transit is demanding a brutal, non-negotiable excavation of feminine energy—that yin, receptive, intuitive, feeling side of life—within every single one of us, no matter how you identify. It is literally screaming at us to stop over-analyzing everything from a distance, drop our survival armor, and actually feel. But because the collective shadow is terrified of losing control and we live in a patriarchal society, the scales are tipping... and we are watching the world react with this visceral, public violence.
The Headlines Are Bleeding (And So Are Our Wounds)
Right now, my soul is compelled to expose the absolute drama happening behind closed doors… We can’t talk about Venus in Scorpio without looking at the taboos breaking across our screens this week. The headlines are literally bleeding Scorpio themes: sexual and domestic violence, institutional decay, trials of power, and death.
Take the Cornell 7 situation that’s all over the news right now. Jane Doe filed a civil lawsuit against the school, the Chi Phi fraternity, and seven specific men who gang-raped her for SEVEN grueling hours back in 2024. And what did Cornell do? They protected the institution and the boys, basically giving them a slap on the wrist and telling them to write an essay. An essay. As someone who has survived my own share of abuse, that level of disrespect makes my blood boil. It’s an insult to anyone who has ever had to carry the weight of being violated.
This has prompted me to look at my own ghosts—the things I subconsciously locked away because I knew the world wouldn’t protect me either. I only publicly talked about my two assaults after creating my own safe space through this blog. One was my very first experience with sex, completely stolen from me by someone I genuinely considered a friend. And the other happened inside a literal hospital—a place where I was supposed to be safe and cared for as a vulnerable mental health patient. But I didn’t tell anyone at the time, including my parents. By the time I was 18, I already believed that my voice held no weight and no power.
I didn’t eventually announce these things because I was expecting back pay of justice. I just wanted to stop carrying the pain deep down inside, alone. With a Scorpio 3rd house and Chiron sitting right in it, my voice carries a deep wound around speaking my truth. I stay quiet because it hurts too much to speak; I used to often regret expressing myself. But this retrograde won’t let us stay quiet anymore.
It’s everywhere you look. I recently saw that Rick Ross just got booked and released on bond for domestic violence battery and strangulation charges. Then you look at the absolute mess surrounding the Lindsay Clancy trial; from the very beginning, my personal perception of that case was that the trial was so completely botched and mishandled by a system that rushed to judge her based solely off her ex-husband’s account, rather than understanding the terrifying depths of postpartum mental health or even, I don’t know… actually verifying the things he claimed. Now they’re having to scramble and basically redo the entire trial because the foundation was totally warped and misconstrued.
Even the prison systems are failing under this energy. On September 30th, the state of Tennessee completely botched the execution of death row inmate Krista Pike. They spent over an hour stabbing her arms, missing her veins, and pumping lethal drugs directly into her tissue—causing severe swelling and blistering before rushing her unconscious body to a ventilator in critical condition. It was such a gruesome disaster that TDOC Commissioner Frank Strada resigned, and Governor Bill Lee had to halt all upcoming executions—including Tony Caruthers, whose execution was already postponed earlier this year for the exact same vein-access struggles.
Scorpio rules the ultimate transition of death, and right now, the universe is pulling back the curtain on the state’s dysfunctional underbelly.
The Blueprint of the Reclaiming
All of these messy public exposures are happening for a reason. The universe is essentially staging a coup against our collective emotional numbness, forcing everyone to look at the exact parts of ourselves we were taught would make us weak.
For women, this retrograde is a visceral ultimatum to reclaim internal sovereignty. For centuries, we’ve been conditioned to perform our softness for validation or to fit neatly into societal structures and expectations that don’t actually care about or respect our safety. So now? We’re being pushed to release codependency, set unshakeable Scorpio boundaries, and honor our raw intuition over the expectations of a polite society.
But for men, this transit is a terrifying invitation to drop the rigid, hyper-masculine armor and actually look at their internal landscape—their grief, their tenderness, and their capacity for emotional honesty. True strength under Scorpio requires the vulnerability to face your own inner shadows rather than reacting with a defensive shutdown.
And this is where the collective wires are getting crossed. As feminine energy rises and demands respect, it also brings to light the subconscious patterns we may be unknowingly perpetuating—patterns that allow these harmful dynamics and systems to continue. This is directly tied to the patriarchal system we live within, and it’s difficult because both men and women often struggle to acknowledge the ways we each help sustain it.
I came across a TikTok clip from the Tonight’s Conversation podcast tour that perfectly highlighted this exact structural double standard. A woman asked the panel why society labels women as “emotional” while men are constantly praised as being more “logical,” even when both act entirely out of their feelings. The men on that panel THANKFULLY hit the nail on the head: Men are not more logical than women; they’re just better at hiding their internal landscape rather than expressing it. And we all mistake that suppression for logic.
The narrative that men are the rational gender is a complete joke. The single emotion that the patriarchy explicitly permits men to express is anger, rage, or aggression. But let’s be real... anger is a massive, volatile emotion. Rage is an emotion. There are thousands of men sitting in jail cells right now, and thousands more entangled in domestic violence situations, not because they are logical, but because they could not control their emotions.
We are both deeply emotional beings; we’ve just been conditioned to exhibit them differently. Women express it outwardly through tears or communication, which gets hyper-analyzed and dismissed as “hysteria.” Men shut down, internalize it, or channel it into aggression. In fact, a lot of men completely struggle to just listen to a woman express her feelings without trying to turn it into a problem that needs fixing. That isn’t logic; it’s an exit strategy. It’s an avoidance tactic because sitting with someone else's heavy emotions forces you to face the discomfort of your own.
It’s incredibly sad that so many men have been so severed from their own femininity and vulnerability that they have no language for grief, lack of trust, or tenderness except anger and violence. And when you take this exact emotional disconnect and layer it over generational trauma, you get the specific, painful cycle playing out inside my own community...
Black Women and the Trap of the "Cool Pose"
I saw another TikTok the other day of a Black man just living in his absolute, uncurated bliss—the definition of #BlackBoyJoy—doing a popular dance to a rap song. And yes, in public. He didn’t care who was watching; he was just being free with his body. And while it definitely pulled a laugh out of me, I knew what kind of comments would be waiting for him. It was a war zone of Black women, sadly, completely tearing him apart:
“Accurate representation of men in 2026”
“I’d be so mad if this was my man/my dad”
“...he got to be gay cause ain’t no way”
And while I’m sure some of these things were said as casual jokes to laugh off, I don’t see how it’s funny. A lot of men are genuinely hurting under this wave of hate pointed at “sassy” men—men who are really just tapping into their feminine energy and trying to enjoy themselves and their lives. It honestly broke my heart a bit to see, because I rarely see this kind of policing of men’s joy or fluidity with this level of aggressive social enforcement from any other culture. I’m not saying that we’re the only ones who repeat these things, but we do need an honest look under the hood of what’s actually being expressed through these truths hidden inside of “jokes.”
Within the Black community, it feels like men and women are constantly at war, even while we are simultaneously begging to come together. This is exactly how systemic racism and patriarchy function from the inside out: keeping us hyper-focused on who is the most hurt or who is the most right as a distraction from what is actually keeping us apart. Because Black women have historically been left entirely unprotected by society, I believe we’ve subconsciously internalized the most rigid, toxic scripts of the patriarchy. And I say this with deep empathy and understanding, because when you are forced to be your own shield, you naturally adopt these kinds of survival tactics just to feel safe. And we expect our men to do the same.
We demand that Black men stay locked inside what sociologists call the “cool pose.” Back in the 90s, researchers coined this term to describe the specific defense mechanism Black men had to build just to stay alive in a world controlled by white supremacy. It’s an absolute mask of hyper-toughness, emotional detachment, and total stoicism. When the world outside is constantly targeting you, any sign of softness, vulnerability, or emotional fluidity could literally cost you your life. Survival required you to look unshakeable, hard, and entirely unbothered. It was a coping strategy built to handle extreme systemic trauma that would only continue.
For more on the cool pose, I highly recommend reading Mark Anthony Neal’s post on Nat King Cole and the Cost of the “Cool Pose”. I really enjoyed reading his application of the term in the world of media and music: “… Cole was rivaled only by his label-mate, Frank Sinatra (the two shared an arranger in Nelson Riddle). Whereas Sinatra looked forward to a career that was limitless — film, the biggest and most lucrative venues, close friendships with sitting Presidents, headlining in Las Vegas, and eventually his own record label — Cole was always challenged by the limits of his dark skin.”
“Cole strategically understood what could be lost personally, professionally and politically, if White America’s favorite Black entertainer “flipped the fuck out.”
We built this survival box to inherently keep our community safe, but now we’re also policing the exit. This is exactly why the phrase #BlackBoyJoy had to be created in the first place. It didn’t start as just a cute internet hashtag; it was birthed as a direct counter-movement to the “cool pose.” It exists because a Black man experiencing uncurated, soft, expressive joy is a radical political act. It’s a deliberate refusal to wear that heavy survival mask anymore.
But look at what happens when they actually try to take it off themselves. When a man steps out of his usual masculine character to exhibit softness, joy, or vulnerability, we penalize him. We tell him he isn’t “man enough” and possibly even gay… does no one see the issue in that??? We spend so much time demanding that men connect with their femininity so that they can respect and understand our own, but the second it actually manifests, we shut it all down. We rightfully demand protection and respect, but sometimes we refuse to give it in return, using the very tools of the patriarchy that broke us, to break them.
I know exactly where that defensive and critical wall comes from. Women in general are completely exhausted from being disrespected, neglected, abused, and even watching our basic rights get stripped away. Many are swearing off men altogether and looking hopefully, and desperately, toward a future matriarchy—but stepping into that reality requires us to drop the very walls that keep men locked out.
The patriarchy doesn’t just harm women; it harms men as well. It leaves them deeply confused. As the writer bell hooks always pointed out, boys are trained from infancy to cut off their capacity for feelings just to maintain dominance. They know the system that upholds them also causes a massive amount of internal, psychological damage, but historically, they’ve been conditioned to ignore that harm and put themselves first anyway.
Knowing this, we have to recognize that any real transition out of this broken system will most likely have to be led by women. But we cannot lead it by treating men the way we were treated, operating purely out of the resentment and bitterness that dominates so many of these internet conversations today. We’ve stopped discussing things to actually hear and understand each other. We just assume we always need to stay on the attack, because we’re terrified that the moment we drop our guard, we’ll be the ones getting attacked again.
So as we sit in the thick of this Scorpio underworld for the next few weeks, I have to ask you to look at how you are policing yourself. Where are you still choosing a comfortable cage over an uncomfortable freedom? What parts of your own raw intuition or emotional fluidity have you been locking away because you’re terrified the world won’t protect you if you let them out?
It is so easy to stay on the attack, to police each other, and to keep throwing rocks from behind our walls. But the demolition is already here, and the old masks aren’t going to save us anymore. We can either keep fighting to maintain the structures that broke us, or we can finally have the courage to drop the armor, look each other in the eye, and figure out what it actually means to heal, connect, and love on a deeper level.
A lot to think about, straight up this was very difficult for me to read for a variety of reasons. I do not align with all of it, however it does leave room for conversation.