Becoming Ugly
A good read. And some very insightful and thought provoking stuff. Especially after this year.
Quote:
What we as women are forced to carry—because we’re vulnerable and because we are strong—goes beyond the natural disorder of things. Our suffering is not natural; it’s calculated and insidious—the passing of a bill, the protests of a college football team, the success of an actor, and verdict of a judge.
Quote:
For the first time, I don’t know how to move past my boiling anger or laugh it away. Also for the first time, I have no desire to. Preferable, I now think, is to stop laughing, to become as repulsive as I can in an insult to these men—so many men—who hate women and the women who adulate them.
Quote:
... a woman’s life, beginning to end, is filled with violence. We’re born, we learn to be afraid, learn to be looked at, learn to be quiet, we bleed, we give birth, we age, we’re forgotten, and then we die. So much of what we encounter—marriage, raising children—is meant to hold us painfully still. Those who don’t offer gratitude for this stillness or choose to take control of their own movement—by living openly trans, by loving other women, by seizing autonomy with birth control pills, IUDs, or abortions—are punished, sometimes quietly and other times deafeningly.
Quote:
Women, though not always “good,” have always been nice. And look where it’s gotten us. Stripped of our rights, degraded, and still under the thumb of men. At no point in history has humanity as a whole been nice, so why should I? There’s no longer a place for pleasantness, not publicly anyway. Now is a time for fury and force—a time for guarding the few things we do have (our perseverance, our bodies, each other) because they’re so at risk and so, so precious.
Quote:
In my own small world, I hug the men I love, tell them I trust them, and thank them for being good when it’s so easy to be selfish. But I also have to remember that everyone in their secret histories has made some transgression against women, just as I—in my whiteness, my relative economic comfort, my blind spots, and areas of ignorance—have surely offended and impeded someone else.
It is very important, now more than ever, to shove off complacency - stillness - or whatever you want to call it.
Dec 30, 2016 @ 22:15:23
Administrator
