Don’t go alone to that party. Call me when you get there. Watch your drink. Carry your keys like Wolverine’s claws in your fist when you’re walking at night. But try not to walk at night. Remember your self-defense training. Check under and inside your car before you get in.
Try not to smile too much, it gives men the wrong impression. Same with applying lipstick in front of them. Same with being nice to them. Same with being kind. What is the right impression, you ask? Why, no impression at all is best.
Safer to go as unnoticed as possible.
Have you heard of the rapeX condom? It’s a sleeve of blades you slip in your vagina for when someone forces themselves inside you. It will dig its way into their penis so that they can’t deny what they did to you when they go to the hospital to have it removed. They’ll still make it inside of you, but it will just be that one time. Just that one thrust.
Then you’ll be safe.
We know these lines. We’ve said these words. We’ve followed these instructions.
Then why weren’t we safe?
Why did so many of us wake up one hot day in June 2022 abandoned with no recourse for our unwanted pregnancies, dangerous and potentially fatal pregnancies, pregnancies that were the results of rape, incest, lack of resources, accidents, and every other valid reason not carry a pregnancy to term? How did our bodies suddenly belong to the same types of people we have been told all our lives to protect ourselves against?
The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade is a devastating, terrifying, and humiliating violation. And it is also a word I don’t have in my arsenal. A word that tears through everything I ever thought I knew about goodness and basic human rights. Yet another American bullet shattering our flimsy illusion of the land of the free.
Now with heavy hearts, we ask ourselves, what is next? Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has already answered this for us. Contraception. Queer marriage. Queer Sex.
The Supreme Court of the United States of America is forcing itself into our bedrooms and bodies. This is not only a war on child-bearing people. This is a war on all of us. This is a war on our humanity, and I, for one, am out of white flags.
