Searching for a community

This may be true for some of them.

But the rest are our peers. They're teachers, and hiring staff, and HR, and managers. They are healthcare workers, and therapists, and handymen, and bartenders. They're policeman, and politicians, and judges, and policy makers.

Their lives are not without direct impact on our own. They exist among us, and their decisions inform our opportunities, environment, and quality of life.

so now there’s an epidemic of afghan males trafficking their daughters (and it’s always only daughters) to pedophiles so that they can feed their sons instead

They see women's homeless shelters and emergency hotlines and think pieces about the violence we suffer at the hands of men, and wonder why men don't have the same resources.

> I ask whether it’s actually feminist, or whether it’s a story about how patriarchy is good as long as the patriarch is benevolent

> they don’t understand

> I describe the common trope in faux-feminist historical romance where the female lead is able to “escape” the sexism of her time simply by marrying the rare good man who respects women— as if patriarchy is a problem of abusive individuals, rather than an inherently abusive system. As if all the issues in patriarchy go away if the man you marry is Nice. As if “patriarchal systems can actually work well when the patriarch is kind and loves you uwu” is a bold feminist statement, instead of the cornerstone of inherently reactionary tradwife beliefs about gender roles.

> they laugh

> “it’s a feminist historical romance”

> look inside

An exception for Rape, Life of the Mother, and Incest mean nothing when you have to prove it in a court of law, or get a team of lawyers and judges to sign off on it which can take weeks or even months.

Weeks a person dying hasn't got. Women are now dying. Actually dying. Because hospitals legally could not save their lives until they could wake up a judge and get their lawyers, and another sides lawyers awake and up and figured out if it was actually necessary or not. All people with no understanding of medicine, and no attatchment to the person suffering who simply doesn't want to die.

There's a lot more I could cover, like the increase in illegal abortion, abortion tourism, the massive increase in infant abandonment... but I'm going to leave it here.

People are dying. People who should be alive. Who would be alive if abortion was legal and the hospital could have simply treated their patient without waiting for a dozen men with no medical experience in another building to decide if their patient actually needs treatment or not. And yes they do have to wait. Because if they don't they get charged with murder for trying to save a life.

Women wanted to be lawyers and engineers and chemists. They wanted to use their brains in challenging and interesting ways. They wanted to get the satisfaction from solving problems and inventing new shit and getting attention for it.

No, it’s not a privilege to be the unpaid labor that enables someone else to gain financial resources; it’s a vulnerable place to be that can go VERY badly VERY quickly. People will flaunt “behind every successful man is a woman” until they realize it stipulates the unsupported work of a homemaker.

Well, as winter turned into spring, I started biking home from work. A long, circuitous route that took me through residential areas, and past offices and businesses. Offices and businesses that were closed for the day. And yet their signs were still lit up. The lights were still on inside. There were TVs playing in empty breakrooms. All the computers in the school district offices stayed on, their monitors not even going to sleep, all night. Paused to take a break in an empty strip mall once and when I leaned against the glass of a restaurant I could hear the music still playing inside.