All Rise

Before we begin, I’d like to ask you to do something for me. I’d love for you to close your eyes and picture the “average American” whatever that means to you. Just give it a whirl if you would - close your eyes and try to get a picture of who that person is in your mind - then come back to me here.

Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash

Was that person a white man? It was for me when I did it, and it did it because of this video which is well worth watching. Let’s begin:

My dad was the first man who taught me to watch my step around men. He was six-foot-one and had what we call a flash temper. He didn’t get angry often because I was a good little pupil, but when he did it was terrifying. I don’t know if it’s because he ran six miles a day, but that man could be smiling one second, and yelling so loudly the next it seems impossible he had time to take a deep enough breath. His voice booming off the walls made me cringe, it made my heart beat so fast I thought it might burst - everything in my body would tense up. His rage would erupt if he felt betrayed or disrespected. If I listened to him talk about his problems attentively, if I hugged him when he sobbed in my arms, if I told him I loved him and everything would be okay - all was well. My training began early, these talks started after my dad left my mom - his second of four wives - when I was four years old. Back then, I thought he hung the moon.

I got so much praise from him. He called me his angel and his princess, and said he loved me more than anybody in the world, which felt like too much, even then. Why didn’t he love his first daughter - my half-sister - more than anything in the world? And where was she, why didn’t she seem to have a relationship with him? He said I was special, so mature for my age, such a good listener. But if my mind ever wandered, or if I had a topic I wanted to talk about that he didn’t like for any reason, his face would cloud over and he’d look like I had disappointed him. I’d do everything I could to avoid that look and that feeling.

He was already so troubled because my stepmom and all the other “lady friends” he had didn’t like to share him. My mom hadn’t liked to share him, either, that’s why he had to leave us and find a new place to live. It was her fault for being so possessive and unreasonable. And his wife before my mom, same thing. They were jealous, insert eyeroll. I was his co-conspirator, his little angelic wing-child. He and I understood these women were clingy and demanding. Why couldn’t they just enjoy the time he gave them, why did there have to be all these rules about it? I’d nod and smile and shrug with him. Women were so emotional and needy. I’d never be like that.

Dear old Dad

I learned from other men, too. In third grade, we went to Central Park with our art teacher to sketch trees. I went and sat with my best friend after we’d picked what we thought was the prettiest tree in the park. We sat there cross-legged with our sketchpads in our laps, and a set of colored pencils to share, talking and giggling while we worked. We’d look up at the tree, then down at the pad to draw. Up again, down again. I don’t remember how much of the tree I’d drawn when I looked up to see a man standing under the tree with his pants down, playing with himself with his tongue hanging out and a crazy look on his face, but I remember the two of us jumping up, abandoning our pads, colored pencils flying everywhere as we ran screaming for our teacher. And I remember no one talking to us about it after. No one at school, no one at home. It was as if it hadn’t happened. We were eight years old. Did the grownups not know what to say? Was that just a normal thing that could happen?

There was a man on a public bus when I was ten. I was sitting in a seat with my legs dangling, and they swung with every lurch of the bus, white lace ankle socks tucked inside my Mary Janes. I made eye contact with him accidentally, the way you do in New York City sometimes, and he glanced down in his lap and back at me again, winking, so I looked. He’d opened his coat just enough to show me his erect penis, like it was a secret between us. It made me feel sick and scared. I looked away instantly, but tears welled up in my eyes and I had to give him the satisfaction of wiping them away with the back of my sleeve while I sat there trying to understand why. Why? Fucking why?

Then there are the fairytales and movies and messages you’re being fed as all of this is happening. The charming, handsome prince will save you. Your knight in shining armor is coming, and he won’t have his dick out, not right away. There’s someone out there who’s going to complete you! Just be thin, pretty, not too loud, smart - but maybe don’t show how smart you are because that can be intimidating and a turn-off - giving, loving, y’know, a good girl. Also be hot, but not slutty, willing to do the housework but also to bring in your fair share of the money ... oh whatever. You’ll figure it out. And when you do, your dad will walk you down the aisle and hand you to your husband - he’ll give you away like property because that’s how it was always done, back when your family got a dowry in exchange for you, or later when the husband’s family got the dowry for taking you off your parents’ hands. Just go with it, it’s cool. And now you’ll take your husband’s last name and so will your children, because… why is that, again?

As I got older, it got worse. I learned from men on the street who stared at me, men who said disgusting things to me that I didn’t always understand, but understood enough to feel shame and embarrassment. I learned from the men walking by around me, who also heard these things and did nothing. Sometimes a woman would meet my eyes and we’d share something - maybe sympathy… solidarity? I didn’t know. When I got a little older, twelve or thirteen, I learned from men who became bolder and more dangerous - one who grabbed me in a stairwell, another who followed me into an elevator and exposed himself when we were between floors and there was nowhere I could go. I just had to back myself up against the wall of the elevator, crying and shaking, willing the elevator doors to open, open, open, and wondering why. There is nowhere for any of us to go. What you start to learn is that a man can kill you if he decides that’s what he wants to do, and if he doesn’t want to kill you, he can kill your sense that you have any power, by taking things from you that you don’t give him willingly. You are not safe unless a man has mercy - that’s the only message you can draw from this.

At thirteen I didn’t want to go to my dad’s anymore. I didn’t want to hear about his problems or make him feel better about hurting every woman in his life. I’d started to understand it was him, not them. He treated women like objects (he liked them skinny, with long hair and big boobs in case you’re wondering, and I know this because he told me) and then acted victimized when they cried, got angry, or didn’t want to speak to him anymore.

I learned from boys, too. Boys at school who walked into rooms like it never occurred to them not to take up space. They were comfortable, they spread their legs when they sat down. They spoke loudly, they ran, they yelled across the hallways to each other between classes, high-fiving like they owned the place because they did. They didn’t think twice, three times, four times about whether what they had to say was right, interesting or smart enough to warrant raising their hands to speak. When they did speak, their hands and voices didn’t shake, even if what they had to say was not very much of anything. I watched female teachers cut boys slack, roll their eyes, shake their heads, laugh along a little. Boys will be boys was a phrase I heard over and over again as I grew up - my mother said it a lot - and under that umbrella you could stash some guy snapping your bra strap, or burping or farting loudly without apology, or turning in his homework late.

Once, a guy in my tenth grade class picked me up off my feet and threw me as far as he could because he was pissed. I’d stood outside the boys’ locker room and called his name because I needed a notebook I’d lent him earlier in the day, and that was enough to incite his rage. My body hit desks on the way down to the floor, I was stunned and hurt. My wrist was sprained and there were witnesses, other kids who’d seen it, and not a single thing happened to him - he wasn’t even suspended. Boys will be boys is essentially what the principal said to me. The rules didn’t apply to boys, not really. 

Photo by Jonas Junk on Unsplash

There was the man who slowed down in his car as I waited on the corner of 86th and West End Avenue for the light to change when I was fifteen, and when I made the mistake of looking at him, I saw that he, too, had his dick out. That’s hardly even worth mentioning, really, but you don’t forget the dicks you never wanted to see, because that’s an assault. It’s an assault on the idea that you have agency. There was the teacher who said he’d help me prepare for the American History Achievement test and then told me at a library one day that he was sure we would have dated if we’d met in college - leaving me speechless and red-faced when he’s the one who should have felt ashamed. He was thirty-five and married, and I was sixteen, so the math didn’t work out for his weird college fantasy - and then there was the fact that even if time travel was a thing, there was no point in history when I would have wanted to date that man. But I realized he was there “helping” me not because he cared about me as a person, or cared about my future, or my education, or my desire to work my ass off so I could skip my senior year of high school and go to college a year early - he was there because he wanted to fuck me. My value to him was as an object. I started to think if that’s where my value was, then that’s where my power must be, too, but it felt like a slippery power, one that could be used against me easily.

Other things happened. I learned the very hard way that crying and begging and saying no again and again doesn’t mean a thing if a man decides he’s taking what he wants and you’ve been dumb enough to put yourself in a position where he can - and that sometimes, the most important girls and women in your life will not help you recover. They will not be your safe space. Your sixteen-year-old best friend will say you flirt too much, and your mother will not believe you. That last part is harder to understand, but it’s called internalized misogyny and we’ll get back to that later.

This is why when a man running to be the vice president of the United States starts talking about childless cat ladies, or a whole party suggests a woman without children has less value intrinsically, none of us are surprised. We might be appalled that these people are saying these things OUT LOUD, that they feel emboldened enough to suggest a woman’s value is as a baby maker and not much else, but we are not surprised by the sentiment. It’s really just another man with his dick out, friends. When a political party questions whether people without children should have their votes counted the same way people with children should, or whether a childless woman (she’s not, she has stepchildren, but even if she was, my god…how many male presidents have given birth??) should be allowed to be president, it’s enraging, but not surprising.

The messaging is clear - if you haven’t birthed children, you don’t have value as a woman. And now they’re saying if you don’t have children, you don’t have a stake in the future of the country. Of course when people say things like this, they’re just showing us who they are. They are people who cannot conceive of caring about things deeply unless those things affect them directly. Can you imagine being so self-centered that the only thing you care about is your own life? Your own rights? Your own health, happiness, freedom? Who cares about the planet, you might think if you were someone like that, I won’t be here in forty years, so screw it. Leave all the lights on and let’s cut down some more trees! 

It’s just more of the same stuff we’ve been dealing with forever, but we’re no longer kids at the park, on the bus, in an elevator, or in a man’s apartment because we thought he was trustworthy. We are not asking why anymore, because we already know why. There are those who value women as human beings - as whole, intelligent, capable, brilliant, strong people worthy of all the rights boys and men have in this country - and those who do not. 

Of course, if the government is passing laws about what you as a girl or woman can or can’t do with your own body, that does affect you directly, whether you have children or not. You’re being told you don’t qualify for the same rights as boys and men. You can’t be trusted to make deeply personal decisions, nor can you assume if you need lifesaving healthcare - it will be there for you. How does that not affect you? Some of us have aged out of worrying about unwanted pregnancies, and even those of us without daughters can still believe with our entire hearts that all people should be trusted to make decisions about their own bodies, full stop. People who believe women can’t be trusted to make decisions about their own bodies will certainly not trust them to run a whole country. 

Here are some things women have invented for your friends or family who may be confused about a woman’s worth.

Let’s get back to internalized misogyny because it will help to explain why strong women are often described as unlikable, or their appearance or sexual history is brought into the conversation - even by other women. It will help to explain why so many women voted against their own best interests in 2016, and why any women anywhere would vote for a man who was convicted of sexual assault, and who openly said he grabs women by the pussy. Just boys being boys, right? Just locker room talk? When you grow up in a culture that teaches you over and over again that men call the shots, when you learn how to walk on eggshells and try to be what you need to be so you’re safe and maybe loved, when you push your feelings down and deal with the rage and confusion of seeing dick after dick you didn’t ask to see - and no one does anything to help you - believe me, you start to question your own worth. And when another woman rises to the top - sometimes - some women want to tear her down because how dare she rise? How dare she succeed and take up space and throw her head back and laugh from way down deep in her soul? Doesn’t she have a dad or husband around to tell her what her worth is and put her in her place? 

I’ll tell you what, though. I’ve decided the kind of men who say despicable things like successful women got where they got because they spent a lot of time on their knees - and the women who vote for them - they don’t get to steal my hope or my fire. I can be hopeful and enraged. That’s a lot better than being hopeful and in despair, which is how I was feeling last week when a straight, white, male, upwardly mobile friend of mine casually said he probably wasn’t going to vote because TFG was gonna win, anyway. Look, I live in California, and this state historically goes blue, but that is not the point. The point is to care about people who have fewer rights and less protections than you. And rage is good fuel, ask any woman who’s been made to feel like she’s taking up too much space, or being a little too opinionated. Especially ask her when she hits perimenopause.

Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them.

Margaret Atwood

You know what? I’m sick of it. I’m sick of being scared walking down the street late at night if I’m walking alone, even now. I’m sick of worrying about my daughter every second of the fucking day because men still act like pigs, and the men around them still act like it isn’t happening - and I can’t always be there to protect her. She’s a teenager, she wants to be out in the world with her friends, and shouldn’t she be able to be on her own in this world and be safe? Shouldn’t all of our kids? And obviously (do I have to say it? Do I have to tell you I have amazing men in my life, and that my son is one of my all-time favorite people in the history of the known universe?) not all men. But far too many of them. And you know what else? Far too many straight, white men I know are casually saying they think TFG is gonna win. They say it in passing, not understanding what happens in my body.

The privilege it requires to be casual about that is astounding. I want to scream at them, if that’s what you think, then DO SOMETHING. Talk to your friends, donate, get people you know registered to vote, don’t just stand there with your protected dick in your pants and shrug, my god. But I don’t scream, because screaming doesn’t get through to anyone, and if you do scream, people call you shrill and unlikable. See how that works? I take a deep breath and I try my best to say it with patience. But my patience is wearing thin. I have work to do, and I don’t have a lot of energy left over to patiently explain to you why you should care or why you should understand how not casual this is.

This isn’t about a two-party system and how messed up it is (it is), or liberal versus conservative - that isn’t where we are right now. If we were, if we had two parties with different ideologies, both wanting a loving and sane country, this is not the essay I’d be writing. I wouldn’t be writing this essay at all, I’d keep my views to myself and trust people to figure things out for themselves, but my god. The things we’re having to fight for here, the rights we’re having to defend, the things that are being said … you just cannot be quiet. Or I can’t, anyway. There is no doubt there are people who have gone so far to the right or left, they’re meeting up in Crazyville. We’ve all seen some wild things happen the last several years in this country. But when you start coming for people’s rights, when you start saying a wildly accomplished, intelligent, well-educated woman who is far more qualified than the man (convicted felon/rapist/wannabe dictator ffs) she’s running against is a DEI hire, yes that makes you both racist and sexist and it needs to be called what it is.

When you’re yelling about mass deportation and shoving anything that feels like common human decency under the umbrella of “Wokeness” so you can roll your eyes and make millions of people unsafe, we’re in different territory. It’s no longer an “agree to disagree” situation, and I do not want to unify with people who think babies should be born even if the mother is twelve and the victim of incest or sexual assault. I do not want to make nice with people who think a woman having a miscarriage should be told to wait in the parking lot of the hospital until she’s close enough to death for the doctors to feel like their medical licenses aren't going to be revoked if they give her the lifesaving healthcare she needs. I don’t want to agree to disagree with people who think it’s okay for a woman to have to travel to another state to have her life saved. This is not the way forward.

And I already know what happens when you hope men who think this way - men who believe women are objects or baby makers or people who can’t be trusted to make deeply personal decisions about their own bodies - will have mercy on you. They will not. Not if you coddle them or walk on eggshells or ask nicely, or do everything right. That doesn’t keep you safe. So I’ll be over here, hopeful and enraged, and I’ll be using that rage to do everything in my power to see the first woman become president, finally, because I’ve had enough of dicks. I hope you have, too.

If you’d like to meet me in real time to talk about sexism, feminism, racism, equal rights, female rage, the power of childless cat ladies, why life feels better when we care about other people (and also mind our own business)… and whatever else comes out of my mouth while I’m so fired up, I’ll be here 7/26/24 at 11:15am PST, or you can wait for the Come As You Are podcast version. Thank you so much for spending some time with me.