If You Gave a F*ck About Women

[TRIGGER WARNING: (Assault, violence, emotional turmoil) Instances of assault are recorded below in the recollection of my childhood. If you struggle with any of the above stated issues, proceed with caution.] ⚠️

From the time I was four years old I’ve had a wild, untethered spirit. With finger nails constantly full of dirt, my clothes often frayed at the edges from playing hard under the country sun, I awoke with the sunrise and slept with the moon. Often times I’d become part of the ‘pack’ consisting of my dog, Frankie, and my three-legged cat, Blue. Attacking each day with fervor, ‘Carpe Diem’ had nothing on us. Feral and free, joy radiated from our filthy faces, and I knew nothing of the far more insidious filth that would soon dirty me for decades to come: patriarchy, misogyny, and the world of conditioned female self-loathing.

Never did it make sense to me as a young girl that people would ask me who my favorite Disney princess was because I quite simply didn’t have one. My world was otherwise occupied with the exploration of the unknown and awaiting future adventures. Many adults thought I was being shy or deliberately obtuse in responding that I didn’t have a favorite princess, but I didn’t understand their unusual obsession with me and princesses. What’s the big deal about princesses? In my mind, most Disney films depicted princesses as either imprisoned, held captive, miserable, or being punished just for them being themselves. One element always remained consistent in this observation – each of the princesses required saving, and the saving was to be done by anyone other than herself, and usually the task was handed to a man. I had no desire or patience for these story lines and weak princess characters. ‘Being a Disney princess would suck,’ I often thought.

Aladdin and Peter Pan were my favorite Disney movies growing up, but never once did I imagine that I was Jasmine, Wendy, or Tinkerbell - but rather, I was Peter or Aladdin, steeping myself into the unknown, wading through adventure, jumping straight into the thick of the action while claiming my courage and owning my moral shortcomings to transform into the hero everyone adores. My heart leapt at the thought of taking flight (so much so that I’d spend hours jumping off of our brick hearth attempting to fly) exploring unknown lands and leading others to their own freedom, to the most joyous experience of their inner child. Heart still racing as I pondered the worlds of afar, bounding across the rooftops of my mind and gazing upon riches I could only have previously imagined, my imagination was ablaze. Befriending a genie, riding a magic carpet, and scouring the Cave of Wonders all seemed glamorous and glorious and totally out of reach if I were to desire to become a muted Disney princess. Princesses depicted as trite and watered-down idealized versions of women contrived only for men to consume and discard as the storyline dictates was repugnant. If only someone would have told me about Princess Diana, I might’ve liked princesses…

Movies and television shaped my worldview from an early age and my heroes did not stop at animated characters. It was apparent by the time I was eight that the world had inundated me with the primary message, “Men are powerful and fun, women are boring and bad.” At this age, my favorite movie was Robin Hood: Men in Tights. Not exactly appropriate fare for children, and missing many of the movie’s crude jokes from the masterful Mel Brooks, I still thoroughly immersed myself in this fictional, funny universe of Robin Hood. I distinctly remember identifying with Robin, admiring the smooth demeanor and quick wit delivered succinctly by Cary Elwes. Oh, to be a swashbuckling do-gooder, robbing from the rich and giving to the poor, all while laughing jollily along the way!

Wanting to be Robin that year for Halloween, I wasn’t sure people would understand my intentions. It’s not like I was focused on gender or the perceived implications of whatever that meant; I was a child. It was all fluid to me. I had been both a ballerina and a vampire, and yet something in me hesitated to become Robin. It’s clear to me now what wasn’t then: I hesitated because the message had begun to sink in that it wasn’t okay for girls to act like boys or for boys to act like girls. The courageous and adventurous natures I’d attached to Aladdin, Peter, and Robin suddenly became unattainable. Girls were meant to be soft, quiet, and adorable, not ambitious or adventurous. Girls in this world are quickly molded to become the throwaway characters in their own lives. From then on for many years, I was sadly resigned to doing the only thing I felt I could – playing the role of the throwaway girl in the epic of my life.

For Halloween that year I was Maid Marian instead of Robin. Amy Yasbeck’s portrayal of Maid Marian in Robin Hood: Men in Tights made me feel empowered. Marian was vibrant and bold, witty and humorous, and most importantly, she didn’t take no shit. If I couldn’t be Robin, I’d settle for Maid Marion. All I remember of that Halloween is the massive wig perched atop my head and everyone commenting on how pretty I looked as the beautiful Maid Marian. I found myself perplexed and annoyed. Pretty? Do they not notice my strength and empowerment, my captivating wit? If the goal was to be pretty, I had little interest anymore in celebrating Halloween.

Fast forward to my last Halloween as a kid at age seventeen. I decided to go as my new favorite icon, Marilyn Monroe. Enamored by her unsophisticated but calculated charm, I saw that sexy didn’t have to be just for men. Sexy could be something you were for you, something you wanted to be because you claimed yourself. Exploring a new side of the patriarchy coin, I decided I’d like to be noticed, but in a very specific way - again, as a woman walking in her power. Years of fighting traditional purity standards influenced by misogyny marginalized me, moved me to the sidelines of all things considered common and normal in my peer group. Baggy pants and Eminem t-shirts weren’t conventionally attractive, especially with no make-up and a sharp feminist attitude, but that’s where I felt most comfortable. People who I was interested in would chat with me and sometimes develop an attraction to me, but it would never culminate into anything further because I didn’t meet the then current acceptable standards of beauty. As a junior in high school, I resigned myself to conformity and started wearing makeup, trading in my rap icon t-shirts for stilettos, my mens jeans for hip huggers, and neatly tucked away my fiery need for equity and justice. I perfectly mirrored the illusion of normal.

Embodying Marilyn Monroe that Halloween, I took a step forward again toward myself. However, I learned that many adults had opinions about my trick-or-treating as a seventeen-year-old. What they didn’t know is that Halloween was a day for us to be free, as each of my friends, including myself, originated from broken homes. For one night, we could be someone else and not have to tend to the wounds of home. Escaping into the dream of someone else for a night empowered us. The nightmares that were our lives were only transcended on the spookiest night of the year because it was the one night we were allowed to create our own terror instead of consistently becoming the victims of the ever-looming terror of others. As it turns out, many believe that female self-expression and joy should be dictated by men, and female bodies should similarly be policed by patriarchy.

Remarks on the inappropriateness of my costume tainted the air at the majority of homes we visited. At seventeen, I hadn’t understood the full ramifications of choosing to embody a woman so iconic for her oozing sexuality. Men would either open their doors and ogle me or give me faces full of disgust and judgement. The women envied and subsequently loathed my looking vibrant and beautiful. It was a reminder of what they thought they’d forever lost, the ability to be free in their choices. Society would always judge them and me and all women for having the audacity to be a happy, content, unapologetic woman walking in her power. We would also walk through life judging each other, putting distance between us for the very same reasons.

Halloween at seventeen wasn’t the first time I’d encountered peers and adults shaming me for being too loud in my femininity, too accepting of my body, and too not okay with being a second class citizen. Unfortunately, not only does patriarchy teach men to hate women, it also teaches women to hate other women, and it teaches us to loathe ourselves. At age nine, a girl in my class made fun of me for not wearing a bra. I absolutely had not even a hint of breasts and we were in third grade. The other girls nervously chuckled as the girl ridiculed me, understanding her taunting was wrong but also wanting to avoid the bully’s taunts from being slung in their direction. My mother bought me bras the following year because you could see little buds under my shirts where eventually my breasts would reside. I resisted the idea of bras, but eventually accepted it. I hated those damn bras, and to be quite honest, I still do. ‘Who cares if you see little bumps under my shirt?’ I thought often on the bus rides to school. Turns out, many people would care, disturbingly enough, unintentionally (though sometimes intentionally) sexualizing little girls. Now as an adult I think, ‘Who cares if my frontal fat bags dangle a little? Fuck ‘em.’ Honestly, my opinion doesn’t seem to have changed much since bras were first introduced to me at age ten.

As middle school rolled around, I started to take on a womanly pear shape. It didn’t help that my parents divorced during the summer I was going into sixth grade, with my family newly bankrupt. Meals consisted of oatmeal packets, easy-mac, coca-cola, and toast as my mother coped with the world crashing down around us. The more we settled into our new lives as penny-pinchers, the more my weight started to balloon. At age twelve, boys made fun of my cellulite thighs and round bottom. They tormented me so much that I stopped wearing shorts just to avoid the comments about my newly rounded body. The trauma I sustained from these incidents of teasing was so severe that I didn’t wear another pair of shorts until I was thirty-two. We teach our boys what we have been taught – that women are weaker, second class citizens viewed only through the lens of men and their desires. The desires of those boys was to tear me down, to break my spirit, and they succeeded.

In what I thought was an unusual turn of events, at age fourteen the comments about my body went from critical to sexual. Boys began looking at my body as their playground, a place in which their judgements and comments were always welcomed because their desires outweighed my right for autonomy. Men are taught that as long as they desire you, their comments about you are acceptable and even commendable. But my own comments about my own body, unless they were critical, were not welcome, as I’d be seen as self-centered and arrogant. In reality, the narrative is spun. What is considered self-centered is really self-loving and a woman’s self-love is one of the biggest threats to patriarchy. The empowerment of women is actively discouraged for a reason. Society made it acceptable for boys to tell me in middle school and high school that they wanted to rape me, and even gave them permission to touch any part of my body without consent, but I was not allowed to have an opinion or an objection about my own body or their actions toward my body. Complaints of unwanted touching fell repeatedly on deaf ears. The school wouldn’t and never did protect me or other girls from abuse. As one might begin to realize, this dangerous ideology that all of us uphold is the foundation for rape culture. From ages fourteen through sixteen I dressed exclusively in baggy men’s clothing consisting of carpenter jeans, t-shirts, and hoodies with no makeup on my face to avoid the constant emotional and physical toll of assaults on my body. The thought was if I could make myself completely undesirable, maybe I’d fend off much of the onslaught of unwanted attention.

The constant barrage of brutish behavior only escalated into my teenage years. Keep in mind, I was very much what would be considered prudish until eighteen, and even somewhat beyond. Everything that I learned until that point about sex I learned from my queer friends. Even then, I spent a lot of time in disbelief. Why would anyone want to exchange any kind of bodily fluid? I thought to myself frequently in disgust. In the end, I loathed myself so much from my previous encounters with boys, ashamed of my body and my desires so much that I could not fathom navigating any space of intimacy or sexuality. To add to the shame, my home life was unstable and unsafe, promoting distrust and a desire for isolation.

Again, at age fourteen, I was ridiculed – this time by an adult man for not being knowledgable about oral sex. I genuinely did not know the term ‘blow job’ or what it meant. Why would I? Again, I had no desire for sexual relations at that age – I was very much still a kid, engrossed in my own insecurities and fantasies of adventure. Dr. Phil was on TV when suddenly the term came up. Either I asked what it was or he had asked me if I knew, but regardless it was clear that I had no idea. The man proceeded to mock me and humiliate me for not knowing the term. I froze, embarrassed, as I didn’t know how to navigate the situation. This man was a member of my family at the time and I didn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable. These situations are not as uncommon as people think and rarely are they addressed or even acknowledged. Again, I suffered humiliation about sex and bodies from a grown man when I was still a child. Not knowing about sex seemed to displease men but also knowing about it made me somehow bad, too. It seemed there was no middle ground.

Women don’t need these recollections of mine, these experiences of humiliation at the hands of men. Why not? Because they each have lived through their own. I persist for the benefit of boys and men who don’t recognize how pervasive and ingrained patriarchy truly is in our society, and how it negatively influences even the best of men.

Time passed and age sixteen rolls around, sweet sixteen. Still prudish for my age and very clear on what I want, I decide to be celibate until I fall in love. Purity culture influenced my decision for celibacy. Pure meant untainted and untainted meant virgin and virginity, in my mind, equated to keeping myself safe. You were protected from patriarchy if you were a virgin who got exemplary grades in school and dressed appropriately, right?

At sixteen and in the purity zone, I experienced my first unwanted altercation with an adult male. At Best Buy with my dad, a middle aged man hit on me and began getting frustrated when I wasn’t responding to his advances. I explained I was only sixteen, but it didn’t matter. My father had to threaten bodily harm before the man angrily stormed away. Also at sixteen, my first boss routinely made sexually inappropriate remarks to all of the female staff, all of us under the age of nineteen. He was later fired for sexually assaulting an underage employee.

The most frightening time came at sixteen when a middle-aged male family friend, during fireworks at a fourth of July function, snatched me up and took me to the edge of the dark woods nearby. It was my first physical assault by an adult, and I was petrified. Later he explained away his actions to everyone under the guise of ‘keeping me safe’ when one of the fireworks exploded on the ground instead of in the air. However, I wasn’t anywhere near the fireworks display. The way in which he swiftly, easily grabbed my body and clung to me as he ran was terrifying, like he’d done it a million times. Once at the edge of the woods, he still didn’t let me go but looked into my shocked, petrified eyes. I remember the deviant smile plastered to his hungry face, like a wolf who had found a free feast. He opened his hot, smelly mouth and I immediately turned away, exposing my neck as I protected my face. I struggled against his grip, which only tightened as he cackled. Without warning, he jammed his tongue against the bottom of my neck and swiped it up along my face to my ear. The maniacal laughter continued as I panicked, mocking me and my weak body, unable to escape. Not too long after, someone saw us and started to approach. Thankfully, he quickly turned me loose. Whoever it was probably saved me from a fate far worse.

About thirty minutes after the event ended, I told a trusted adult everything. She believed me, but she didn’t exactly know what to do, as this man was her in-law. It was later decided that the man was ‘just joking’ and has a ‘weird sense of humor’. I was also told that he was mentally ill, unstable, and unmedicated. Never once was he held accountable, nor was my trauma ever validated, but carefully swept under the rug as to not offend anyone. Not only was it dismissed, but I was expected to let it go because the issue was considered resolved as a misunderstanding. The same man, years later, attempted to hold my hand, rubbed my knee, and ‘prayed’ over me during a church service as I sat there, wanting to wretch. The bottom line in this story is that you can tell a trusted adult and do everything right and still end up in danger because as adult women, we are still conditioned to not rock the boat. The adult women who knew about my experience thought no real harm had been done, aiding in their choice not to pursue the matter, but it had. From that day on, I became not only annoyed by and emotionally beaten down by men, I became utterly afraid of them. In time, I’ve healed many things and forgiven everyone involved except the man himself, but I’ve still never shed my deep fearfulness of men. This fear has impacted every relationship I’ve ever had with a man. These incidents left me questioning the validity of my own spirit, conditioning me further to ignore my own intuition and warning signs of danger in the future.

Guilt and shame plagued my thoughts from that moment forward. Did I dress too sexy? I was wearing jeans and a tank top. Did I deserve this because I’m somehow not pure enough? Why couldn’t I fight him off? Did he think I wanted him because I didn’t try to run away sooner? Did I send any unconscious signals? Am I defective? The thoughts went on and on and on. Of course, none of these warped thoughts had any merit. The reality is that our patriarchal society encourages and enables the abuses of women which are later blamed on the woman herself so that men may continue to abuse, or at the very least, benefit from the system of abuse and oppression of women.

Sadly, seventeen didn’t treat me much better. Each day I’d walk from my house to Taco Bell where my friends worked. I’d routinely get cat-called or have vile sexual imagery screamed at me by men from cars on the busy streets. Occasionally, I’d throw up a middle finger or shout something equally obscene back in a rage, but I learned that only antagonized them. They’d become more confrontational, aggressive, and threatening, seeking me out to taunt me once again - all over a rejection to their egos.

The last encounter of sexual misconduct I recall as a child, (Yes, if you read back, all of these were during the period of my childhood – these are not counting the incidents I have experienced beyond 18, as we would need a bigger forum for that) was with a high school teacher. The teacher in question was later fired for sexting with underage students and my situation with him was tricky. You see, he was very well-liked. Unlike the previous predator I’d encountered, this man was beloved. Dressing sharply, exuding intelligence, with a quick wit and a likable, relaxed demeanor, he was the perfect teacher and seemingly a good man. Teaching English, he cared about our education and also wanted it to be fun and enjoyable. He would joke around with all of the kids in class, almost seeming like one of us except about fifteen years older. Even I enjoyed his classes and appreciated his personality.

One day I went into school early to do a presentation I missed from being out sick. This teacher asked me to drop in thirty minutes before class so I’d have plenty of time to present. Nervously, I gave my presentation in costume, and as I finished, he was smiling. I felt relieved. I remember that he got up, went to the classroom door and shut it before he sat back down at his desk.

“Well,” he began, “You did have a D in my class from missing assignments, but your grade from that presentation just bumped it up to a B. Well done.”

Feeling absolutely elated, I breathed out a, “Thank you.” I sighed with relief and I relaxed a bit.

“You’re welcome,” he smiled. I noticed his eyes quickly scanning my body. I assumed it might be due to the costume I was wearing. Maybe he was also grading on the effort we put into the costume? Then he focused his eyes intensely on mine – so intensely I became nervous, prompting me to hold my breath.

“So, what would you do for an ‘A’?” he said suggestively, in a low tone.

Again, I froze and nervously laughed with what air I’d been clenching in my belly. That loosened up his intensity a bit. He continued smiling, waiting for an answer, leaning toward me in his chair. I managed to muster up some small excuse to weasel my way out of his room politely, but I spent the rest of the year making sure I was never, ever alone with him again. The entire time in class he never struck me as dangerous, even while being suggestive, but the thought of his behavior toward me definitely indicated to me that he could become dangerous if he so desired. The behavior shocked me more than it scared me, mainly because he was so likable and also because he was supposedly happily married. Both of the male adult predators mentioned in the previous stories were married. Marriage, as it turns out, is not a safety buffer. Why? Because many men are indoctrinated to not respect women, including their own wives. The misconception of love and commitment leading me to safety in the company of married men left me vulnerable many times throughout life.

Society doesn’t give the experiences detailed in my childhood a second thought. Women are not valued and neither are children. For a country who pretends to care so deeply for children, we sure do not treat them as though we value them, dismissing their experiences and feelings so easily. Commonly women’s objections are dismissed, with our character and bodies open to attack and degradation. Through the trials and tribulations of just growing up female, we are taught to despise ourselves, to despise other women, willingly give up our own autonomy and accept our place as second class citizens under the umbrella of patriarchy. Taught to martyr ourselves to experience soul death for the common good of men, our spirits become tamed and our bodies are given up for consumption, and later for incubation, as we are expected to carry on his family name and genetic material. Nothing more than pussy-toting, second class citizens.

Like half of the current population, I don’t get the privledge of seeing the world through my own eyes. No, I am forced to see and experience the world through the lens of men. To see my own beauty, experience my own body, and to connect from the perspective of the inner divine is a rebellion against the establishment of man. I not only welcome this rebellion, but encourage it. Girl, see yourself through the deepest love of your spirit, the wisdom and courage of your ancestors, and the faith in the perfection of life and its being. For if you do not, your perspective and reputation both will be sculpted by the harsh beliefs and judgements of a society steeped in patriarchy and inequity. The message is: rebel beautiful one, rebel. Be who it is that you were always born to become.

Women have been at the forefront of the movement for centuries and this is a call to action for all humankind to stand together as we fight not only for equity in gender, but equity for all. If you’re a man and you’ve made it this far, then I’d highly encourage you to just give a fuck about women. Oh my, here comes the obscenity! What is truly obscene is the current status quo. Half of the population is female. Just knowing women, befriending women, and honoring the women in your life doesn’t count for much. Confront the issues, oppose the system, and make it your job to lend women your equity in society. This space is the beginning of where you’ll be truly giving a fuck about women. Start by simply listening. The rebellion, the revolution, all begins with us.