Maybe We Will Just Protect Ourselves

 

I tell this about myself because its true and a little weird, but when I was small, my dad taught me how to hook my fingers up and around an eyeball in its socket--just in case I ever had to. I knew what a xyphoid process was at six years old. I knew where to drive the heel of my hand into a human nose. I was taught that I didn't have the physical strength advantage in life, so I had to have the will. I was taught that you have to walk in awareness. I was taught you watch your drink. I was taught to carry improvised weapons. I was taught to see the world in terms of potential improvised weapons.

I was taught this because some boys never get told what they should never try. Or get told but don't really learn it. (You don't use your knee--it's inexact. You grab them by it. You can squeeze and disrupt a generation of losers. And I never had to do any of that. Not once. Because it's really only a small percentage of men who are actual monsters--most are reasonable and not actual sociopaths. I like men, really. They are interesting enough and some have valuable skills. They care for the people around them and often are smarter than they think they are. It's a confidence issue. When you are told to value muscle over brain, you know.) 

I was raised to think, more or less, there wasn't anything I couldn't do. Math, science, art, politics. Sports. And it simply never occurred to me women were just out there, somewhere, either not voting because their husbands said they couldn't or voting for exactly what their husbands told them to, until I heard about that in my early adulthood--because why? That's crazy: we're fully-fledged adult people, right?  Even if I knew I was born just before Roe and just before women generally could even get credit in our own names. 

I've been married twice. The idea of a man not knowing what he's even getting politically going into a relationship is weird to me--this is me. We are talking politics. You don't know me and not know my politics. 

I was told to put in the work. Show it. Show up. I learned how to put a little bass in my voice. I learned respect is earned, not one time, but every time. 

Donald Trump never had to earn the respect that he has from the bottom up, in any environment where respect wasn't just his for showing up. Women can see through it. Do you not see his relationship with Jeffery Epstein? The couple dozen claims of sexual harassment or assault? How he speaks about women all the time? The religious right (that he has allied with) desire to end no-fault divorce and the grinning sadist desire to monitor our menses and try to punish us for our fertility and even stop us from travelling to other states to save our lives? 

Some women just needed encouragement though--your vote is your own, and a silent but powerful force. 

Anyway, I don't like when a person I feel pretty much is a sociopath says he wants to "protect me". Especially after taking away Roe. Do you know what pregnancy with a 52-year-old womb would look like? It's possible but it's not great. That didn't protect women like me. But he is more or less referencing "Birth of a Nation"--he will save white women from raping hordes of POCs. 

And like--no. Because let's get back to the thing where women are afraid to not vote the same way their husbands do--because what happens to them then and what regular experience lets them know it is going to happen? 

That is part of real women's lives and he isn't fixing that shit. He isn't fixing our churches and our local fucked up politicians who want to take away our rights to save us from the curse of feminism and "ills" like sex ed and birth control. He never walked in our uncomfortable shoes and had his fanny slapped. His sense of unsafety isn't like ours. He never has been in a position to get fired for not putting out. 

Has he ever been even expected to do his job? 

He doesn't want to know about women who worry about who is looking after their kids while they try to work to make rent and feed them. He makes examples of women who died because of migrant criminals, but the legal responsibility of laws that let women die because they were denied reproductive care is nothing he considers. 

This is what our vote is for--we will protect ourselves. 

This is what we had to learn.