Let’s Make that Deal with God
We Gotta Keep Running up that Damn Hill
I am glad this is the week that (my all-time favorite) Kate Bush is at number one in the UK charts (again), with a song about “the idea of a man and woman swapping places with each other, seeing what it was like from the other side.”¹ It is fitting, in a week when the so-called land of the free has taken away women’s rights.
This might seem extreme; after all, we still have the right to vote (today). But I cannot help but feel despondent, like we are at the edge of a slippery slope. On the surface, we have lost the ability to make a decision about our bodies; on a deeper level, it feels like we have lost the ability to control our lives.
I have never been pregnant, and I will never be pregnant. As such, I do not know the joy that news might bring. I have also been spared the terror that a positive pregnancy test can bring.
It seems to me that being pregnant is terrifying, whether you want to be pregnant or not. When a woman is pregnant, she is perceived differently. Her life plans change. She is no longer allowed to be selfish; instead, she must be selfless. From this point forward, she is expected to care for another more than she cares for herself.
In many cases, when that tiny being finally emerges, a woman’s ability to choose is diminished further. Her body has been broken, ripped asunder, and the mutilation may continue for months to come as a young mouth gnaws at her nipples. Of course, if she cannot breastfeed, she will be judged for that. If she breastfeeds too long, she will be judged for that.
As women, our lives are always judged; if we mother and how we mother are only the most painful examples.
I, for one, am sick of being judged. I am especially sick of being judged by people who seem to pick and choose which elements of present-day society are acceptable and which are not. But perhaps, in a strange sense of 1700s humor, our Founding Fathers would have thought that assault rifles were the answer to the question of an unwanted, unasked for or dangerous pregnancy. Perhaps that is the Manifest Destiny this new America is heading toward.
I am sure this treatise is futile, just as I am sure the protests around the world are futile. I know this is dangerous, but I think now is the time for radicalism. We must follow in the footsteps of our mothers, who protested Vietnam, who rallied for civil rights, who kept their own names.
My proposal — unrealistic and full of classist assumptions as it may be — is this. Wednesday Walk-outs for Women. Inspired by Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future, and the great but unseen movie, A Day Without A Mexican, women walk out. Walk out of their lives, of their jobs, of their relationships. Because when we lose control of our bodies, we lose control of our lives. And men should experience that too.
