Women: Ragged and Torn, Again, Thanks to Texas

I can become easily pissed sometimes, but today I’m juggling just feeling pissed with wanting to slam every man I see into a frigging wall, smashing his head. If only I had the strength. But I don’t. I’m a fragile little woman, you know—that weaker sex, not strong enough. Of course, that would not be true of Serena and other spectacular female athletes like her. But then, that’s yet another woman’s issue that this screed won’t address today.

Some women have had the good fortune of growing up in loving families and have led unexceptional lives. We went to school, later to work. We did girly things like learning to dance and how to cook a turkey, and then some of us married men and had babies. If we were lucky, we made it through these passages unscathed—at least physically. Sadly, though, many women did not—like the woman who had an ectopic pregnancy, or the one whose body just couldn’t carry a fetus or that woman at the wrong place at the wrong time who got herself raped! Translation—HE fucked her! A short six weeks later, she missed her period and bam! She got herself pregnant. With the rapist’s seed.

Dear God. . .

I came of age in the sixties, often touted as a “decade of change for women.” It seemed that women’s voices were beginning to be heard. There was Gloria. And Betty Friedan. And more recently we have been lifted up by other feminists like Margaret Atwood, Alice Walker, Hillary Clinton, to name only a few. To all of them, I give thanks. They were the ones who laid the groundwork brick by brick, year after year, so other women, now in the 21st C., would not have to carry a baby to term that she didn’t want or couldn’t care for or worse yet, the baby of a rapist.

Yet here we are. Thank you, Greg Abbott, and your worthless ilk.

Decades have passed since the 1960s—years of misogyny and fear and paychecks lesser than for the same day’s work—and too many women still find themselves metaphorically in shackles. Though I was among the fortunate who never experienced physical abuse, I nevertheless have felt emotionally abused all my life, living in fear of men in general. It began with my brother, a mean bully, five years older than I, who was never held accountable. There were men who lurked in dark alleys at night, so I carried my car key like a tiny weapon, all the better to rip into any man twice my size who might attack me. Or at least that was what I needed to believe. They leered at me when I sat at a bar and the man at the stoplight in the next lane over who stared and licked his lips. And there were men I knew—I called them friends—telling me jokes about menstrual periods and breasts that aren’t big enough and hips that don’t shake enough to their liking. All my women friends share similar experiences and more. It’s the thing nightmares are made of.

But we carry on. We walk tall. We find strength with each other and with some men who are our angels.
I am not the one who can find the words strong enough, painful enough, shocking enough to reach the depths of the feelings so many women are having now about the TX law that recently went into effect. And don’t even get me started on the repugnant Supreme Court that has “remained silent.”

Nevertheless, I have no doubt that women younger than I will take up the mantle, yet again. They will speak out. They will write. They will march. They will vote. They will scream. They will cry and claw their way out of this setback—yet again. And they will know that generations of women before them are lifting them up once more.
And to the men who still see themselves as superior, who get some kind of perverted thrill out of keeping the little woman down, I say—you are but a gnat on the arm of every woman who has ever walked in your shadow. You can be—you will be—swatted away. Soon the sun will set on these latest egregious laws meant to crush us all. My sisters and I are fierce and angry and determined, and we will fight you with vengeance, watch you bleed without pity.

Photo by Scott Snyder from FreeImages