Begone, Panty-Sniffing Ghouls of the GOP

I am a feminist.

Am I militant? Is there any other way to be a feminist right now?

Am I strident? Am I unlikeable? Am I mean? Do I give you unpleasant memories of your mom?

I don’t give a shit.

I want every single petty panty-sniffing theocrat in these United States to either fail catastrophically or, preferably, die in a humiliating way involving a bowel movement. The face of the Republican Party is a lawmaker wielding a speculum, advancing slowly toward you to lift up your skirt and evaluate you accordingly. It is the vile face of a vile body whose arms are long and whose laws are murder.

I am too tired too often to let myself feel the rage that’s been building in me for too long. Being this angry is exhausting. There is a part of me that died in November 2016, when my country chose a proud, multiple rapist over a smart and qualified woman who ran to break the highest, hardest glass ceiling.

That night, 60 million Americans said no woman, no matter how qualified, or smart, or capable, was good enough. They told us so when they voted for a man who bragged about sexual assault, who has since been adjudicated a rapist, who has multiple, credible accusations of rape and sexual assault against him. These are the actions of a man who sees a woman as less than human. Who, when a woman says “no,” discounts it along with all her other words. That is what our nation chose over a woman.

There is a part of me that scarred shut back then, a kind of curdled weariness covering over that burning pit or rage. I buried my pain in cynicism, pretended I’d never cared, when I had. I had cared so much my heart broke. I walked away from doing stand-up comedy after seven years of telling jokes on stage, because I thought if I heard one more rape joke from a male comic, one more nasty little crack about women, I would explode. I walked away from a part of me that had made a room of a thousand people laugh, and I made myself smaller in the process. That night eight years ago was a dark night of the soul.

And as far as being a woman in America—the fears I had, the fears so many women had, have come to pass. More than one in three American women live in states with abortion bans in place. The period-tracking, panty-sniffing ghouls of the GOP have, with the guidance and power of fifty years of metastasizing Christian theocracy, made great headway in their goal to control every American uterus. Their goals for us are absolute. They want women to be utterly submissive. They want us as sows to breed. They want to control who we love. They do not want to grant us dominion over our own bodies. They do not see us as people. Their god tells them so, and they make it law, because the church has taken over so much of the state, and it is a church of wrath, a church of obedience enforced with blood.

And as a result there are women dying of sepsis because they cannot get the abortion procedures that are the standard of care for pregnancy loss. Women who are raped forced to bear their rapist’s child—a further and total rape of the body. Women legally compelled to bear children they do not want, or more children than they can afford. Women denied treatment for cancer or lupus or other conditions because it might compromise their breeding. These are not incidental to GOP policies; they are acceptable collateral damage. Because who cares about the anguish of a breeding sow, who cares about a brood mare, except insofar as her value for purebred future stock? 

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Livestock is all we’ll ever be, to these men, and the women who ally with them—from menarche to “the post-menopausal female,” who, according to vice presidential nominee JD Vance, is primarily responsible for caring for children. There is only the bearing of children and the caring for children. We are not human to them. We never will be.

Last night was the first night of the DNC, and throughout, to their credit, the Democratic Party kept its focus on abortion rights, featured women telling their stories about their abortions. And that qualified woman from eight years ago—the woman that men on both sides of the aisle, and a considerable number of women too, engaged in an orgy of hate against, because they were so thrilled to have a woman it was permissible and laudable to hate—stood up and talked too. She talked about abortion, and she talked about voting, and she talked about Shirley Chisholm, and all that must be done and sacrificed to crack that glass ceiling. Throughout the night speaker after speaker talked about returning bodily autonomy to women. 

While I’m relieved that this rhetoric is central, I confess myself to be furious that it is necessary at all.

There is no science and no rationality behind banning abortion—just cruel Christians and a mass of ghoulish, racialized obsession with breeding. The “natalists” of this country, the “pro-life” movement of this country, is a crusade to tell women we are ghosts in our own flesh, and neither our words nor our spirits matter at all. We live in a dystopia created by a fifty-year movement to deracinate feminism, to make it an object of ridicule and shame. A movement that produces marriage manuals that tell women to kill our selfhood, and serve our husbands. To survive by suspending and degrading our desires, curtailing our autonomy, learning to love the bit and bridle, to breed on command.

I am not a sow to drop a farrow, wean and gestate again. I am not a broodmare. I am not just a body. I am a human being whose spirit is as full, whose intellect is as developed, as any man’s. My uterus does not impede my mouth or ears or eyes or heart. I have a mind. And I have a vote. I will use it. 

And maybe the part of me I killed to protect myself can live again. And let the cretins who would steal my own body from me, who have done so already for so many women, pass from memory in shame and ashes, sackcloth and wretchedness.

Let them be led, be ruled, by a woman. No fate could be crueler or more just.