“We Are Not The Same Women That You Controlled Fifty Years Ago” – @mommamia1217
Believing in The Power of Women Doesn’t Make You A Woman’s Ally. It’s Not Enough To Just Believe We Can Be Great, It’s Your Job To Ensure That We Have The Space To Be Great Without Your Judgement, Shame, And Guilt Ridden Need To Destroy Everything We Could Be By Stomping on What We Are – Anonymous
I’ve been thinking this for a while, but because of my brain and the amount of crap shoved in there, I kind of forgot how to say this exact thing as succinctly.
Every once in a while something truly great comes across Twitter and every cell in my circular system goes into overdrive. Today is one of those truly majickal days.
10,000 years ago women were respected – barely – in the heat of the desert they wore barely any clothing because of the heat, and the more beautiful you were, the more power you held. If you had brains all the better, but let’s be honest back then brains weren’t entirely necessary to be a woman.
That being said women in the days of ancient times knew how to ensure the continuation of their line, they passed down their experience, their stories, and their majick through their children, ensuring that if they couldn’t have better lives, then their descendants would.
Each generation of womanhood brings bout a reckoning against a world that consistently continues to believe it can beat the women out of women, in every possible humiliating and horrible way.
Women have been fighting for every minute bit of recognition since the beginning of time, and wherever there has been a man in a woman’s life, throughout any timeframe of our history, there have been women who suffered at either his hands or the hands of men he called friend.
When we tell men that we need them to speak out and reach up, when we tell them that we need their support, too many of them, especially young men, think that their support should come with strings.
“I was so nice to her, why doesn’t she want to sleep with me?” Too many men don’t understand the concept of consensual and platonic friendships, and I don’t know if it’s because they are consuming the wrong kind of media, if it’s too much time on gaming platforms, or if it’s school and media, but whatever it is, it’s becoming increasingly terrifying to be a woman on this planet.
The question posed is “what would you do, if you could get away with anything?” And the response from the man is “I sort of feel like I’d rape a really attractive woman…” Okay cool, good thing I’m fucking hideous I guess?
I gained a lot of weight over the days of the pandemic and honestly, I could care less about how it makes me look. “yes gentlemen, give me your best “you’re hideous,” look, lets me know I’m safe and I don’t have to kick you in the balls,” is a shit way to live, but I’ll take it if it means that I never get raped again.
I sort of feel like if I could do absolutely anything and get away with it, I’d rob a BUNCH of banks, like, obviously? Whether I need money or not, what I don’t need I can share, and what the fucks are the cops going to do about something who travels the world giving away free money? Little to nothing, you know why? Because all the people I give money to would probably hide me, so I could just travel the world helping people with money stolen from banks. My FIRST inclination would probably not be “let me go destroy someone’s life,” and that’s the huge difference between women and basically any man, anywhere.
Women are natural nurturers, but not because we want to be, it’s because we’re conditioned to believe that if we don’t take care of the boys in our lives, they won’t take care of themselves, and so we OFTEN neglect our own needs in order to provide whatever the men in our lives need so that we can feel safe and secure under their protection.
When we escape that cycle we’re called crazy, told we’re too loud and we should shhh about not wanting to get married or have kids. And I recognize that I’m one in a billion bloggers who have written this very post in their late thirties, but that’s because I’ve finally realized, this is how fucking long it takes to look at your life and have your “holy shit moment“.
What Is A Holy Shit Moment?
A Holy Shit moment if I remember correctly from a long deceased blog (I think) named Yes This Really Happened, is the moment when everything about your life becomes crystal clear, and they don’t last very long, it’s like a switch goes off in your brain. It makes you gasp, it shocks your entire system, and everything in your life for just a second or two suddenly makes perfect sense.
Women, in particular, have these moments and I don’t know about other women, but often when I have these moments – and they aren’t as rare as they feel – I usually get pretty pissed off. Largely because MY holy shit moments usually happen to be huge massive reminders that I’m still alive, and honestly, I really shouldn’t be.
There’s absolutely no reason for me to have survived ALL of that trauma, except for the fact that somewhere in Heaven or Hell there is an angel with some seriously deranged mental health issues of their own.
As women, we’re constantly seeing more and more young girls call themselves feminists without really knowing what that means. Many feminists will tell you that feminism stands for all women everywhere. Except:
- Trans women
- Women of Color
- Women of particular faiths
- Sex Workers
They’ll look you right in the eye and tell you that they stand for all of these issues, but when folks – women – with these issues come to them for help, they are suddenly nowhere to be seen. I’ve seen it a thousand times. “Well sure I love women,” “Okay cool, what about a Black Jewish and Muslim Woman who’s transgender?” “Um well define trans…” I’d add a level of “oh look I’m shocked,” but I’m not.
When the first Women’s March happened, I was excited, at first, thinking that women all over the world were finally standing up (again) against the same oppression as our sisters, cousins, and ancestress, but hey nope, that didn’t happen.
Black women, Trans women, and Sex Workers were blocked from speaking on the big stages, and I can’t think of anything more disgusting than saying to the world “we support all women,” without actually supporting all women.
How Do Women Claim to Support ALL Women, And Then Not?
It’s actually not as easy as one might think. We talk about the abuse that women face in white supremacist groups, but women of colour women – in particular – don’t care. They don’t care because they don’t honestly see the abuse they face at the hands of white supremacists as the same thing. “We’re abused because we’re women of colour.”
Yes, we are, absolutely and it’s fucking nasty.
However, they are abused from childhood by the same men that spit on us and threaten us, they are raped, beaten, and abused into believing what they believe, and OFTEN for women in white supremacist groups, repeating the evil rhetoric is a survival technique more than it is a weapon of hatred directed at you because of race, creed, nationality, size, or orientation.
If we’re going to talk about Critical Race Theory seriously, then we have to acknowledge the pain and trauma that white CHILDREN faced at the hands of the same men – and women – who abused our children, and our ancestors.
I will keep harping on the fact that the KKK and many other white supremacist groups around the world have classes for children, DESIGNED to teach them to hate anything that isn’t white. They are conditioned over and over again to believe that anything that isn’t white and of the exact same Christian order as them, then “we” are the enemy.
The same thing happens in cultures around the world – every single country has some form of a secret underground network of supremacists all claiming that they are the beginning, the future, and the end of humanity, and if you do your own research you’ll be able to understand how TRULY awful the war against EVERY woman is.
Julius Caesar had assorted wives, mistresses and male lovers, prompting the poet Catullus to refer to Caesar as ″the husband to every woman and wife to every man″ in Rome. Caesar carried on a scandalous relationship with King Nicomedes of Bithynia, now in present-day Turkey.
apnnews.com
The fact that we’re too lazy to acknowledge that Ceaser, one of the world’s greatest warlords and strategists, was also one of the most openly bisexual men on the planet – and he wasn’t the first.
Sexuality has been fluid as long as there have been humans on the planet, it wasn’t until the rise of Christianity that sex became secular, it wasn’t until the rise of Christianity that being anything other than “white” was bad a thing.
In the days of old people fighting for all kinds of things, but most resources, in the days of old women, were retired to the bedroom or the kitchen, and very few women were allowed in the halls were politics discussed.
Those that were there were often only there because of the station of their men, and often times the women in the arms of soldiers were not wives but concubines, wives were at home tending to the kitchen, the gardens, the farm, and the children, while men went off to war to kill things, because that’s what men do.
These days most countries that are at war are often at war because of the same things as days of old,: religion, power, resources, and freedom. Every single person on earth wants to know what it feels like to own a house, have children, (or not,) fall in love and just have some sense of stability, but with the number of humans on this planet, the growing economic disparity and all the other issues we face, human beings are leaving women out in the cold, and women are more than ever before in the history of time, standing up for themselves.
But this isn’t the first time that women have made their presence known on this earth, and that includes their power, their strength, and their majickal ability to survive whatever the world or the universe throws at them.
5th century[edit]
- 4th–6th century: Possible time period that the legendary woman warrior Hua Mulan may have lived.[188]
- 5th century: Princess Sela acts as a pirate. The Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus described Sela as a “skilled warrior and experienced in roving.”[189][190]
- 450 – A Moche woman was buried with two ceremonial war clubs and twenty-eight spear throwers. The South American grave is discovered in 2006 and is the first known grave of a Moche woman to contain weapons.[191]
- 451: Saint Genevieve is credited with averting Attila from Paris by rallying the people in prayer.[192]
All of this really great information and much more can be found on Wikipedia or at your local library.
Some women – a lot of women actually – get super uncomfortable when it comes to fighting for what they deserve, and that’s entire because TOO many women don’t know they are allowed to fight for themselves. I didn’t, Michelle Obama didn’t, Oprah didn’t Beyonce didn’t so many women did not know, even after centuries of women standing up for themselves, that they could.
It’s a skill we learn, or if we’re lucky that we’re taught at an early age. But the society that we live in constantly tells us that women aren’t good enough. We’re not as strong as men, we’re not as powerful, we’re not as well behaved, we’re too loud when we demand more, too quiet and easy to abuse when we don’t.
This is especially true for women in marginalized situations, regardless of race, creed, nationality, size, or orientation, women everywhere are and have been under attack since our very first existence.
Every historically accurate story about a woman who fights back, is also a tale about how she died, usually at the hands of those she was fighting against. That’s never going to stop, but if you’re going to say that you fight for women, then you have to fight for ALL women, and you don’t get to pick and choose which women you fight for, based on how different they may be from you.
That’s not how any of this works.
Sending all my love,
Devon J Hall
Loud Mouth Brown Girl 