"I think what struck me most about the movie was, the men weren't saying that the law was fair. They were saying that it wasn't, but that it needed to stay that way. It needed to stay unfair, because if they gave women the same opportunities as men, then men wouldn't be in power. Women would take the jobs and roles that men had always been given. It wasn't that they didn't think they were disenfranchising women.
It's that they knew they were, and they wanted it that way."
~
O, sir! O, snivelling, swollen man!
You are chicken meat and bird bones, sighing snuffles and nasal tones.
All your knowledge is known to me, and yet you treat me as some kind of mean green Internet queen, some kind of blithe yawning broad, some kind of child with ****** eyes and dripping lips, instead of the mother Isis that I am, instead of a woman who is barely crammed into the bristly confines of her self-concept, let alone your own!
You are snob-hardy and spiteful, sir. You are nosesome and noiseish. You fill spaces that retract from your loatheability, and you cannot see how they do because your eyes are full of fantasia and fear.
You are a walking ham-hock. You swagger and talk as if that slight edge to your jawbone grants you the same *** appeal as a Hemsworth, but you do not know all that women see in a Hemsworth. You do not care for all that women see. You splutter and shout when a woman dares speak a fiendish reality out loud instead of staying prim and ***** and proper and pretty. All that women see is that you are garbage, you are below garbage because garbage has someone who cared enough to throw it out. Women do not care enough to throw you out. They do not care to fix you, for you are somewhere beyond broken, somewhere for which there are no words. Language cannot hold the reprehensibility of your core.
You are disgusted by women who behave ****. You are disgusted by women who enjoy behaving ****.
O, to think the world was created for you! That blisscious ignorance, that bilious sucrosic worldview. That gift that your father granted to you. It bears such dripping fruit. To think that all of that was moot!
To think that a woman dare exist not for you.
Sir, have you ever said something, and, out of the corner of your eye, you witnessed the women in the room glance at each other? Sir, if glances could speak! O, sir, that glance said, "He is not our equal. He is not grown. He is a boy in man's clothes, he is a frightened yelping beastchild playing at CEO and ROI, at working in skyscrapers and reading the newspapers. He is lustful and laughable. Let him never become one of our own."
Supercilious, insolent man! Haughty, uppity boy! Unreasonable to the extreme! You are superficial, optional in my life, in the lives of all women. To us you are in grayscale, unevolved, uninvolved with our validity and our pride. You are oafish and numb, defensive with nothing worth defending. To instruct you to self-reflect conjures an image of you folding yourself through your legs, circling around your core, over your back, and doing this again and again, all the while whining and snorting that there is nothing to see here.
Do you not see the exhaustion in viewing this masterful display of amateurity? O, sir. O, unlovable ******. It is so tempting to dream, even for a moment, that you really, truly believe you are in the right. O, what euphoria to think that perhaps you are a nice man, that you mean well, that you just don't know any better, and that the tar that flows from your slippery lips was stuffed down your gullet by cruel society. To think that it is not original, to think that somewhere, deep in your egocentric belly, there is a valve waiting to turn it all off.
I despair that there is no valve. The certainty, deep inside my confusing womanhood, deep inside my mysterious uterine canals and my awful "unknowability" (that every determined woman has come to know), terrifies me.
The benefit of the doubt.
Whom does the doubt benefit?
would love feedback on this one! tried to play with word sounds and meter a bit. inspired by mary gaitskill and RBG.
