From the “You Can’t Make This Shit Up” Department comes an article in The Gray Lady exposing a cult based in Albany that promoted the branding of women. Please click on the link for the full NYTimes piece.

The group, known as Nxivm, has been searing women’s skin below the hip with a symbol containing the initials of its leader, Keith Raniere, 57, who made a lateral career move into cults after a company he helped run was shut down following its investigation as a pyramid scheme by several state attorneys general.

Common to many cults is iron control of followers, and especially women. As Nxivm’s head honcho, Raniere had sex with his many of his female disciples, punished them for infractions, and insisted that they fit the slim profile of his preferred female physique. “To become effective, members had to overcome weaknesses that Mr. Raniere taught were common to women – an overemotional nature, a failure to keep promises and an embrace of the role of victim,” according to the Times article.

Of course, Mr. Raniere must have had a profound understanding of his own emotions (sarcasm off) plus lots of empathy for his fellow man and woman (okay, sarcasm really off) – that must be why he felt empowered to establish himself as Controller-in-Chief, giving him the right to enforce strict codes of behavior, including talking the women into providing written “confessions” of past indiscretions to be used as guarantees of the women’s silence. If it looks like blackmail, quacks like blackmail, swims like blackmail ….

Such abominations have come to be expected in places like Texas (Branch Davidian leader David Koresh) or Utah (child bride rapist Warren Jeffs of the FLDS). But Nxivm, pronounced Nex-e-um, is headquartered in the northern end of the scenic Hudson Valley, in the supposedly enlightened and progressive Great State of New York.

If this sort of misogynistic venom can fly under the radar for two decades in a so-called liberal state, is it any surprise that the general population has been poisoned in sub-clinical doses? And which came first, the chicken or the egg? Is this abhorrence birthed because the ethos-at-large tolerates the American rape culture, albeit in smaller amounts? Or does rape culture leak out from these extreme examples to create the zeitgeist?

Perhaps this insanity is a side effect of the lack of emotional connection in our Anglo-Saxon culture. Just wait and see: in a few years it will come out that like fellow scumbags Koresh and Jeffs, Raniere probably was raised in a dysfunctional family. When will society wake up to the damage caused by the not-so-benign neglect of children’s emotional environment?

And speaking of dysfunctional families, here is a Times Union exposé from 2012 featuring an audio interview with Nxivm board member and fleecing victim Clare Bronfman engaged in spectacular doublespeak, which she apparently believes. She should have drunk her daddy’s whisky rather than Raniere’s Kool-Aid.

Lastly, The New York Times characterized Nxivm as a self-help organization. I object. I belong to a 12-step self-help group for the adult children of addicts, alcoholics or otherwise dysfunctional parents. No burning and searing in those meetings, other than some old childhood memories.