Right now, somewhere, a little girl is being held down while her genitalia is mutilated. One day, the man she marries will open the wound with a knife to rape her, if she doesn’t die of infection first. Another, somewhere else, is being married off as a child bride, to be raped by a man four times her age. Another is trafficked to a brothel, so a white man on vacation feels less guilty taking his pedophilia somewhere else. Another is killed as an infant, because she isn’t a son. Another is dying in childbirth. Women all over the world are dying in childbirth, because they couldn’t get an abortion, or they’re a child, or their husband demanded a tenth child. Somewhere, a husband beats his wife, and it’s habit. In the U.S. alone, a woman is beaten every 9 seconds in her domestic relationship. How many will suffer in the time it takes you to read this? Somewhere else, a woman is strangled by her partner. Women die every day to the hands of their lovers. To their exes. To that guy who saw them once in a grocery store and was so mad that they didn’t smile back. A college woman will leave her boyfriend today, and tomorrow find out everyone on campus has a hold of her private photos. She will be told she is a whore, an embarrassment, asking to be raped. 1 in 4 college women are raped. I was one of them. 80% never report. I didn’t. Somewhere a 16 year old at her first job is wondering what to do, because orientation didn’t prepare her to hear the comments her boss makes about her body. Does she quit? Where does she go? Because it’s everywhere! Its everywhere! In that building, a coworker gropes her. In that bus, a man slides his hand across her ass. In that street, ‘harmless’ teens tell her how pretty she’d look with their cocks in her mouth. In that bar, her drink is drugged. You cannot escape it. Women’s suffering, like gasoline dredged over us. Waterboarded by their hate. Lilith was right. Dworkin was right. Every woman locked in an asylum, lobotomized by their family, burnt at the stake, was right. Every woman crying, diaries full, and from every moment of history, of women crying. Hysterical women, but Christ how can you not be?
