I am learning, much to my thrill and awe, that one of the greatest gifts of the transition known as menopause is shamelessness. And the news is along those lines.
Patriarchy deploys shame like a drone: it shadows you, ready to take you out any minute, exhausting you by keeping you forever aware of its presence to the detriment of all other things that you could be investing your attention in.
I gasp at the heights of audacity that I like to think come monthly in lieu of my increasingly AWOL menstrual cycle. It is as if instead of shedding the lining of my uterus, I am shedding the lining of patriarchal fuckery that I was socialized into. feministgiant.com/p/moisturize-y…
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Dec. 8, 2011: I had surgery on my left arm to straighten the fractured bone so that it could fuse properly, after Egyptian riot police broke it during the Mohamed Mahmoud protest on Nov 23/24.
The ortho surgeon inserted a titanium plate & 5 screws and I have a beautiful faint white scar that reminds me.
Soon after surgery,I flew from NYC to meet my family at my brother’s home in the Midwest: I asked for a wheelchair because I could not do anything w/both arms in casts
At boarding gate, I started to cry because I felt sorry for myself.
Onboard, I asked the woman sitting next to me to open the bottle that contained my pain killers. She asked what happened to me. I told her but knew that what had happened would be impossible for most to absorb.
If terrorism means politically-motivated violence intended to scare us into changing the way we behave, then surely femicide is terrorism. Patriarchy is the ideology; cis men are the terrorists.
Unless we impose on societal consciousness just how quotidian violence against women is and how it is ordinary men who commit it, it will continue to benefit ordinary men. It does.
Say it. Violence against women is everyday; ordinary men commit it.
Read this article about Dr. Meera Shah, a New York physician who monthly commutes to South Bend, Indiana — an 800-mile trip across four states — to perform abortions. I am grateful to her and abortion providers everywhere washingtonpost.com/national/this-…
In 2020, I was asked to blurb Dr. Shah’s powerful You’re the Only One I’ve Told: The Stories Behind Abortion, in which she shares the personal narratives of people who have had abortion but who have rarely if ever told anyone. youretheonlyoneivetold.com
I enthusiastically blurbed Dr. Shah’s book because the narratives are vital and because she is one of the few women of colour doctors I know of who write openly about providing abortion care.
No matter how often those of us from authoritarian countries and those of us who have fought fascism -- be it via military rule/rule of religious fundamentalists -- warned & warned, white Americans arrogantly shook their head that it couldn’t happen here. feministgiant.com/p/if-amy-coney…
And no matter how often we warned you that the fate of nations is not a straight line bending towards a “manifest destiny,” you only saw Iran & women in chadors or Afghanistan & women in burqas and refused to believe that their fate awaited you.
That fate never comes overnight.
Just as Trump was not an aberration, but rather a fruition of decades of white supremacist, misogynist, bigoted rot, so too is the conservative dominance of the Supreme Court, which conservatives have worked for since the early 1970s.
I have had two abortions. I was not raped. I was not sick. The pregnancies did not threaten my life. I did not already have children. I just did not want to be pregnant. I did not want to have a child. And so I had two abortions. feministgiant.com/p/abortion-is-…
And for those who were willing to give Amy Coney Barrett any benefit of any doubt: she is a Five-Star General of White Supremacist Patriarchy and we've know she'll bring disaster. She is the fruition of decades of work by that patriarchy feministgiant.com/p/if-amy-coney…
With every attempt to ban, now in Mississippi, remember: It's what white supremacist Christian conservatives have been working for, while telling US women "be grateful you don't live over there (Muslim country)." I explain 👇🏽#DobbsvJackson#SCOTUS
Liberal, affluent, white cisgender women thought as long as Roe v. Wade survived, they could ignore whatever the Christians were saying all along - since the 1970s. In the U.S., white and Chrisitian is considered the default, a norm, not scary, not brown or Muslim or pathologized
They remained willfully ignorant to the fact that Roe v. Wade died for many Black and women of colour and poor women in the South, where one after another clinics that provide abortions were being shuttered.