"We Are Human"

"We Are Human"

Men colonize our bodies.  They split them into territories, they create highways and housing for their businesses and beliefs.  They erect monuments that celebrate their fleshy swords like false idols to their savior.  

They beat our bodies to drill our life source to fuel their systems of oppression and call it manifest destiny - a divine law.  They convince us that we are diseased, misbegotten men as they rape us into silence.  They command us to cover ourselves out of respect, but is it respect when they feed our bodies to the highest punter?

They traffic us to foreign countries with false hope of a better future.  They turn our bodies into unknown regions that we, women, must learn to assimilate.  We are assigned statuses like street names and billboard signs.  We become

Wives, 
Property, 
Whores,
Lovers, 
Temptations, 
Nymphs, 
Lolitas, 
But never their equals.

They dissect us into tits and ass and holes to fuck - we become tagged walls - "for a good time call...."

And we pump ourselves with drugs, drown ourselves in alcohol, pull out our hair, binge and purge, and cut into our flesh just to forget that our bodies are not our own.  Then, centuries after our internalized misogyny has set in, our borders are sealed and the anthems written that we, women dissect ourselves with the same pejorative language as we view our bodies through the gaze of men reflected back to us in our mirrors.  

We, women, birth their sons and daughters, and raise generation after generation just to watch history repeat itself rather than be made anew.  And I, wonder, do you want to see bruises on our flesh, like pulpy figs in smoldering heat, just to prove our lives are worth your consideration?  That our bodies, riddled in swollen welts, deserve the very basic of human rights?  That we deserve to feel safe in our own skin - to not feel like immigrants in these bodies you have now claimed as your 

States, 
Your churches, 
Your homes, 
And pulpits from which you speak of your moral truth,

Because the truth is we hare human, not districts to dominate.  We are human, not fields to plow.  We are human, not empires to build or provinces to own.  We are human, not neighborhood to gentrify.  We are human, not separate but equal.  We are human, and we deserve to be free of this toxic patriarchy. 
We.Are.Human.  

Defile - Thy Name is Woman

Much in the same way I convinced myself the molestation I endured at 12 was a “misunderstanding” because I was not brutalized violently or raped viciously in the manner that would leave physical bruises, I also convinced myself at 20 that the verbal and emotional abuse I was enduring was just another “misunderstanding.”  In both scenarios I minimized the situation in order to rationalize my abuse – to move forward because I thought that’s what one does.  Even later on in life when others molested me too I was paralyzed with insurmountable anxiety that if I did not move on I would have to confront what I was going through, and I was the least informed about abuse of any kind.  That’s the thing so hard to grasp; life doesn’t suddenly stop so that you can sort through your feelings.  So that you can understand what you don’t have words for. You can barely ask for help because the whole process is humiliating to even admit.  You just have to keep going.  I placed the responsibility of my abuse on myself because I thought I was overreacting – this is how I resolved it.  I truly thought that just because I was seemingly not being forced I must have had control, and if I had control I could have stopped it, but the reality was wrong; I had no control.    

In conversations I heard around me the general census was that one cannot force themselves on another without the person’s consent.  It seemed unfathomable to people that you could be raped, molested or even verbally abused without your permission. When one is physically assaulted the marks against the flesh – a purple pulp of a disfigured blemish – is an undeniable proof to an everyday reality.  It becomes easy for others to accept your abuse so long as they can see the scars across your face.  But even then the case is against you.   

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” – Eleanor Roosevelt.  This sentiment, I believe, is a perpetual train of backwards thinking.  It permeates the collective minds of our society.  Women are often made complicit in their own abuse so that the world could rationalize the increasing violence and second class citizenship of over half of the population.  The world makes us women share in the responsibility of violence against ourselves to minimize the real problem and to deny the failure of human condition; that we have risen generation after generation of men who have made violence a mandatory trait of masculinity.  As much as feminists can raise the consciousness of people, of men on the subject of institutional violence against women the progress to a liberated society is drudgingly long.  The difficulty of living with forms of post-traumatic stress disorders suffocates any woman. 

Often we are lost inside our own skin feeling the revenant hands of our abusers crawl inside of us and rip out everything we were and everything we could have been.   Their words, though long forgotten by the years, become our daily church bells – reminders that the language our abusers used sewed us to our insecurities and buried us under their own filth and called it a compliment.  For me, and many like me, I believed invisibility was the answer.  I thought silence would keep me safe, but in this, I too was wrong.  We do what we can to survive; returning to normalcy begs a stage in which we feign shallow interest in a life that is not ours anymore.  The pain may lessen over time, but what was done will never be undone.  I learned that I will have good days and bad days in ways others will not.  I learned that one cannot simply move on; one can only manage to nurse the wounds until they become scar tissues.  I learned that I will have to live with this for the rest of my life.