![]() ![]() Of course, when they founded the school in 2013, Flores and Urbaniak had no idea the issues they’d been exploring would become the stuff of morning TV segments. Urbaniak teaches what she calls “verbal martial arts,” practical techniques designed to interrupt that telltale moment of frozenness described with bafflement and shame by nearly everyone who experiences sexual assault, including the president’s alleged victims. Donald Trump had just been elected and the timing seemed right. But when I first got in touch with Urbaniak more than a year ago, she was beginning to consider seeking a wider audience. (Flores and Urbaniak were together when they founded the Academy after ending their romantic relationship in 2015, they’ve remained business and creative partners.) In five years, they’ve taught about 500 students. The Academy, as Urbaniak and her co-founder and partner Ruben Flores have named it, has so far not been open to the public. All were here to attend a workshop conducted by Urbaniak, who has for almost five years been running a secret female empowerment school mostly out of her apartment. Some had come straight from the office others had come from Utah, Texas, California, or Florida. In early December of last year, on one of the first formidably cold evenings this winter, a group of 130 women of varied ages and demographics gathered in the lobby of the WeWork space near Bryant Park to seek an answer. Or somebody goes, ‘Nice tits, can I come upstairs?’ And it’s just … nothing. “Like, what is it that stops you? Because there’s this moment - someone is touching you in a way you don’t like and they even ask you, Do you like that? and you want to say ‘no,’ and yet the word ‘yes’ comes out of your mouth. “You’re powerful 95 percent of the time but that conversation about your raise is the one that suddenly triggers default behavior - what is that default behavior?” she muses. “The problem of female speechlessness - my own, my friends’, my mother’s,” she tells me. What exactly is that moment? This is the question Kasia Urbaniak, a dominatrix and Taoist nun turned empowerment coach, has been trying to answer for her entire life. In subtler ways, the moment can also happen in women’s quotidian encounters with men like bosses, boyfriends, and husbands. invited them back to his room for a drink, then proceeded to ask if he could take out his penis in front of them before removing all his clothes and masturbating.īut it’s not just brazen or potentially criminal behavior that results in this moment of frozenness. But I didn’t.” Dana Min Goodman and Julia Wolov, who used to perform as a comedy duo, have described a similar sense of feeling “paralyzed” when alleging that at a 2002 comedy festival, Louis C.K. The incident prompted years of guilt, she told The New Yorker last year, “because, if I were a strong woman, I would have kicked him in the balls and run away. For Argento, that maddening moment came when Harvey Weinstein allegedly lured her into his hotel room at Cannes back in 1997 and insisted on performing oral sex on her Argento emphatically said no, but then didn’t fight him off. Asia Argento knows about the frozen moment - the one where you shut down and get “tensed up,” to borrow the words of Megan Creydt, one of women who recently accused Charlie Rose of sexual harassment. ![]()
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