In the last several weeks, coincidentally or not, leading up to March (which is International Women’s History Month), I’ve read more and more disturbing stories and statistics about the state of women in the world. First there were three articles in three separate women’s magazines about survivors of rape in the Darfur region of Africa. Then there was the reminder that Nicaragua and Colombia recently ruled to outlaw abortion. Today it was a piece about how in the last 10 years the rate of women infected with HIV/AIDS in Brazil jumped 44%. Those are the big blips on my consciousess’ radar screen. The smaller ones include reading about how 23 women were asked to leave their sorority house supposedly because they didn’t fit a “pretty girl” image. Then there was the conversation I had with my cousin about how she was changing her entire diet because she just had to lose more weight because someone at some point in her life had told her her wide hips and big booty were somehow wrong. Let’s not forget the personal experience of being hassled and then followed on a subway car by a man who felt it was his right--because he has a penis--to invade my personal space causing me to flinch, my heart to race and the fear that I too could become a statistic someone reads about in the paper.
All of these things made me recall why I wrote the prelude I posted several months ago. At the time I couldn’t articulate all of the thoughts and emotions that weighed heavily on my mind so the poem, was a more raw option, something that wouldn’t force me to explain. But in honor of my XX chromosomes, personal and global, I felt like there was no better time to share and fully examine and articulate my feelings as well as the source of them.
“In the recent shootings at an Amish schoolhouse in rural Pennsylvania and a large public high school in Colorado, the killers went out of their way to separate the girls from the boys, and then deliberately attacked only the girls. Ten girls were shot and five killed at the Amish school. One girl was killed and a number of others were molested in the Colorado attack. In the widespread coverage that followed these crimes, very little was made of the fact that only girls were targeted…we have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that violence against females is more or less to be expected.”
--Bob Herbert, The New York Times, October 2006
The words jumped from the page before me. Although I had cringed at the fact that more young people were being affected by violence, I hadn’t been aware of some of the facts behind the cases. How, and why, in the world would you choose to hurt anyone, but specifically young girls? Reading this shook me to the core. How and why has misogyny become an accepted norm? In each situation girls were separated from boys with the intention of molesting and then killing them. There wasn't a single cry of outrage. He pointed out that if the children had been separated based on religion or race, a national uproar would have been made. And up until that moment I hadn’t considered that he was potentially right. Why is it ok for women to be commodified? Why is it ok for us to use language that is violent and degrading, oppressive and belittling to describe women? Worse still, why is it ok to act on those words, to give credence to their existence? Girls are daughters and sisters and mothers and aunts and grandmothers and wives. They are friends and girlfriends and cousins and children.
They—we--are people. Period.
But it was the rest of the editorial that truly made me pause. The author discussed the long standing tradition of misogyny that just can’t seem to be escaped, that seems to loom and grow larger daily. I hear it in songs, I see it on television. I glance at it on billboards. From the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep I feel like I’m being invaded by messages that the only thing my person is used/ful for is to be a receptacle, something that receives: anger, dissent, negativity, projected emotions, semen, you name it. And while it sounds harsh, in the literal way, it makes total sense.
Physiologically females are capable of holding, nurturing, nourishing and sustaining life. Their own as well as the children they have the ability to create if they so choose. But somewhere in the thick of that, perhaps because of our power, our strength, our natural ability to aguantar (hold) females have become vessels for everything else that can be thrown our way.
**Even the word aguantar…it literally means "to hold." In Latino culture, or at least how I saw it exemplified around me my whole life, the word meant that women had to tolerate, accept, put up with it, swallow themselves. For men, for image, for family, for every possible reason you could think of. It was something I even bought into for a while. Somehow the ability to "aguantar" is/wasnoble. Like the mujeres who can hold out the longest win some sort of prize. But do they really? And what is it that they get? **
How is it that men are made from women, carried in wombs, invading bodies and nurtured throughout, spend their entire lives trying to get back inside, but are so quick to use ugly words and project their own anger and insecurity? Is it that they see reflections in the women in their lives and can't deal with it? Is it because they have absolutely no one else to take it out on?
On a random note...I informally counted 9 different sexual euphemisms that had violent indications or aggressiveness undertones. Smash, beat, slay, hit, crush, knock, bang, screw, dig, etc. What about this is romantic? What about this derives a connection? Even in the crudest, most animalistic sense, nothing about these words indicates that a woman exists for anything other than to be the receiver of something, to be violently affected by a man’s desires.
Although I am pro-woman, it doesn’t mean that I’m not guilty of, or had my own fair share of, moments. Moments where in anger/frustration/insecurity/fear I have hurled words like bitch, hooch, skank, et.al. towards or about another female. Those moments color my cheeks crimson after for I realize when my emotion has subsided that I’ve bought into the bullshit and denigrated someone else, someone just like me. As a writer I acknowledge and understand the sacredness of words and the ability they have to make things real. I realize that I too have been socialized by this behavior and language that we have incorporated into our vernacular, into our actions. Why? At what point in time did these words become synonyms for girl/lady/female/woman/her/she/me? I’ve lost count and am unable to even rationalize. I just acknowledge that it’s a battle for all of us, even when we try, to not bend to the tidal wave of misogyny.
And for all the men who are reading this, don't get it twisted. I’m not anti-man or bitter or angry or caught up from some past hurt. I am just observing the world around me and find it amazing that although women create life, our own lives and persons are so poorly valued.
