Killing Themselves With Kindness, Then We Did Pilates

Ajrehman, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Yesterday at the gym a young woman whose politics I honestly do not know, but whom I am scared to ask because we live in The South, asked me, in the way that gals do: Hey, how’re you?

And because I had just gotten out of the car, where I was listening to the news of the leaked Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, I took a deep breath, shook my head, and said, Not good.

She looked surprised and said, Why? What’s the matter?

And I said, Well, I’m worried that women’s reproductive rights are being stripped away. She looked fully shocked that I had not responded with the usual Good! How’re you? And that I’d said something POLITICAL. She responded, while sort of moving away from me, Wow, that’s a lot to be worried about right now.

And I said, Yeah.

Then we did Pilates.

This is super hard y’all. I was not angry with that young woman. It IS alot. For half the class time I was angry with myself for saying anything at all, when Lord knows people are just trying to get a minute away to do some squats and stretching and probably DO NOT want to hear from me that not only are they coming for us but holy s@!t they just got a whole lot closer. Look, I’ve lived in the South for awhile now—moved here in the summer of 2016. Yep. Right before the election. I have been politically active. I have been silently quaking with rage. I have been pleasant at the luncheon. I have been all those things, and I have also been an observer. An anthropologist of sorts. Someone who has tried to meet everyone at the heart, where everyone is good, instead of at the head, where it’s all mixed up and confusing, and where the kindest people think the most hateful things.

One thing I did was spend two years ferociously texting with a brilliant woman I respect a lot whose views diverged six ways to Sunday from mine. I have tried to become someone who seeks to understand rather than to be understood.

And I do think I understand a lot. About this region. About the tendrils of Christianity that weave through here. About the strength and kindness and goodness and complexity of these women. And also, I know a lot. I have read a lot and studied a lot and thought a lot. I can hold the individual and the collective, the actual and the conceptual, together, and peer back and forth between the two.

One thing I know is that we live in a patriarchy. And that women, despite all the gains they have made, are nowhere near in charge. And many women are okay with that. Because they have convinced themselves that they are IN CHARGE ENOUGH.

In that moment, in that gym class, I wanted to shout that while In charge enough might feel like enough, it is not, in fact, even close. I wanted to screech shut the music and, with all the women in that room, take to the streets.

But while I was doing those leg lifts I was looking around thinking, I know many of the women in here believe earnestly and sincerely that abortion is murder and that women can’t be trusted with the power to wield their own decision making power over their own damn bodies. And I also know that still, to this day, RIGHT NOW, many many women do not feel comfortable having honest conversations with other women about this subject. It is not polite. It is not okay.

It is scary all the way down into the marrow of the bones.

It is easier to perform strength, to carry it all, than to be truly strong and throw the baggage and the expectations and the false idol of reductive femininity down.
Many girls have been taught that feminism is a Dirty Word.

I remember teaching a college class in the early aughts and asking, Ok, so what is a feminist? One girl said, a woman who doesn’t shave her armpits.

Another said, In a sitcom she’s the friend who makes the mom do crazy things until the dad has to come along and rein the mom back in.

A lot has changed for many. I thank real baby Jesus (not American Republican gun-toting Jesus) for Instagram and tik tok, a place where, yes, of course, girls have forged on toxic femininity, but also a place where they have fought back with their very bodies against the messages that their bodies are not okay.

And yet, for real for real for real, this one issue—ABORTION—is holding so many women back. And down. Because it’s meant to.

Because for the whole lives of anyone born after 1973 there has been a group of people shouting at them that deep inside they house a MURDERER. That they are, if left to their own devices, MURDEROUS. That because they have the freedom (relative freedom, and less and less with each passing year) to decide that it is necessary to terminate their pregnancy, they are as good as the worst killer on death row unless they distance themselves as far as humanly possible from that freedom.

And the message there—having the ability to end life is not pretty. And while, sure, many have been fighting for the acceptance of all bodies, all sizes, there is still a deep, deep fear within most women of being ugly. UGLY is shameful. Wrong. And villainous.

Breathe it in and accept it. Feel it. Know it.

Birth. Is. Ugly. It is blood and shit and screams and grunts and cussing. It is a ring of fire. Death. Is. Ugly.

It is the gasping for air. The smell of rot. It is the final undoing.

Women. Are. Beautiful. And hear me on this—THEY ARE ALSO UGLY.

Kali, the goddess of creation and destruction.

Sheela n’a Gig, with her cavernous vulva, ready to devour.

These are the forms that the ancients knew were the accurate representation of women. As far as we know—and the more we dig the more we know—there was a time before the worship of a supreme superior Omni male god. There was a time when people worshipped THE GODDESS. In all her forms. Maiden. Mother. Crone. Life Force. Death Force. THÉ ONE WHO MAKES THE DECISIONS.

In a patriarchy, women and girls are not embodied. They are worshipped for their youth, their fecundity, their giving nature. Their strength, sure, insofar and only so far as it continues to serve the dominant.

It seems they don’t know how to hold their motherhood (current or eventual) on one hand and their sovereignty on the other. They don’t trust themselves. They are not empowered. So. I’m glad we are here. I’m glad women can no longer hide from themselves. Smug superiority in a ruffle smock is a lot of fun til you’ve gone back to being literal property.

In my new fantasy, I invite my gym buddies, my Christian mother-daugher volunteer club members, my neighbors, to go outside, under the moon, look up, and ask—Who am I? Do I need to be controlled? And if the question feels scary, go deeper. Can I be trusted to make my own decisions? And if I don’t believe I can then why not? Who has decided this for me? And what are my other options?