Patriarchal Ooze

Last week held 2023’s “International Women’s Day”. Can I share with you why it irritated the daylights out of me? We treat women across this planet like disposable plates every single day. So, pardon if a pause for an afternoon of superficial, costs-you-nothing, verbal high-fives doesn’t do it for me. In lieu of a day where we get to hear more politicians talk out of both sides of their mouths’, I’d rather have: complete body autonomy for all humans, mandated/paid parental leave, fair wages, and compensation for various types of unpaid labor. Is anyone else tired of mustering up the internal strength to sort through what they are upset/frustrated/angry about, and then diving head-first in to the why? It’s like once we break it down in to digestible nibbles, we oftentimes realize the pain is a side-affect of: the cis-het, ableist, white-supremacist, patriarchal society in which we reside. It’s like this slimy-ooze that permeates everything; physical contact or not, it’s just in the air/unavoidable it seems.

I throw on Rage Against the Machine and scream-sing, Killing in the Name… “FUCK YOU, I WON’T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME, MUTHER FUCKKKKKKKKKEEEEER!”, on loop, and that helps a little. One of the most upsetting parts of trying to stay on the rails living as a lesbian+woman in this society, is watching other women suck down that nasty ooze-spiked juice. These women are fooled in to thinking it makes them more powerful when they hold other women down. It breaks my heart to see women who assume they can’t step up, unless it’s by using the back of another woman for their upward boost towards that glass ceiling. These women end up embodying the ethos, carrying out tasks, and doing the patriarchy’s dirty work for them. It’s as if: regulating women’s bodies, commenting on their clothes and shapes, what they choose to do/or/not do with their hair, and if they decide to follow the social protocols rooted in a WASPy-eurocentric-cis-het narrative of what’s acceptable, isn’t enough freedom-of-choice containment. I am not immune to this nasty gunk either. Why do I shave my legs? Do I really love my hair long? Would I wear makeup ever, if I didn’t feel it enhanced my features for others? Is it self-care, or is it serving up different iterations of trying-to-fit-in? It’s hard for me to find real answers within, because the messaging and our patriarchal training begins at the start of our comprehension of what others around us find appropriate, attractive, and desirable.

Why did I do a double-take, and feel inward shame during moments like the following: a man in line at a BBQ shop on Divis overheard me at seven months pregnant, tell my wife that a customer leaving the payment line had shoulder-checked me to the point of wincing pain, and that they hadn’t even paused to acknowledge the slam or apologize. This dude proceeded to tell me, unsolicited, that I needed to, “calm down, because I was overreacting”. My initial reaction in that public-setting moment had been one of guilt for taking up space. But, my secondary reaction was to speak up for myself and tell the dude to mind his own business. Yet even in that moment of personal empowerment of using MY voice to protect MY personal space+pregnant body, I felt guilt for possibly “causing too much of a scene”. It’s bananas how most of us who identify as female-Americans, are taught from the fucking jump that we should really appreciate every single day we don’t get assaulted for looking too tempting. Or that we should feel grateful every time we aren’t forced to carry an unwanted child to term because… we dared let our legs and breasts and lives see the light of day? IT’s FuCKED aND NoT OK.

George Michael enters my playlist, and begins blasting in my headphones. The patriarchy doesn’t stop at just trying to dictate the lives of all women. I think to myself, “it also wants to control anyone who doesn’t fit in to what they consider a neat little box of allowable ways to live.” You live your assigned-at-birth, binary gender. You fuck someone born of the opposite sex. You let Jesus in to your heart. You live your life by giving of yourself until there is nothing left to share, and you don’t complain about it. Is that it? Did I get it right?

The recent, massive uptick in anti-Trans, anti-drag, anti-all-things-LGBTQI+/community-related legislation is alarming, but not shocking. What does knock me out emotionally, is watching people I thought I knew to be warm, kind-hearted, caring people either: say nothing/do nothing to protect marginalized+vulnerable people, and/or also pile on about how drag shows are somehow inappropriate for kids (but child beauty pageants are chill?) and other bullshit, etc., etc. If you want to fear what you don’t understand, and let that fear guide your life, YOU DO YOU. However, you must stop coming for our beautiful community. I beg of you, please, get yourself a life fulfilling enough, that you don’t feel called to spend your precious life-minutes tearing down peaceful forms of expression that a marginalized community has worked so hard to create and hold-up. I spent quite a few years trying to dodge the angry lesbian trope, because it’s lame+boring to wrap all of us in to one tidy, man-hating blanket. I may be an angry lesbian when it comes to human rights owed to marginalized humans, but the thing is, I don’t hate men at all. There are so many men in my life and otherwise, who genuinely support women’s issues and LGBTQI+ issues, because they care about equality for all humans.

Also, please note: I am specifically not speaking on the experiences of marginalized communities in which I am not personally included. This is because, while I also care to stop the many human rights violations happening to those communities as well, it is not my lived experience. So, I will continue to focus on listening to those communities, so I can learn more // so I can do better // on loop. If you need a refresher and/or aren’t following along with the legislative nightmares being brought against the Trans community as of late, I highly recommend this interview transcript of Ezra Klein interviewing Gillian Branstetter. This line in particular knocked me absolutely sideways, and had me nodding my head in agreement so hard, my neck angrily protested: “There’s an artist that I love named grlofswords on Instagram, who does these Jenny-Holzer-style slogans. And one of them she has is that it is a blessing to have a transgender child. And why is it a blessing to have a transgender child? Because I think any parent would agree that it is a blessing to have a child who is strong enough to tell the truth when the whole world wants them to tell a lie.”

The patriarchy can be sneaky too. It can creep up your leg like a Clematis, and start strangling your airways before you even realize you haven’t been capable of taking a real, deep, fulfilling breath in years. About six months ago, I started attending talk therapy on a weekly basis. I spent most of those first months unknowingly studying myself, training myself, and preparing my full, legal-style case on why and how I needed accountability from someone who had repeatedly hurt me deeply. I thought I had done such a great job; I practiced by writing and rewriting a letter to them, until I felt I’d clearly given my perspective of our story. I kept editing my thoughts, until the version felt (to me): warm, but not too soft, succinct, but not emotionless and cruel, and most importantly to me, actionable. I felt I had left nothing in the zone of inference for the person to sift through alone. I didn’t want to leave them reading between the lines, or feeling like it was an attack on their character, which would likely just lead to more default-force defensiveness.

I realize now that I thought if I worked hard enough, I could politely lay out just how violently their actions had shredded my heart, mind, self-esteem, and foundation. I thought I could show them THE path in which our healing was possible. In doing so, I then assumed they would understand what I was asking of them, which I recognize in hindsight was entirely unfair to both of us. What I had hoped for to aid in my healing, was for them to provide me with some sort of “I’m sorry”, or anything along the lines of a single, “I fucking bungled that so hard; I was wrong”. I believed that if they could just speak the words I had predetermined were a requirement in my repair work, that we truly could lock hands, and skip-off in to the California sunset, together. I presumed that, that, that, we’d be buoyed by the knowledge that it was going to be hard, but that there was nothing we couldn’t do together, even something as thorny as untangling our messes.

Alas, as life goes, you cannot MAKE someone do anything. You can want, with every fiber of your being, to have them look inward, then apologize when relevant, and that there was a magic wand you could wave to remove the now overwhelming stench of their homophobia. You can want something so, so badly you can taste it, but you cannot ever control the thoughts and actions of others in a way that leads to true healing and repair. Sometimes, as I am beginning to understand, your healing will need to happen sans the other characters in the story. Once, when I was going through a particularly hard time, my Dad said something to me along the lines of: Your version of reasonable is never going to be that person’s version of reasonable. You are inherently different people, with different systems of beliefs, including what you each consider, “reasonable” . In this recent case of me asking this someone if we could heal together, I unfortunately found out that I’d need to attempt to manage my emotional wounds, without their aid.

So then what after something like that? It’s a life-altering moment for sure, and right now it’s haunting me like an ever-present ghost. I am actively grieving yet another loss of someone with whom I thought I held a deep, long-time connection. But, if someone is simply tolerating something core about who we are (in my case being queer), then they are not your friend or pal or family. I am not a thing to be tolerated, and I deserve better than that, and so do you. Unfortunately, it looks like I have to dig up my emotional abacus and swipe another bead from the “they love me, full stop” side, to the “how disappointing; you would have preferred I live my life as a lie for you, instead of being true to myself”, side.

As much as I despise puttering through my days pissed-off, I am truly bubbling-over with rage, anger, disappointment and a deep desire to flip some social-etiquette tables the FUCK OVER. I’m not going to do it because I loathe violence and wreckless damage to our planets resources. But, part of me wants nothing more than to shatter lots of windows, and slam all of the doors in the city, until they rattle in their hinges one tiny step shy of splintering completely apart. I want to scream at the top of my lungs, until my throat is raw and hot tears are streaming down my face. I want to cleanse my soul in the full moonlight, surrounded by my charging crystals and my brilliant wife. I want to form a soul circle outside in the crisp, night air, and hold hands with those who truly care for the me I am, not the me they wish I’d be. I want to soak up the joyous love of my hilarious child and my amazing sister-in-law, and my thoughtful brother-in-law, and my incredible friends who tell me when I’m acting like an asshole, but who also tell me when I have every right to feel this supersonic furor over the way humans sometimes treat other humans. As much as I sometimes wish I could silently stuff this tirade/these feelings down in the name of ignoring them, I know that won’t serve me. So, for now when someone asks me how I’m doing, and this sludge is simmering just beneath my skin, ready to burst forth… I will take a deep breath and say something like, “it’s going alright, thanks for asking”. Not because I’m placating them with a lie, but because sorting through your emotional rubble in the name of healing is kind of alright when you know the explosive part is in the rearview… I hope?

I think back to when I was a minor, in the care of people charged with doing their best to ensure I didn’t do things like jump off of bridges or partake in drugs. Spoiler: I absolutely did both of the aforementioned things in the name of teenage fun. But, for what it’s worth, I’m still alive because: the bridge wasn’t too/too high + the water was just deep enough, and “the drugs” were of the earth and not from a bottle or vial and are now legal in California anyways. I cannot have been an easy child to manage; I did and said many awful things in the name of exploration, expectation-pushing, and adventure. My behavior when I was cresting my time as a minor, trying with all my might to find my way out of the closet, was at times, dubious. I will openly admit that I had attitude for days, and often assumed I knew what was best in lieu of lived wisdom from elders. I didn’t meet a boundary I didn’t at least consider testing, and I will never claim that I didn’t press the buttons of the people charged with keeping me alive, in all the ways I knew possible.

I bet it was scary to try and parent a force like me. I bet it was alarming to try and flex your strongest parenting muscles, only to have what you’d thought was going to be an obedient, young girl, turn in to someone else. The terror that must have come with watching me bloom in to this new person, who told you that you couldn’t tell me what I could or could not do with my hopes and dreams and life and body. I relied on them for everything, and yet I still made it clear no one could make me stop loving someone I loved, nor altogether rip my queerness from my body. I honor that younger me, and her bravery. I was as scared as I have ever been to stand up for myself, and yet, I persisted. I was terrified I was, in fact, going to be worthless and somehow spoiled by my gayness. I worried endlessly that I would pay a price in the future, for letting my true self seep in to public view. I was truthful to myself anyways, despite those fears, and I would do it again. Why? Because now I know how it feels to live honestly within myself; I do it everyday I live out and proud. Living openly is not a one-time event. Instead, it is an ongoing act of bravery. When you live your life knowing there are people out there, who HATE your very existence, and that fact that you won’t deny your truth to save them from their discomfort of fear, you do, at times, need to pause to square your shoulders back and center yourself. You have to seek interpersonal steady-footing every day, in the event some unprompted vitriol is hurled directly at you and/or a community of people with whom you identify.

The thing is, once you realize someone’s love is, in fact, conditional, and that you’ll never be able to achieve happiness based on their parameters, you really can learn how to stand in your own power. You can know how it feels to loose it all with a person and yet you STILL continue to take steps forward. You can begin to see that while the bone-shattering fractures of their loss may be emotionally crippling, it’s not as impossible as living a lie. I’m not quite sure why it took me decades to realize I was making so many rationalizations for this person. I can only guess at this point it’s because it was simply too painful for me to do otherwise at an earlier junction in life. So, for now I will continue to grieve the things that are unrepairable. I shall let the overwhelming emotional pain sink in, and try to process each psychological tidal wave that takes me temporarily under.

As I continue to sort through my messes, I will not ignore the gnarly ooze that’s gotten on my skin either. I will hold myself accountable not to protect, defend or excuse those that pretend the patriarchy isn’t real and/or operating. I will not turn away as it’s systems of oppression set up over the centuries continues to hamstring entire communities. This queer, white, cis-woman will use the patriarchal privileges she’s been “bestowed”, to try and lift other marginalized voices and lives. If women’s liberation is a dirty concept to you, then I am absolutely proud to say that I am covered in raw, feminist filthhhh. I dream of true equality for everyone.

I don’t want, nor need, the patriarchy to be my hero.

Marginalized communities, their advocates, and their peoples are my heroes.

People who choose bravely living their truth, in lieu of lives built on foundations of lies, are my heroes.

My wife is my hero.

My kid is my hero.

My friends and some of my family are my heroes.

There is also another hero in this story.

I am slowly, carefully, realizing how strong this new hero is; wild considering, I look her in the eyes,

every time I glance in a mirror.