Is It Better to Have Loved and Lost or to Never Have Loved at All?

“‘Tis better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all” ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson.

When love, like anything, reaches its inevitable end, the loss can and does cut so deeply that it not only feels as if something inside of you has died, but as if someone has died. Like mourning the physical death of a loved one, mourning the end of love goes through similar stages of grief: denial that it has ended; anger at both your lover and/or yourself; bargaining with the universe or god to bring back what has been lost; depression, which usually manifests itself in a loss of appetite, listlessness, exhaustion, and/or an overall disinterest in life; and finally acceptance. The agony one feels during this process often leaves one feeling as though it would have been better to have never loved at all; but would that truly be better or is Tennyson correct? I suppose it depends on who you loved, how deeply, and how/why the relationship ended; however, if you see love as part of the process of becoming, then perhaps in its loss there is something to be gained?

You see, the beautiful thing about love is that it never truly dies because you are tied forever by shared memories and experiences, which alter your very being, helping to mold you into who you will become. Every person you have ever loved, in any form of love, becomes an indelible part of you, a thread in the tapestry of your very existence. For that reason you were, in a sense, meant to love the people you have loved and will thus belong to them forever, and they to you. That is not say that you do not move on from the loss and from the one you love; only that the love and the loss of it are essential elements in the never ending process of personal growth.

For that reason, Tennyson is correct. To have never loved at all, though it would have spared you the initial pain of loss, is worse than having loved and lost because the tapestry of your life, the glorious work of art that is you, would be incomplete and that would be a far greater travesty than a temporarily broken heart.

The Parenting Paradox (or The Myth Of Motherhood)

Parenting, particularly mothering, as anyone who’s lived it or who is living it knows, is perhaps the most difficult job ever in the history of the world. It never ends. There are no days off,  not even sick days…The minute you become a parent your life pretty much ceases to be your own. Suddenly (and yes, it is suddenly because pregnancy does nothing to prepare you for the realities of raising a child) there is this sort-of-person, a small and helpless little creature that is completely dependent upon you for every single thing. It’s daunting, frustrating, exhausting, and, for some, joyous. However, for others the joy is harder to find; for some it never really comes and all they can muster is a sense of contentedness or a quiet resignation to accept responsibility for the choice they have made…

For those mothers out there who fall into the latter, the realization that we are not cut out to be mothers is a hard pill to swallow. It fills us with guilt, leaves us feeling like horrible people, riddles us with regret, and shames us into silence. Because in a society that, despite its many advances, still expects women to aspire to motherhood above all else, that still fights to control women’s bodies and treats sex as if its sole purpose is the propagation of the species, admitting that one does not want children is hard enough, but to admit that one should never have become a mother is even harder. For those of us who harbor these feelings, it is not that we do not love our children, it is not that we would not do everything necessary to raise them to the best of our abilities, it is merely a matter of fact that we are not cut out for motherhood.

As anyone who knows me well knows, I never wanted children. I never wanted to be married. I wanted to go to college, join the Peace Corp, travel the world, and dedicate my life to making the world a better place. I didn’t want to be tied down, trapped in a cage, withering away in the endless, daily drudgery that sucked the lives out of my own parents and murdered their dreams. However, as is often the case with life, shit happened and I found myself, at the age of twenty-one, unexpectedly pregnant. Like most people, I was a different person in many respects then than I am now, in my thirties. Back then my belief system was quite different from what it is today; back then I was relatively religious, I believed that life began at conception and as such abortion should only be sought in the most dire of circumstances, and so I believed that having a child was my only choice. I became a mother not because it was what I wanted but because I believed I had to become one.

And this is where the paradox of parenting, or rather the myth of motherhood begins: I neither fully embraced nor entirely lamented the situation; rather I accepted it with a sort resigned ambivalence. From the moment my child was born I have cared for him, loved him, and sacrificed for him; but not because I feel a deep and all consuming maternal drive to so, rather its because I have to; I owe him the best that I can give him. He didn’t ask to be brought into this crazy, fucked up world; I made that choice. I love him and take care of him because he is a human being, innocent of the complexities of life and as his mother I understand and accept my obligation to him. But often times that is exactly what motherhood feels like to me, an obligation; a sense of duty born not out of an innate maternal instinct, but rather out of a sense of ethical responsibility.

For years I have felt as if something was wrong with me for being unable to embrace motherhood with the same zeal or happiness with which so many other women seem to embrace it. I have felt guilty for not seeing motherhood as my greatest accomplishment or as even being a minor accomplishment because for me its just something I have to do for the sake of this person who I brought into the world. For years I have felt ashamed because motherhood never felt entirely right, because it felt almost foreign. Then I read this article and while I certainly don’t feel vindicated I do feel somewhat relieved to know that I’m not alone, that other women have found themselves trapped in the same parenting paradox in which they at one and the same time love their children but wish that they weren’t parents. Not every woman is meant for motherhood, and for this reason motherhood is a myth; a sacred story of the feminine ideal against which all women are judged but up to which not all women can, or for that matter want, to live.

Although I love him very much, he’s an awesome kid and I couldn’t ask for a better son, if given a chance to make the choice again I don’t know that I would have made the same decision. It’s not that I regret the decision or that I wish he was never born, because that’s not the case, raising my son has taught me things about myself that I may not have otherwise learned; it’s simply that I realize that I would have been just as happy, if not a little happier, had I chosen a different path. This is the real reason that I never had, and why I will never have, another child: because being a mother has taught me that motherhood is not for me. I know now, in ways that one can only ever understand in hindsight, why I never wanted children – I was just never hardwired for it. I’ll never overcome my ambivalency, but perhaps now that I know that I’m not alone I can at least stop feeling guilty and ashamed.

Misogyny in America: It Really is Everywhere

Following the recent mass shooting in Isla Vista, California, in which a misogynistic shit-weasel killed seven people and wounded thirteen others all because women refused to to have sex with him, the Twitter hastag #yesallwomen went viral. It not only blew up on Twitter, but soon found its way to Facebook and was being discussed everywhere, from CNN to the Huffington Post to Salon.com. While many people responded to the shooting, and to #yesallwomen, by rallying behind the victims and openly discussing the realities of everyday misogyny, many others have attempted to undermine the prevalence of misogyny in our culture by arguing that not all men hate women or that women in this country have made many strides or, in some rare but truly disturbing instances, to not only defend and applaud the women hating diatribe left behind by the shooter, Elliot Rodger, but laud him as an American hero.

As sick and twisted as it is that there are actually people who agree with the entitled, misogynistic ramblings of Rodger, it is nearly as disturbing that there are people who honestly believe that misogyny is not as serious an issue as the #yesallwomen campaign has attempted to demonstrate. I say that it is nearly as disturbing because it illustrates just how pervasive misogyny is in our society; it has become so engrained in the fabric of our culture that it goes virtually unnoticed by those who are not directly affected by it, and almost accepted, if not fully expected, by those who are. This is disheartening, to say the least, because as long as people willfully ignore or excuse everyday acts of misogyny, women will continue to be victims of it. Regardless of whether or not everyone wants to admit it, misogyny, as every woman likely knows, is very much alive and well in America and its time we take it seriously and take action toward ending it.

Misogyny, to be clear, is not merely the overtly and extremely violent hatred of women, as exemplified by Rodgers and his ass-chasing ilk. It is, by definition, the, “dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women.” Misogyny, like any form of prejudice, can manifest itself in a variety of ways, many of which seem innocuous on the surface but are, to those who endure it, anything but. As the #yesallwomen campaign has so brilliantly highlighted, women experience misogyny everyday in a variety of ways. From cat-calling to the disgusting way in which we talk about women’s bodies to the numerous political attacks on women’s rights, from health care to wages, misogyny is all around us. 

1) Street Harassment aka “Cat-calling”: As a woman, I have endured this demeaning and extremely annoying act more times than I can count. So often, I’m sure, that if I had a dollar for every time that it has happened to me I’d probably be able to pay off my credit card and have enough left over to celebrate with a delicious steak dinner (to be fair, my credit card balance is only about $250). Most of the time it’s a simple honk and/or a quick, “Wooo! Baby!,” sometimes it’s a more explicit, “I’d like to hit that ass!,” and on a couple of occasions it’s been followed by a, “Fuck you bitch!,” when I’ve ignored the comments as I usually do. While, for the most part, it seems relatively harmless, especially to the sort of men who do it, for women it is insulting and belittling; and in some cases, deadly. To be yelled at by a man, or group of men, as we walk down the street or wait at a bus stop or are sitting in our cars at a traffic light signifies the dim and unsettling reality that, in the eyes of many men, a woman is little more than a thing that exists to entertain or bring pleasure. Yes, before any man bothers to say it, we know that not all men behave this way, but that’s not the goddamn point, a lot of you do; enough, in fact, that every woman at some point in her life will have some jackass harass her as she goes about her day. And how does that make us feel? As this brilliant project by Brooklyn based artist,Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, illustrates, it leaves us feeling humiliated, objectified, ashamed, scared, dehumanized, and powerless. It’s not a compliment, it’s a blatant declaration that you do not see us as human beings to be respected, but as walking, talking sex dolls. To deny a woman the right to freely move about in the world without being verbally harassed is to deny her her very humanity, that is misogyny. Period.

2) Physical/sexual harassment: Unlike cat-calling, I have luckily experienced this less frequently, but the fact that any woman has experienced it at all is just plain disgusting. There’s something deeply and profoundly fucked-up with the psyche of a man who finds it acceptable to grab a woman by the arm and try to force her to sit next him (yes, this happened to me and very recently), or to smack her ass as she walks by (yep, I’ve experienced this too), or to come up behind her as she’s dancing in a club with her friends and grind up to her so closely that she can actually feel his dick on her ass (sadly, I’ve endured this as well, and it’s one of many reasons that I hate going to clubs). Now while my personal experiences with this should be terrible enough, sadly they are relatively benign when compared to other forms of physical/sexual harassment that women have been made to endure. What this form of harassment ultimately succeeds in doing is to tell women is that our bodies are not our own, that we have no right to determine when, where, and how we will be spoken to or touched. Like cat-calling, but to an even larger and more harmful degree, it denies the humanity of women and it is explicitly misogynistic.

3) The Wage Gap: As mentioned above, misogyny is, in part, the “ingrained prejudice toward women.” A clear example of this is the wage gap between what white men earn and what women, of all colors, earn. Women in nearly every occupation, despite our level of education, earn less than men. On average, working women earn just 77 cents for every dollar earned by a white male. Surely there are some out there who may be wondering how the wage gap is indicative of misogyny, and the answer is simple: the wage gap signifies that the work of women is worth less than the work of men, which is the result of millennium of both the relegation of women to the domestic sphere and devaluing of women’s bodies. Throughout human history, with very rare exceptions, the primary worth of a woman has been the sum total of her marriageability and her ability to produce offspring; if she could not succeed at both, she was essentially worthless and a burden. Even in our seemingly more enlightened and evolved era a woman who does not reproduce, be it because of infertility or by choice (gasp! I know, some women actually choose to not have children! by gods the horror!), is treated, by both men and women, as if she’s breaking some sacred, universal law that will destroy all of human civilization if she doesn’t flood the world with an endless brood of babies. Now, for the modern woman, the decision to have children lands her in a rather precarious situation because one of the main arguments used to defend the wage gap is that, since women give birth and, assuming she can afford to do so, take time off from their careers/jobs to both nurture their new born children and care for ill children or family members they contribute less to industry in which they work. Ultimately, women are being monetarily punished for both our biological predisposition to child-bearing and the socially constructed expectation to both have them and nurture them. To insist that women must have children and that women must be the primary care-givers to those children and then turn around and punish them for doing that which society has, for forever, insisted they do is misogynistic. And this brings me to the next issue….

it is important to note, because agism,racism, and sexism both play a role in the wage gap, that when broken down by race the wage gap gets worse, with one exception, for women of the non-white persuasion: caucasian women, 78%; african-american women, 64%; native-american women, 60%; hispanic/latina women, 53%; with the one exception being asian-american women, at 87%. moreover, the wage gap expands with age.

4) The attack on Women’s health care: I have written extensively on the issue of women’s reproductive rights here on the blog, and in the two years since I first began focusing primarily on feminist issues the attack on women’s health care has yet to abate. In 2012 there were 916 laws introduced across this nation that attempted to limit not only women’s access to safe and legal abortions but to also limit our choices of and access to birth control. According to a 2013 report by The Guttmacher Institute, a total of 43 laws restricting women’s access to reproductive services were passed and enacted in 2012; each one of them putting the health and welfare of women in serious jeopardy. As if the attack on women’s health care from right-wingnuts wasn’t enough, this year women have had their rights to birth control challenged in court by conservative Christian corporations, which are attempting to deny female employees access to certain forms of contraception under the guise of wanting to protect the unborn. In addition, 2014 has seen the introduction and/or passing of some of the most detrimental laws to women’s reproductive health yet, for example: the Alabama state legislature passed four anti-abortion bills, one of which would ban abortion after the detection of a fetal heart beat, which occurs at about six weeks gestation (never mind that if born this clump of very nearly undeveloped fetal cells would immediately die), making no exception for rape or incest because, as one Alabama law-maker, or in this case rights-denier, put it,  a life is “a life regardless of the painful, painful circumstances;” and South Dakota introduced a bill that would not only ban most abortions, but would put doctors who perform them in prison. The never-ending assault on women’s reproductive rights is entirely symptomatic of a culture built on and plagued by misogyny, as the premises for it’s entire argument boils down to the fact that the primary purpose for a woman’s existence is to conceive and bear children and that the potential life of a clump of developing cells is more valuable than the woman within which said clump will develop. Think about that for a while, I mean really chew on it and digest it: the health, welfare, and agency of a living, breathing person is of less concern and value than something that cannot survive outside of it’s host. Essentially what this boils down to, given the sort of people who are designing and promoting these abominable pieces of legislation, is that a woman is less important, less valuable, less worthy of protection than the seed implanted in her by a man. Anything that aims to deny women’s autonomy, to limit our free agency, to rob us of our dignity, or to strip us of the fullness of our humanity is an explicit and utter act of misogyny.

5) Demeaning women’s bodies: The idea that a woman’s worth is contingent almost entirely upon her looks is, sadly, very much a reality in our culture. It’s also something of which both men and women are guilty, but misogyny is a societal ill and as such it’s going to influence, to some degree, how both sexes view women. The demeaning of women’s bodies occurs in a number of ways from fat-shaming to criticizing women for going out in public without first putting on some make-up to agism. The idea that there is only a single female form worthy or respect and desire is, to put it bluntly, fucking stupid and it stems entirely from the misogynistic perception of women as vehicles of sexual satisfaction.

6) Slut-shaming: As one brilliant #yesallwomen tweet stated, “because the term ‘friendzone’ is attacking a woman’s right to say no and ‘whore’ is attacking their right to say yes.” Female sexual agency is, for many men, something to both loathe and fear; which for women means that we’re damned if we don’t and damned if we do. We here in America, like many other places where one would find vaginas lurking about, have a terribly antiquated opinion about female sexual activity and consent known as the “double standard.” You see, in much of the world, even right here in the land of free, men can pretty much stick their dicks in just about anything and anyone as often as they please with extremely little to absolutely zero negative reaction; in fact he’ll likely be lauded as stallion among men, a god of sex and conquest. However, when a woman dares to enjoy the same uninhibited sexual exploits she’s a wanton, dirty little slut. Every single word in the English language (‘Murican for those who despise foreigners) that negatively defines a sexually promiscuous person is not only used to describe a woman, it is in the very definition of the word itself: whore, slut, harlot, skank, floozy….the list, quite frankly, goes on. The very fact that there are so many words in the English language that we still use to this very day to demonize a sexually active woman not only indicates that our culture stems from a deep seeded root of misogyny, it’s still producing fruit.

7) Rape and Rape Culture: In case you’re living under a rock or are just willfully oblivious, we live in a rape culture. By that I mean that we live in society that teaches women to not get raped rather than one that teaches men to not rape. By that I mean that we live in a society that, when women say we’ve been raped or sexual assaulted, asks us what were we wearing, where were we going, what were we doing in the place where it happened, were we drinking, or did we give any indication of being at all interested in the man who violated us; despite the fact that a woman is more likely to raped by a man we know, who feels a sense of ownership over us, than by a stranger, but facts be damned because clearly the sheer act having a vagina means that we’re responsible for it being violated against our personal will. By that I mean that we live in a society in which 31 states grant paternal rights to rapists. By that I mean that we live a society in which one in six women will be the victim of an attempted or completed raped, in which 9 out of 10 rape victims are women, and in which 97% of rapists go unpunished. Rape is not about sex it is, as this article accurately points out, about control; control over a woman’s body, and what we’re wearing or whether or not we’ve feigned even the slightest interest in our attacker has nothing to do with it. Those who rape or assault see a woman’s body as something to be claimed, a rapist does not see the victim as person but as an object over which to take ownership and do with as the rapist sees fit. Rape is about sexual domination, not sexual gratification. Not only do rape and misogyny go hand in hand, but so does the way in which our society talks about and treats rape victims. When society lays the blame for being raped or sexually assaulted at our feet, it is accusing we women of being vile temptresses and is essentially implying that, on some level, the rapist is the victim of the uncontrollable lust that we women evoke in the loins of men, which in turn legitimizes the objectification of women. Putting the blame for being raped at the feet of women is, beyond any rational doubt, misogynistic.

8) Domestic Violence: While both women and men can be victims of domestic violence, women are far more likely to not only be victims of physical abuse but to die as a result of it. According to the CDC, 1 in 4 women have been victims of physical abuse at the hands of an intimate partner, compared to 1 in 7 men, and, in 2010, 1,095 women were murdered by their domestic partners, compared to 241 men. According to the American Psychological Association, three or more women are murdered by their partners everyday and nearly half of all women (about 49.4%) have reported experiencing some form of physical violence from an intimate partner in her lifetime. According to the FBIs 2011 Supplementary Homicide Report, of the 1,601 women murdered in 2010, 1,509 of them were murdered by a men they knew, and most of them were murdered during the course of an argument. As with rape/sexual assault, physical abuse is about power and domination. Abusers abuse typically to exert control over their victims, abusers see their victims as property as opposed to a person. Given the fact that the majority of domestic violence victims are women, and that the majority of aggressors are men who have laid claim to said women, domestic violence is an act of misogyny. Men who beat women do so for a variety of reasons, but all of them boil down to one underlying social problem, men have been acculturated to believe that the women in their lives belong to them. One cannot view another person as property and still respect them as a person. Men who abuse women do not view us as fully human, they view us as things to be owned and controlled, and even something to fear and hate; which is, by very definition, an act of misogyny.

Sadly, for women, misogyny is all around us. While it is true that not all men are misogynists who disrespect or objectify women, and while it is true that not all men hate women and seek to own, control, marginalize, or abuse women; it is true that all women experience acts of misogyny. Every. Single. Day. That is the point to #yesallwomen. Every woman, everywhere, everyday is a victim of misogyny. So of those men who are not, by their own account, misogynists we ask you: Don’t ignore it, don’t dismiss it, don’t downplay it’s prevalence; rather, listen to us and take our experiences seriously, acknowledge and admit to the fact that misogyny is both endemic and systemic within our culture so that we can eradicate it together.

 

Coming to Terms with Loss: There is Hope in Unbelief

I wasn’t always an unbeliever, an agnostic with atheistic tendencies if you will. No. Once upon a time I was a doubter, who wanted desperately for God to be real despite the lack of any concrete reason to believe so. I have suffered much and seen much suffering, too much to be able to rationalize the existence of a benevolent and all-powerful deity, much less to rationalize the need to worship one. To those believers out there, please do not take this as either an attack on your personal beliefs (have at them, they’re yours not mine) nor as it an invitation to attempt to lure me back into a flock in which my fleece was always black. I assure you, I have found peace and I have found hope. I no longer wrestle with the question as to why God allows innocent children, women, and men to be murdered, to be raped, to suffer starvation, to struggle in poverty, to be surrounded by war, or to suffer debilitating diseases because I have come to conclude that God is nowhere. We humans are in this on our own. It sounds depressing, but in reality it is not. No, it is actually freeing and full of hope.

I did not come to this conclusion lightly, nor did I reach it suddenly. Rather it was the result of a process, the culmination of years of pain, self-reflection  and scholarly study. I was raised to believe that God exists and that, if we believe enough and pray enough, God will provide. At the same time, I watched my mother drink herself into near oblivion every day of my life for years. I watched her attempt suicide, nearly succeeding twice. I watched her put our family into debt as she drank away the money for the electric bill, the car payment, the rent. Yet, no matter how much I prayed to God for my mother to stop drinking and to just be a mother to my sister and me, God was nowhere.

I watched my Grandpap, whom I loved with all of my heart, suffer a stroke and then slowly fade away. I learned much from him, though not as much as I, in hindsight, would have liked. He taught me, via his own quite actions, to not judge others, to always grant people the benefit of the doubt, and to be open-minded. I never heard him mutter an unkind or disparaging remark about anyone. He always greeted people, friend or stranger, with a wink and smile. When he passed away it was seven years after he had had a stroke; the final years of his life had been spent in a nursing home, unable to communicate clearly, unable to walk freely. Here was a man who never disappointed and never broke a promise, here was a man who was, by all accounts, a good person, trapped in his own body. He never talked about God with me, I am not certain he himself even believed, and when he died, over a decade ago, I myself was still in my doubting phase. With his death, I struggled to find a reason as to why God would allow someone, like my Grandpap, to suffer in his final years as he had, there was not a single answer religion could give me that made an iota of sense. Again, God was nowhere.

Moreover, in late 2012, I watched my father-in-law lose his five-year battle with cancer. I watched a man who loved fishing and hunting, who was always active and full of life, who was a firm believer in God and who prayed and went to church every Sunday, wither and die an agonizing death right before my eyes.  Although I had by this point in my life left behind my doubt and reached the conclusion that there is most likely no God, I still could not help, as it is only natural to do in those moments, but to question how the God in which my father-in-law so deeply believed could allow him to suffer and do nothing to ease his pain. Yet again, God was nowhere.

I was reminded recently of a Robert Green Ingersoll quote, “They who stand with breaking hearts around this little grave, need have no fear. The larger and the nobler faith in all that is, and is to be, tells us that death, even at its worst, is only perfect rest … The dead do not suffer.” It is only the living who suffer and are left to make sense of the loss, to find consolation for our grief, and to seek meaning for both life and death. I understand why some people choose to believe in, or rather hope for, heaven; the promise that someday, if you are a good boy or girl, you will be transported to a perfectly sublime existence where everyone whom you have ever loved and lost will be waiting for you…It’s a tantalizing idea, but that is, in all probability, all it is- an idea.

We cannot know for certain what, if anything, awaits us when we die. Whether or not there is an afterlife at all, whether or not we go to heaven or are reincarnated or cease to exist at all is, in all honesty, irrelevant because either way we only get one shot at this life. We each get only one chance to be this person, living this life. This, right here and right now, is all we get; therefore we must do all we can to be the best possible selves we can be, to treat others with respect, dignity, and compassion because in the end it is most likely that the legacy we leave behind through our actions is the only true afterlife there is.

While I have concluded, after years of study and personal reflection, that there is no great and mighty deity coming to our rescue, I have also concluded that this is ok because we have each other and in that there is hope. There is, most highly probably, no God, but we are here nonetheless and our actions, regardless of belief or lack thereof, determine the quality of life that we and our fellow humans will live. We humans have the power, via our choices, to lift up one another and make life good. We can feed the hungry, end poverty, find cures for diseases, stop violence, prevent rape all by simply learning to value our fellow humans by pure virtue of the fact that we are each a person worthy of respect and compassion. We need neither the promise of heaven nor the threat of hell to do right by each other, we need merely the realization that good action begets good action and will create a legacy of goodness from which current and future generations of humans will benefit.

 

GOP: The Party of Patriarchy

It’s said that an elephant never forgets, unless of course that “elephant” happens to be the GOP (on a side note, being the mascot for the GOP is an insult to elephants); in which case forgetfulness seems to be a prerequisite for becoming a Republican. I say this because what other reason, aside from a severe case of the brain farts, could the Republican controlled House of Representatives have possibly had for passing the 20-week Abortion Ban? Do they not remember the protests, the outcry, the backlash, and the fact that in last year’s election they failed to take the Senate and the Whitehouse, and they lost eight seats in the house? Have they already forgotten that their failures in the last election were in no small part caused by their archaic and misogynistic attitude toward women? Obviously so….I mean, they cannot possibly be so daft as to not learn from their failures and try to not repeat them…Oh wait, of course they can be. Who am I kidding? This is the GOP about which I am speaking, the party plagued by racists, sexists, classists, homophobes, climate-change deniers, anti-choicers, fear-mongerers, misogynisits, and all around dipshits. This is the party that endorsed ass-nuggets like Tod Akin and Twit Romney. Honestly, what is it going to take for them to get through their thick and ignorant skulls that they have got to stop attacking the rights of women? Perhaps if we just put it bluntly….

Dear Conservatives,
I do not recall inviting you into my uterus, so get the fuck out! Here’s a novel yet extraordinarily logical idea, if you don’t have a uterus then you don’t get a say. Period. You don’t see women running around trying to pass bills that will dictate when and how you can get an erection or jack yourselves off on the grounds that every time you ejaculate you’re killing potential fetuses, so where the fuck do you get off trying to control the bodies of women? How would you like your dicks policed?…Exactly!…Now take your patriarchal, misogynistic, fucknuttery and cram it up your piss-holes.

And So The War Rages On…

Two weeks ago we celebrated (at least you did if you see women as fully equal and autonomous human beings with full ownership of their own respective bodies) the 40th Anniversary of Roe vs. Wade. I had hoped to have had this posted sooner, alas time was in short supply but here it is…

On January 22, 1973 the US Supreme Court ruled, 7-2, that one’s right to privacy under the the due process clause of the 14th Amendment protected a woman’s right to own her own body and to make decisions for herself concerning abortion. It was a momentous and profoundly important ruling in which women, who had for so long been denied the right of full autonomy under US law, were finally able to freely choose our own paths. It was supposed to mean the beginning of a new era, one in which women could finally be valued as fully human and protected as the citizens that we are, and not be merely relegated to the domestic sphere as prized heifers to bear and raise a brood of children to carry on a man’s last name. It was supposed to end the fight over our bodies and break the yoke of patriarchy and misogyny because finally we women were free to decide…

Sadly, it has not been as it was supposed to be. No. Here we are, forty years later and the fight to break the yoke and claim our autonomy still rages on as wanna-be-kings-of-the-world try at every turn to strip women of our hard won rights. In a number of states all across this nation measures are being taken to grant personhood to fetuses and thereby once again make the rights of the woman secondary. For example, the state legislature in North Dakota has introduced resolution 4009 to add an amendment to the state’s constitution that would grant the same rights to a potential person as is already guaranteed to a fully developed, already born, actual person. If passed, this amendment, known as the  “Human Life Amendment,” will effectively ban abortion, IVF, and most forms of birth control. And in Tennessee the legislature will introduce a resolution to the 2014 ballot that will, if passed, eliminate provisions in that state’s constitution that protect a woman’s right to privacy.

It is unfathomable to me how anyone who clearly views women, who happen to make up more than half of the nation’s population, as secondary to not only men but to a clump of cells that may or may not become a viable fetus that may or may not become a person can be allowed to make laws that will have such a profound and detrimental impact on the lives of said women. I honestly cannot, no matter how hard I try, wrap my mind around that fact that right now, in this day and age when humanity is capable of such fantastic feats as curing diseases that once decimated populations and as exploring the far reaches of space, women are still fighting against the misogyny and the patriarchy that has held us back for thousands of years. For crying-out-fucking-loud it’s the 21st-goddamned-century, people! Enough is enough! This is not the stone age and we no longer live in caves. Put down your damned clubs and come join us in the land of the civilized, where the already born take precedence over the yet to be. Let us concern ourselves more with caring for the children and adults who already exist by ensuring that they have access to essential elements they need to both live and thrive; such as food, shelter, health care, and quality education. Let us concern ourselves more with waging wars on poverty, disease, and illiteracy and end this ridiculous War on Women; it is senseless and it is cruel.

To these misogynists, these pricks who would strip us of our rights and relegate us to the domestic sphere forever chained by the bounds of chattelry, I say, STOP! You do not own me, seriously I am not a piece of property for you to do with as you please. You do not get to decide what happens within my body, to it, on it, or with it because it is mine. You do not get to tell me when, where, how, or if I become a mother, that is my choice because it is my life and it is my body, not yours. I reject the idea that the primary purpose of my, or that any of my fellow women, existence is to bear children. I am more than the sum total of my reproductive organs; I have a mind of my own and I have goals that I long to accomplish. I refuse to bend to the will of men who believe that I am not worthy of the same ownership over my body as they enjoy of theirs. I adamantly and vehemently deny anyone the power to dictate the course my life will take. And until they, the would-be-kings-of-the-world, understand and accept that we women are not their property, that we are not prize heifers to be branded and bred, and until they respect the fact that we are people, actual living and breathing people, who possess the inalienable right to choose what happens to our own bodies, then the war rages on…

To see where your state stands on Women’s Rights, click here.

Happy Anniversary Roe v Wade

Elephant Ocean

Dear Anti-choicers (aka pro-lifers),

Stop. Stop it right now. Yeah, you with your holier-than-thou, pseudo-moralistic, self-righteous stare. Knock it off. Stop trying to dictate the actions, choices,  and lifestyles of consenting adults. You there, who decries the alleged evils of big government, stop supporting people who want to control the lives of consenting individuals. You’re speaking from both sides of your mouth and you sound like a hypocritical dipshit. Oh yeah, I said it. Until you have to deal with ass-nuggets, like yourselves, treating your body like public property, you haven’t a clue what “big government” really is or what it really means to have your rights infringed upon.

Too harsh? Too bad. Quite frankly, I have had enough of you and your lies. You claim to want to “save” the unborn. Great. But what about the already born? Where are you for them? Where are you to save the already living, breathing children, huh?…

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In celebration of the 40th Anniversary of Roe v Wade I am reposting a few previous posts.

Elephant Ocean

I grew up in the 1980s and came of age in the 1990’s, in the midst of third-wave of feminism. The generations of women who had come before me had fought, with such bravery and determination, enduring prison and abuse, to win me the right to vote and to have access to family planning service, including access to safe and legal abortions should I need it. I took these things for granted. I mistakenly believed that society, at least the majority thereof, had progressed to such a point on human, civil, and women’s rights (all one in the same in my opinion) that no one would ever dare to drag us back through the gates of hell  and lock us behind them once more.

To my fore-mothers and fathers, who struggled and fought and suffered so that I could have a full say in my own life, I am…

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Year of the Woman?

Many talking-heads in the media have been, in the aftermath of last night’s election results, referring to this election year as “The Year of the Woman.” It certainly seems as such given the number of records broken by women in this election: Elizabeth Warren is the first female senator from Massachusetts; Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin is the first openly gay person to be elected to the US Senate; for the first time in history all of the New Hampshire’s Congressional seats are being occupied by women, not one man will represent that state in DC; and there are now more women in Congress than ever before. It is certainly a year of broken records and a series of firsts, but “The Year of the Woman?” I’m not so sure I’d go that far. Not that I am not pleased to see so many women, whom I have come to respect and admire as I have watched them rise, like Warren and Baldwin, to both win their respective races but to make history while doing it, it’s just that there is still so much to do. So, so much to do.

While there are more women in Congress than ever before, the number of women Congressional members comprises only about thirty percent of all seats in Congress; of the 535 total seats (100 in the Senate and 435 in the House), thus far -some districts are still counting- women hold 20 seats in the Senate and 141 in the House. Although this is certainly a gain, it’s far from a true representation of the nation, of which women make up nearly 51%, and it has been a long time coming. The Untied States is 225 years old; it took 133 years from the year the Constitution was ratified, in 1787, to the year women were finally recognized as citizens and given the right to vote, in 1920, and another 92 years for us to reach this record breaking year….I know that progress can at times be slow, but c’mon now! It’s been 225 years, and it’s the 21st century, yet still women are not fully represented in this nation.

In the 225 years that we have been the United States of America and in the 92 years since women finally were given the vote, only thirty-five women have served as governors and there are still twenty-four state that have never had a female governor. In that same time there have only been thirty-nine women (42 if you count the new senator-elects) to serve in the senate, with 1992 marking the year that women began to be elected in number rather than one or two here and there, and only twenty-three states have been represented in the senate by women. Also, in that time, the House has had only 229 women fill it’s seats, and at present women make up about only 17% of the House.

My point here is not to downplay the successes and milestones female politicians achieved last night; to the contrary, I am both excited for them and hopeful that this is a sign of better things to come for women in this nation. Instead, my point is to merely demonstrate that this is but one more step in a very long journey toward true sexual equality in the US. While 2012 can certainly be seen as a year of firsts in which women broke records and tore down walls, it cannot rightly be called “The Year of the Woman.” Perhaps we will have that year soon and it will mark the closing of the gender gap that divides this country nearly in half, but there is much to be done before we can have that year. When women make up at least half of Congress, when women have served as governor to every state, when our bodies are no longer fought over by male politicians as if they’re public property, when we no longer make 77 cents for every dollar earned by a white male, when a woman has held the highest office in our land, when we’ve achieved at least half of this then and only then will women have finally had our year.

Nevertheless, 2012 is our year in this sense: we came out in record numbers, both as candidates and as voters, and we won a record number of seats for women. We had our hard won rights threatened by misogynists in the GOP, like Todd Akin and Tom Smith, and we stood up together and said, “Oh hell, no!” So, while I think that calling 2012, “The Year of the Woman,” is less than accurate, I think 2012 will be remembered as the year in which women truly found our voices and our strength and started fighting back; in which we finally decided that it was time to stop taking baby steps and to start making leaps and bounds; and in which we made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that we are done playing by the rules of those who would hold us back. 2012 is just the beginning, we will have our year and it will be a wondrous sight to behold!

Romney, He’ll Not Be My President

Well, it’s election day tomorrow and I am filled with angst and trepidation. This is a difficult thing for me to say, as it goes against everything I was raised to believe, which was to respect the President even if I did not believe in his abilities or his principles, but I loathe the man so much that the very thought of putting the two words “President” and “Romney” together makes me feel incurably ill. The idea of this “man” – this lying, conniving, flip-lopping, land polluting, job killing, 47% of America hating, ass-nugget- sitting in the oval office is a loathsome and unnerving thought. So much so that I will not utter the words “President” and “Romney” together, should it come to that, ever. I abhor the “man,” in every possible way and for a plethora of reasons, among which are, in no particular order:

1) This is a “man” who believes that single-parent homes, the majority of which are headed by women, are the biggest cause of violence in America. Never mind that the facts and figures from numerous studies show that the US is the deadliest of all post-industrial nations; there aren’t enough single-parent households in the US to account for all of that violence. And never mind the empirical evidence such as the fact that mass shooters Jared Lee Loughner and James Eagan Holmes are both from two-parent households, as were Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, because clearly such facts are irrelevant when they contradict baseless assumptions.

What Romney’s comment implies, and implications are important, is that single people, especially women, are not capable of raising children to be well-rounded human beings. This is bullshit and it is insulting to single-parents everywhere who work very hard to care for their children. It is insulting to my Dad, who, for the better part of my life, raised my sister and I almost entirely on his own. It is insulting to my best-friend, who, in addition to being raised by a single-parent, is raising three wonderful children as one herself. It is insulting to my step-mother, who raised my step-sisters, both of whom turned out to be strong, intelligent, and successful women, nearly all on her own. Not one of us has ever, nor would we ever, engage in pointless violence.

Anyone who would dare to turn single-parents into scapegoats for America’s ills is a loathsome, disgusting little turd-eater and is not fit to bear the title of President of the United States of America. A true president, a real leader, would not make a political stab at hardworking Americans, who happen to have been put in a position that contradicts his personal religious paradigm. No. A real leader, a true president, would rightly insist that we, as a nation, have a serious problem that can only be solved with careful reflection, education, and a concerted effort on a national level to address gun violence and all of its probable causes.

2) This is “man” who believes that the solution to our energy problems is to destroy our natural environment by drilling for oil and natural gas on federally protected lands and mining for coal. I don’t give a flying-monkeys ass if you “believe” in climate change or not because regardless of one’s personal beliefs on the matter, it’s happening and adding more CO2 to the atmosphere is not going to solve anything. That factoid aside, even if you’re camping in the land of denial where climate change is a myth and burning fossil fuels is all lollipops and fun, you’d have to be pretty fucking obtuse to deny that the processes of extracting oil, natural gas, coal, and uranium from the earth and turning them into usable forms of energy are not only damaging to the environment, they’re dangerous for people. That someone would insist that digging corrosive and unsafe materials out of the earth is good for America, and that people would agree with him, is dipshittery at it’s finest. Are we all really this stupid? Have we all forgotten what happened on April 20, 2010?

Sure, on the surface it seems easier to keep on this path of mindless self-destruction, doing business as usual, but just beneath that shiny surface of apparent ease and comfort is a dark and dirty truth that threatens the survival of our species and nearly everything else we know. Why risk the future of our species for the sake of simple, cheap, and comfortable solutions? How selfish, greedy, and uninformed must one be to not understand that we cannot breathe dirty air, drink chemically laden water, or grow food in parched soil? Are so many of my fellow American’s really so blinded by fear that they’ll have to sacrifice their toys and gadgets to preserve the very organism, our planet and home, that gives us life and sustains us, that they’ll vote for a “man” who wants to help big business make billions more, on top of the billions they have now, to further destroy the very thing we need to live? Please, for the love of humanity and the planet we call home, please tell me that most of us are not this hopelessly and mindbogglingly obtuse?!

A person who refuses to move forward, who refuses to make the tough choices, who refuses to help this nation change for the better, is not a person who possess the qualities needed for leadership. A real leader, a true president has the capacity to think critically and to extrapolate upon current trends and data in order to make decisions for the good of not only current generations but those to come as well. A true president, a real leader is a person who understands that what we do now will profoundly and inextricably affect the present and the future, both distant and near. The choices we make now become the legacy we leave to our children, our children’s children, and so on and so forth. I, for one, do not want to have to look my own grandchildren in they eye and explain to them that money and things were more important to us than their chance to not only survive but to thrive on the very planet that we took for granted. A real leader, a true president would understand this and would help us better ourselves.

3) This is a “man” who doesn’t care about the LGBT community. As governor of Massachusetts, Romney demonstrated disdain and an utter lack of compassion for same-sex couples. Yes, Mr. Romney, gay people have families. I know. I know. It’s a difficult thought for you to wrap your simple, bigoted little mind around…you have no love for gay people, thus it seems unfathomable to you that anyone else could love them. Well, as shocking as it is, they have mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, and significant others who love them and want the same thing for them that the families of hetero persons want…for them to be happy. Why can’t two people, whether it be two men or two women, who love each other have that love legally protected in the same way as a hetero couple? Does one stop being American because one happens to be gay? No! So why the fuck are we even entertaining the idea that, as Gov. Christie said, voters in each state should have a right to decide if same-sex couples have basic civil rights?

Anyone who would deny civil and human rights to a segment of the population on the mere grounds that said segment is different from the larger population is not fit to lead the country. This truly has become the new civil rights movement  and how we as a nation choose to address it will speak volumes about how we value the lives of living, breathing people. A true president, a real leader is not afraid to take a stand against oppression, to look  bigotry in the eye and say, “America don’t play that way.” It’s what Lincoln did, it’s what  LBJ did. A true president, a real leader concerns his/herself with the needs and rights of all the people, not just the majority but the minority as well. A real leader, a true president is a person who understands this and will not, regardless of personal belief, allow the rights of one group to override or supersede the rights of another. That’s the grand design of the American Republic, that “though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.”

4) This is “man” who sees women as having little more purpose than bearing children and keeping house. Everyone had great fun with Romney’s “binder of women,” gaffe from the second presidential debate, but in my assessment it was more than a mere gaffe, it was a very telling Freudian slip. In the mind of conservative, religious “men” like Romney, a woman’s place is first and foremost in the home; bearing and rearing the children, cooking the meals, and cleaning the house. Mitt Romney doesn’t have a binder of women, he and the GOP have a binder for us. Romney, is against the Blunt Amendment, which guarantees the right to affordable birth control to all women. He and the GOP oppose access to safe and legal abortions (see previous posts before you dare say anything to me about this), and Romney has said that the repeal of Roe vs. Wade would be a good day for America.

Really? The day on which women are denied the right to their own bodies, on which we will be forced to allow something to use our bodies against our will, on which we will be dragged back to the days of back alley clinics and wire hangers, will be a good day for America? Fuck you! Fuck you hard in an unpleasant place, you misogynistic ass! You claim to be pro-life, yet you want to put the lives of living, breathing people in jeopardy by making abortion illegal, denying women access to affordable birth control, and preventing sex-education in public schools, thus creating a situation ripe for unplanned and unwanted pregnancy and thereby putting girls and women into desperate situations in which they turn to dangerous means. If you and your party were truly pro-life, you’d support access to birth-control and comprehensive sex-education because the best means for limiting abortion is to lessen the need for them by decreasing the number of unwanted/unplanned pregnancies. What you are, instead, is anti-choice, seeing as how what you really want to do is deny women all personal autonomy and strip us of all legal protections for our rights to own our bodies.

And if his stance on reproductive health isn’t enough to bind we women to our “rightful” places behind our husbands and in our homes, then his position (which seems forever in flux, like his stance on so many things) on  the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act should provide the extra rope necessary to keep us where we belong, forever beneath men. If we’re trapped at home raising babies, we are less likely to go to college and pursue careers, and without the promise of fair pay and equal opportunities in the work place, we will be forced to either deny our own dreams and ambitions, be dragged back to a time in which we were forced to marry out of necessity, or remain trapped in the never ending cycle of poverty in which millions of hard-working women are presently trapped. Without the right to control our own reproductive system, without the ability to acquire an education, and without the right to be paid fairly for the work we do we women will be bound to the domestic sphere, returned to the status of male property, from which our mothers and grand-mothers and generations upon generations of women fought so hard to break free.

Anyone who would have the audacity to treat the bodies and livelihoods of women with such blatant disregard and disrespect is not fit to lead a nation whose demographics is nearly 51% female. A true president, a real leader would protect the bodies and lives of women, who are already living and breathing and experiencing life, and he/she would do so, not simply by making abortion safe and legal as it should be, but by also ensuring that women have access to affordable birth control and health care and by making certain that children, particularly teens, are receiving a well-round, comprehensive education about sex. A real leader, a true president would not allow the bodies of women to become public property and would instead ensure that it is legally protected as the private property that it is. A true president, a real leader would not deny the autonomy of women, he/she would respect it and protect it.

I could go on and on and on about all of the reasons why I loathe Romney and why the combination of his name and the title of President leaves a taste in my mouth that is so repugnant I want to vomit, but I think you all get the gist. This “man” is not fit to be president; hell, he’s barely fit to be called a man. I will always hold the utmost respect for the office of the presidency, but if it so happens to be occupied by Romney, he’ll not be my President. I will not call him by that title, he is unbecoming of it.