It was by accident/happenstance that my last two posts (Confessions of a TERF andConfessions of a Racist) had an obvious theme. Neither were written because they were necessarily timely or relevant to larger discussions we’ve been having here, nor did I anticipate they would be as well-received as they had been.
In the comment section of the former post, I joked that I had some internalized misogyny, but it would take me years to unpack that. And it’s true, I do carry some baggage with me about women and I, like millions of other women, find myself judging them so much harder than I do men.
What’s the opposite of “the soft bigotry of low expectations?” That’s what I (and I believe most women) carry with me every day. I don’t think it’s benign per se, but I’m also not going to dig deep into why women like myself fight that battle because I don’t think it’s that important.
I hope that one day it will be but I don’t think we have that luxury now, if we ever did at all.
Before I continue though, I need a standing ovation for Cecily Strong and her skit on SNL’s Weekend Update. If you haven’t seen it yet, you must correct that oversight. This post is written in dedication to and appreciation for her.
The absurdity (and it’s beyond absurd) of the skit is what makes it so absolutely and paradoxically poignant. Here is a smart, talented, successful woman talking about her own abortion and literally acting like a clown in order to make it seem harmless- which it was ALREADY.
But she had to make it more palatable to the audience. An audience, I should add, that is likely already mostly on her side of the issue.
Strong later said that the skit was indeed biographical, and she hadn’t even told her own mother about her abortion. She wanted to tell her story but she wasn’t sure how to do it and, at one point, even asked people if she was crazy to think she could pull off this skit.
(That’s another thing about women- whether it’s abortion or rape or domestic violence, we often carry it alone, quite often further enabling the stigma because we think there’s something wrong with us if we can’t carry that particular weight with quiet dignity.)
And that is the most frustrating part about abortion as “an issue;” as Strong points out, it’s not an uncommon procedure or experience for many, many women. And as I always say, if you think you don’t know any women who’ve had an abortion, you do. You just don’t know any women who’ve felt safe telling you about it.
You know what else I say that about? Sexual violence. I guarantee, statistics be damned, that nearly every woman you know has experienced being treated as an object at best, violently raped at worst.
If we’re murdered it’s almost always a man who slithered his way through the “justice” system for years, despite our bruises or wounds. And sometimes women help those men. The reasons for that are as sad as they are varied, but they all mostly boil down to not wanting to be in more danger. Indeed, the most dangerous place a woman can live in this world is in the weeks after leaving an abusive partner.
I hope and want to believe that this is slowly changing but until it’s eradicated, women are trained from a young age how to adapt to this violently misogynistic society rather than young men being trained how to not be sexually or otherwise violent towards women.
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When my oldest niece was born I was blown away. Beyond in love with her and determined to keep her safe for her entire life, and that overwhelming love was when I realized something was tragically even more wrong than what I’d previous realized.
After five nephews, I finally got a niece and I literally danced as I walked for weeks afterward.
But I was also overwhelmed with the thought that she would one day grow up in this world and we hadn’t taught our boys anything. I carried- and still carry with me to this day- the anxiety of loving this girl so much and being unable to ever truly protect her.
When she was a couple of weeks old, I remembered a line I had heard in a movie or TV show or maybe just popular culture in general.
“When you have a son, you spend your whole life worrying about that one boy. When you have a daughter, you spend your whole life worrying about every other boy in the world.”
And that shouldn’t be our truth. That shouldn’t be what we feel when we look at our daughters and it shouldn’t be what we expect of our sons. We shouldn’t be resigned to the idea that she is vulnerable as a girl in a world designed by men. We can no longer accept that our boys will just be boys, and part of being a boy is damaging women.
As far as my eldest niece goes, my mom and I (her primary custodians) didn’t really teach her anything at a young age other than “always be comfortable with your feelings.” (I know I’m prejudiced, but my niece was and is an insanely adorable creature. I want to belabor this point so hard that I will probably have to delete several paragraphs about how fucking cute she is/was when I edit this. [Ed note— I deleted seven paragraphs])
Anyway, whenever we went to the store or the park or any other public place, people- mostly elderly ones- would see her and light up and approach her asking for a hug or whatever. My funny, adorable little niece would most often turn her head up and over so as to show she didn’t want that person in her space. Otherwise known as sticking one’s nose in the air.
Every once in a while she’d smile back and give a hug to the person then sing a song for them. (FWIW, her voice has never been as beautiful as she is so we taught her the shortest version of all of her favorite songs. For our own well-being. There is no amount of adoration within me that will justify that rusty can sliding across a chalkboard her singing voice.)
What was remarkable is that when she was a toddler, 90% of the women who approached her got at least a smile and a song, and less than 1% of men got the same.
Yet 100% of the women who got the “you don’t exist to me” head turn accepted and respected that, saying something along the lines of “good girl, she knows not to talk to strangers!”
To be fair, about half of the men behaved the same.
But we never really talk about the other half, do we?
The other half of men that she shunned became visibly angry. “You’ve taught that child no manners!” or “when I was a kid we respected our elders!” or “she’s going to have to get used to strangers, you know!” or, my favorite “WHY DON’T YOU TEACH THAT GIRL TO SMILE?!?!?!” Like she’s a fucking dog pissing on the carpet and this dude is flabbergasted that I haven’t potty trained it.
They all became offended when my niece drew her own boundaries. They all seemed to believe that it was something wrong with her or me that she didn’t want their attention. They never considered that my niece didn’t want their attention.
We never had an explicit or open conversation about this, my mom and I were just naturally on the same page as far as my niece went. She owned her own body, her own face, her own energy. Sure, there were things like bathing and swimming and other things toddlers can’t do alone where we had to be at least supervising but often actively in charge of her, but other than that no one, not one person in the world, could force upon her body anything she didn’t want. As a toddler, that was an unwelcome hug, but we knew that as she got older it would escalate.
The thing was, raising my niece made navigating this world even more complicated and difficult for me. It was now a wickedly designed and plainly dangerous maze rather than the maze I had grown so accustomed to that it now seemed mundane, even when I hit a dead end.
Every single fear that I had for my niece was part of my own history, my own trauma. And so much of my own trauma was knowing the trauma of my mother, and her mother before her, and her mother before her. My niece was an adorable, brilliant, individual being of her own, yet also a composite of every woman before her.
She’s sitting in a dark basement room, the only physical contact being a smack across the face, and no way to remember last time she saw the sun. She’s the little girl dropped off at the steps of an orphanage, the girl also later inheriting the trait of the only physical contact being a smack across the face.
The girl pregnant at fifteen but never considering an abortion because she so wanted another human, one who would never know poverty and the desperation she felt. The same girl who later wrapped her infant child in a blanket and held him close to her chest as she stepped out on the ledge of her apartment window, suddenly aware that she couldn’t escape her fate and thus she had also doomed her first begotten son to the same, and that was a fate worse than death.
This is the girl who went to spend the night at her friend’s house and woke up to her friend’s father with his hand where it shouldn’t be. The girl who’s tiny body completely froze until he finished what he was doing before running home barefoot in the middle of the night. This is the girl that woke up one night in a cheap motel with her naked body pressed hard against the cold wall, barely able to comprehend what the man who had pinned her there was doing behind her.
This is the girl who is twelve years old and on the couch with a man three times her age shoving his tongue down her throat. This is the girl who was thirteen when she woke up to a man asleep on the couch, who suddenly grabbed her arm and pulled her down on top of him, pressing her pelvis into his and grinding and asking if she wouldn’t mind getting naked for him. This is the girl that knew enough to be scared when he asked if she couldn’t tell how hard he was or if she simply didn’t care. This is the girl who pried herself away and made a pot of coffee and felt invaded but otherwise normal because these are just the things that happen.
This is the girl who had a pregnancy scare at fourteen and, unable to collect the money needed for an abortion, instead got really drunk and had her best friends punch her as hard as they could in her stomach. This is the girl who had a nice boyfriend who said that however the pregnancy test turned out, it would be ok, and this is the girl who five minutes later crouched in a corner among shattered glass trying to explain how she could be so fucking stupid.
My niece, my beautiful niece, was all of those women in my eyes. All of those scenarios and more I had to protect her from. Her very innocence shattered me because I knew it was destined to be short-lived. I did the typical thing and said I was going to keep her in the attic until she was thirty. And even then, any man who wanted to see her would have to submit to a serious interrogation.
This is the strange experience of being a woman. We are individuals, radically diverse and unique, yet also all the same. The woman who thinks and feels and dreams and contributes to society and loves and is loved is the same woman who will nevertheless eventually find herself in the proverbial dark alley and lives each day with that inevitability. We somehow reconcile those two beings at some point in our lives- usually in the aftermath of said dark alley. We are sincere and genuine, but we’re also scared and always aware that we are prey so we hold a lot back.
So I don’t really care what internalized misogyny I carry because it’s nothing compared to the specifically female trauma that this world created. It’s light as a feather compared to the generational trauma I drag around with me. It isn’t what led me to write a line in a song that said screamed “now not even my cunt is mine” and it isn’t the sigh and deep exhale my mother gave when she heard that, turned her head towards me, and said “you know I don’t like That Word but that was a really good song.”
It isn’t like the feeling I had on my eighteenth birthday when I was pregnant and trying to figure out how to get an abortion. It’s not the suffocating feeling of turning the corner at the drug store to find a man with his shorts pulled down and penis hanging out, staring at eight year old me as he started to pleasure himself.
It’s more the feeling of running fast away from the man and towards the customer service counter. My internalized misogyny is based on the fact that I find safety in women. That a part of me will always see them as caregivers first and foremost.
And I’m okay with that for now. As long as the world is as daunting as it is for women, I will embrace the stereotype of feminine = nurturing. It’s all I’ve ever really known. And it’s what I’ve become. My oldest niece is now approaching her 18th birthday and so recently I asked her if she needed birth control. She said yes. I told her if it ever fails, call me and we’ll take care of it and she said she already knew that.
If my niece also carries internalized misogyny I have never seen it, but that she sees me as a caregiver first and foremost I am okay with because my life wouldn’t be my own if she didn’t know I was always here, ready for a hug, no matter what.
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Like Cecily Strong, I haven’t told my mom about, well, everything. Or anything.
She knows things have happened and she’s allowed me the space to tell her vaguely about some of them, but I don’t think I can ever tell her about most of it. I know she’ll blame herself and if I’m being totally honest, I DID blame her for most of it, too.
Because the very young, recently divorced single mother can make many mistakes, yes, but why is the worst thing a mother can do is bring men around her children?
And WHY am I so mad at my mother for what men did?
Women shouldn’t have to constantly view every single man as a potential predator. Seriously- how are we to function in this world if we have to always set aside how dangerous men are to us, while also pretending we are not at all threatened by men?
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One day when I was about ten, my family had a big get together at the nearby reservoir, as we did several times every summer. There were about eight of us girls sitting under a big umbrella in wet swimsuits with towels wrapped around our shoulders. Both sides of my family were there. I took a deep breath and told my sister and my cousins that I was being molested and I didn’t know how to stop it. I had heard all the speeches in school about “tell somebody” and all that, but I still felt, and feel to this day, incredibly stupid for telling my story.
I finished my story anyway.
And then one by one, they started telling their own stories.
A group of young girls, ten to twelve, telling their stories of molestation. Only one cousin swore she’d never experienced anything like that but I knew she had because I was there when it happened. I remember the police coming to our house to take a statement from her, and I remember how my young body trembled when they said “we’ll probably never find him, unfortunately, unless he does something serious to another young lady.” I thought the police would recognize what happened WAS serious, but they didn't and so I knew I would always be in danger of seeing that man again. That is a really hard lesson to absorb at nine years old.
When I was older and first came across the perfectly accepted statistic that one in three women will be sexually violated in their lifetimes I couldn’t help but laugh.
I don’t know a single woman who hasn’t been.
This is the hardest part of being a woman. She tried to shield it from us but we, my sister and I, heard every detail of what happened to our mom, both as an adult and a child. We heard what happened to our grandma- and I haven’t yet and probably never will share what I learned about my other grandma.
In so many ways this is simply generational trauma, but it’s also because so little has changed. No, in theory, our bosses can’t slap our asses while we’re in the office. In theory men can no longer make offhand, sexist comments. (BTW, if you’re one of those men who thinks “just the tip” is a good punchline in any situation, please STFU forever.)
So many men feel like they’re being shackled by the “#MeToo” movement, otherwise known as “we’re fucking tired of your shit,” and at the same time women are feeling shackled by, well, just look around at everything.
And yet we’re *still* required to make men feel comfortable in our presence as though we’re the ones who can inflict harm.
So there will be no “Confessions of a Misogynist” from me. Yes, I sometimes objectify women. Yes, I judge them harsher than I judge men. Yes, I hold them to a higher standard and yes, I do that because I think they are superior to men.
There.
I fucking said it.
But I didn’t write the rules, I’ve just lived by them.
And in part two we’re going to talk about how the rules are far worse for men than they are for women, but for now I just needed to be an angry feminist.