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| Art by Arna Baartz |
Beyonce
thinks girls run the world. I like her optimism, but it’s off-base.
If women ran the world – if it was really true that we run the
fucking world – 3.5 million female children in Turkey wouldn’t be
in contractually-arranged rape relationships (child ‘marriage’),
and the pregnant girls of Boko Haram wouldn’t have been abducted,
impregnated, left alone to fend for themselves, and shamed by their
community. We would be fucking safe from rape, from abuse, from
misogynist social policies. We wouldn’t be scared for the safety of
our children. We would be able to make more and better choices for
ourselves and our families. We wouldn’t be marginalized and shamed
for enjoying motherhood. We wouldn’t be fucking oppressed
like biblical fucking slaves.
We
are in the fucking wilderness.
If
you’re a woman and you decide to have a baby, good luck. It’s not
easy to navigate the array of social (let’s just call it ‘bullshit’
for the moment) bullshit and expectations surrounding the experience.
If you’re a single mother, the level of bullshit is increased
ten-fold and navigating it all is much more intense because you are
alone. That being said, It’s not always difficult being a single
mother. But for a vast majority of single moms, it’s fucking hard.
And it’s lonely, and isolating. Women that have the privilege of
having a partner (whether that partner is male or female) have help.
This means they have financial
help in most instances, and that kind of help goes a long way toward
relieving a lot of pressure and helping other things in their lives,
such as physical and mental health for example. Having someone else
around that you can trust to care for your children when you are sick
or tired, is an amazing thing. You can rest.
They can rest. However, many of us don’t have that privilege. We
just go and go and go and go. All of us have to make difficult
decisions to make things work financially. Sometimes to the detriment
of our relationships with our children and ourselves. We women have
to make choices. But the choices that we are ‘presented’ with by
society are not fair. Not by a fucking long shot.
The
truth is, we are controlled.
By men. I’m not going to waste time dragging in statistics here to
prove this point but if you want to google some feel free. Take a
look at the ratios of men to women in positions of power all over the
world and you’ll get a better idea of how controlled we are. From
presidents of countries, to corporations, to town hall and city
council boards, we are controlled in every which way imaginable.
Because we are rarely in positions of power, men make the majority of
decisions that affect our lives in both public and private ways. They
rely on their own male understandings of reality when they do this –
which is obviously highly problematic considering how many of them
are religious fundamentalists and think that the pains of childbirth
are our punishment from God for tempting Adam in the garden. This is
literally what they think. They also think that we are all objects to
be fucked. This is what they think. The porn industry is as
successful as it is because our society has normalized its
acceptance. Women need to wake the fuck up to what this is doing to
us and our daughters. And our sons.
We
have children on our own terms. But even when we do, the only options
‘offered’ to us are options created by men in power. We are not
consulted for policy that affects our livelihoods and existence. We
are forced
to pay tax on necessities like tampons and fucking menstrual pads.
Our social, sexual, emotional, and financial resources are
continually extracted by men in power for their own benefit and it
needs to stop. These extractions are violent because they are forced
and they are against our will and against our intuitive intelligence.
Forced
extractions do not equal choice, just as forced ‘sex’ does not
equal sex – it equals rape. This must stop. Our resources are
valuable and we must protect them.
If
we have a baby, we are forced
to return to work. Frustrated with being forced to return to work, we
are forced
to play the capitalist game - which is essentially a misogynist game
that places more value on the accumulation of capital than on the
building of a strong and healthy society. Enmeshed within this
system, rife with a variety of damaging liberal feminisms disguised
as progressive politics that are patriarchally oppressive in
nature to women, we are forced
to perform male-sanctioned 'work' and neglect caring for our
children. We are forced
to make 'choices' that hurt. We are forced
to literally go against our nature and our instincts, to leave our
children in the care of strangers who we are not allowed to
personally vet; we are forced
to trust the state and its policies and practices in the governance
of our lives and that of our children. We are forcefully
placed between a rock and a hard place:
- Between slaving away in a bullshit capitalist economy that devalues our motherhood and our work at home through a variety of misogynist social mechanisms constructed to oppress and erase us - or -
- Staying home and having our maternal work devalued through a variety of misogynist social mechanisms.
WE.
ARE. AT. WAR.
With ourselves, internally, and with the patriarchal structures of
society, externally. We are at war with ourselves internally because
the external social mechanisms and forces of misogyny press down upon
us, press down upon our minds and our hearts, twisting our emotions,
making it hard to know what to do with the 'choices' we are forced
to
accept, realizing that in this system, the 'options' available to us
are not really choices after all, and so we are made angry, we are
deeply hurting, we are made to feel like we have given up, like we
are not contributing enough if we choose to stay at home with our
children, we are made to feel like we are weak, non-contributing
social leeches, unable to perform like everyone around us, according
to male capitalist expectations.
FUCK
THAT.
We
are not fucking slaves. Not to capitalism, and not to patriarchy. Our
children are not pawns to be used in the misogynist accumulation of
capital. We are not slaves. Our children are not slaves. We owe it to
ourselves and to our daughters and the future of our world to stand
up to this systemic-historical violence and take our fucking power
back. We will no longer allow male-dominated systems and patriarchal
regimes of rationalisation to govern us through oppressive rules,
policies, agendas, and misogynist practices. We will no longer allow
men to dictate what options are available to us. We will no longer
accept male-constructed realities of capitalist 'choice' as the only
options on our table. We will no longer tolerate the extraction of
our natural resources. We will create our own structures of power and
governance. We are going to dismantle this system and make it work
for US. We are going to make it work in the name of Goddess, in the
names of all of the mothers who have gone before us and been abused,
violated, devalued, marginalised, mistreated, raped, maimed,
oppressed, and silenced. We are the lifeblood of this world. We have
always been. They depend on us. Without us they literally wouldn't
exist. They owe it to us to listen. And if they don't, we will fight
back.
We
will shame them. We will publicly call them out on their bullshit. We
will not take 'no' for an answer anymore. We are stronger than what
we may appear. We are a force more powerful than any government,
policy, or religion.
We
are going to change the world.
An excerpt from the upcoming Girl God anthology, Single Mothers Speak on Patriachary.
Nile
Pierce is a secret academic and artist currently living and working
in Glasgow, Scotland. Her first poem was published when she was 7
years old, albeit under a different name. She has been writing and
doing spoken word for many years and has amassed a trove of poems
that now number into the thousands. She is a proud single mother and
loves her child more than anything else in the world. You can find
her social commentary on feminism and single motherhood
at magnadea.org
Thank you Nile, for this wonderful article! I can relate to this energy, but as we must be aware, that you cannot fuck for virginity, you can not fight for peace. We use male weapons,when we fight. To a certain degree it is right to do that, but then you must be aware of it. Certain situations call for male energy. But our main strength should be the female energy,don't you agree? I was an at-home mom for three children, with a partner, and started to learn to find the female strength in that time. There is still so much to explore. One of the basics is the connection to, and the wisdom of the body. And our social competence. We don't need men for that. We have to find our strength there and help men. But the most difficult is to find a balance. For example : To find a doctor that is accepting that you know what is wrong and assists with his knowledge towards your healing.
ReplyDeleteWe may vote and repair cars because western women faught therefore. But the way of the feminine energy would be to live and dance your strength and honour women and men for their capabilities. All the best to all in love and light and Harmony. Andrea
Hi Andrea, this is Nile (logged into the MD account). First off, thank you for taking the time out of your day to read the piece and respond with your comments and complement - I am very flattered! With respect to you, I agree with some of the points you raised, but not others. I will be brief in outlining why. The first and most important issue i'm interested in is the idea of gendered energy. I personally do not believe that energy is inherently or originally (in terms of source) gendered; we heuristically qualify energy this way, as male or female, but i do not believe that it has an intrinsic gender value or type. When you say "Our main strength should be female energy, don't you agree?", I think what you may mean is that we should be practicing and cultivating compassionate energy that heals and love all within its vicinity, yes? I don't philosophically disagree with you on that at all because I think that compassion is something women practice more of - however, I think they practice it more because of how we are raised and the struggles we all face through our lives (namely taking care of others/family). I think that there is a real potential - and need - for girls and women to be more assertive, more aggressive, to own their own power more AND to allow themselves the right (because it is a right) to get angry at certain things and to do what they can to dismantle harmful systems of oppression. There is no reason that we should sit and quietly accept the ongoing abuse of ourselves or others. Passivity in the face of grave injustices is itself harmful. If a woman allows a man to hurt her in front of her child, and she does nothing to stop it, that inaction on her part contributes to the abuse of the child who is harmed by that behaviour especially if it takes place over long periods of time. Women not explaining the reality of rape to their daughters harms them because their daughters enter into a world ill-informed with false expectations. Silence and passivity in these matters is harmful. I think that there are times when aggression is necessary. Consider the allegory of the various slave revolts that happened over time in the United States, for example. Black Americans would not be free today had they not fought on behalf of their ancestors, themselves, and their future decedents. I'm not a historian on these matters but I understand the basic tenets of what happened in certain instances. Something else you said interests me: "We have to find our strength there and help men." With all due respect, I wholeheartedly disagree with this firstly because it is not our responsibility to do men's work for them; and secondly because men today are aware that they are in control and that there are grave injustices happening against women in all corners of the world (pornography being one, but I digress) yet they choose to continue on as they always have. In fact, they have the audacity in some instances to make very political calls for change, advocating more compassion in politics, etc. But while they may talk the good talk, they rarely walk the good walk. So no, I do not believe that we women need to exhaust ourselves any more than we already do trying to change men. Men know they need to change. They witness our humiliation and oppression daily in a variety of ways. They are already aware of all of this. They simply don't want to change because the system, the way it currently is, benefits them. There are some men doing the good work but they are sadly very few and far between. We need more women in positions of power on a global level. And I agree with you that we need more love and light in the world. That is why I am on the path I am on. Thank you for honouring me with your thoughts and words. All the best, Nile
ReplyDeleteHi, Nile, thank you for this strong clear expression of the need for women to unite to change our material conditions in the world. All humans are "forced" to do certain things to survive, but women are forced far beyond the needs of nature. Society is built on women's unpaid labor and sacrifice. Even this, to some extent, could be tolerated if we women had chosed this subordination, but it has instead been imposed on us, resulting in a lethal imbalance between the sexes. It is important to note as you have that we are kept exhausted with imposed responsibilities so that we will not rise up and re-impose a healthy balance.
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