What It’s Like.

I wasn’t allowed to go to high school, either. I was thirteen and at home, the primary caregiver for a younger sibling, being told that if I went to school he’d have to go to daycare and what kind of godly sister would that make me? The first semester of that freshman year came and went, too. I homeschooled myself, alone with a four year old, at home, on the computer – and failed almost all of my courses. 

All my life, people have been trying to cage me and shape me into something I wasn’t, something I have never been. All my life, there have been people trying to control and contain me, smothering and break me. There have been people who have beaten me physically, people who have assaulted me with words most can’t even imagine, people who have used threats and intimidation as a way to force my compliance and silence. 

These people have been, overwhelmingly, 99.9% of the time, men. 

****

Unacceptable. Worthless. Out of line. Rebellious. Too much, too loud, too needy, too little, too big, too brash, too opinionated, too sharp, too strong-willed. Disobedient. Disrespectful. Disgraceful. Worthless. Owned. 

Owned. 

These were the words I grew up under, their crushing weight battering at me every time I told myself I could believe in something more. Stupid and sinful and fat and worthless and owned. My father repeatedly, in that semester that I could not be in college, told me these things. A litany, over and over and over, beaten into my head and my skin and the fabric of my being until I believed it, until I screamed in agony when no one else was home because I remembered what it had felt like once to believe I was worth something, and I did not know what I had done to change that. 

I was useless, a waste of space and food and energy. I was hopeless, a lost cause. I was worth nothing. And he owned me. 

Maybe that’s why, all these years later, I still begin shaking in anger when I read the words of some anonymous internet stranger telling his “future wife” that she’s like a car. A thing to be driven, to be possessed, to be controlled. Maybe that’s why I get so undeniably pissed off when I read this person’s smug assertion that they are already owed things by their future spouse – simply because she will be a woman, and he’s a man, and we owe them things, don’t you know. 

We owe them our life and our laughter and our children and our beds and our censored thoughts and our carefully cultivated actions, stuttering around theirs so as not to be too much or too loud or too big and uncontainable. We owe them our piety and our bodies, our every article of clothing that we put on carefully tailored to their gaze. 

Be appealing, but not too appealing. Cover up in the way that they’d want you to but don’t be a prude. They can go to bars, but you can’t. You can go to church and prepare your womanly brain for a life of submission to a man’s will. You can go to church and hold your lily white hands high in the air and pray that God, whatever god there may be, will save you from the horrible fate of a man who controls your life like your father does. You can pray to whatever gods that hear you to be saved from your miserable existence. 

You can pray and they will answer – the men, that is, they’ll answer you – you are owned, and this I know, for the Bible tells me so. 

You can curse God for the crime of putting you in the wrong body. No, no, you accept your gender and have never felt shame about being a woman – except for when you do, because every part of who you are, the things you like best about yourself, would’ve been better in a man. Your humor and your passion and your intellect and sharp wit, those things would’ve served you well with just a subtle shift of chromosomes. 

But you were born a woman, born Becca. You were born in a body with large hips and damnable breasts and every single cultural convention that fundamentalist religion wants to place on those is the price you pay for your existence. You go to church and you bow your head and you don’t tell anyone that sometimes at night your dad beats your brother because what would be the point, anyway? 

You are silent, you are submissive, you are a raging wind trapped in an airless chest. And you are dying every single day that you’re forced to live like this. 

****

When I tell people I am a feminist, there is often a pinched look about their faces as they ask, “But..not a man-hater, right? Not a feminazi, right?” They want me to laugh and tell them that I’m not one of those kinds of feminists, the ones that are extreme and brazen and make you feel guilty. 

I smile and I say I am a nice feminist. I say, “Feminism is the radical belief that women are people too.” I tell them not to worry, I’m not strident. I downplay their fears and soon, I become the token feminist at the party, the one people might ask an expert opinion of or say something incendiary to, as a joke, of course. Poke the angry feminist and watch her growl. Tell her she’ll never get a man that way, then maybe joke about how since she’s a feminist, she probably doesn’t like boys at all.

I remember my first kiss. I remember the taste and the buzz and the tingle I felt all the way through my chest. I remember feeling scared but safe and I remember feeling wanted. I remember thinking, this, this is the best feeling in the world. Right now, this moment. I remember, too, the way that boy broke my heart, and the way I laughed it off through tears, saying, “I’ve been through worse before.”

I’ve been through worse, before. 

****

I think I was maybe twelve the first time I told my mother I didn’t want children; sixteen when I ranted to her in the car about the indignities of child birth and rearing, the submissiveness that I never could seem to master, the travesty of the birth canal and the unfairness of the teachings that birth control was a sin. She laughed and laughed, and I kept going, desperate to be heard, but she just laughed.

“Oh, Becca. You’re so funny. It’ll be different, you’ll see. You’ll change.”

In the first semester that I went to high school, half-way through that freshman year, I remember the way that my father would avoid looking my direction. The way his head would turn when I walked out the door to walk the mile to catch the bus out of our rural area, the almost two-hour ride to the nearest public high school. 

That was the beginning of him not looking at me. It was like if he couldn’t see me, couldn’t see what I was, then he wouldn’t have to admit what I was becoming. We wouldn’t have to talk about the fire inside me that refused to die, the voice that whispered that I could do this, I could make it. He didn’t look at me, and I avoided him, and for the most part, as long as I was good enough at scurrying around corners when he was there, that worked just fine. 

In the lost semester at the beginning of what should have been my college years, he started seeing me again. He looked at me to find fault and flaw, expose my character failings and the crevices of my selfish heart. He cracked me open under his gaze and though he seldom touched my flesh, when I left after six months of living life under his examination, I was bruised through and through. 

The only times my father really looked at me were the times when he was determined to reshape me, to make me something more pliable, to form my being into what he wanted of it. 

But I believe that the reason he stopped looking at me, long before that, was that when he did, when he saw me, he saw the fire in my heart and the iron in my bones, this thing that wasn’t what he’d expected when he’d had a little girl; and he was afraid. 

It’s funny, fear. It’ll make you try and break something. 

****

I have often been told it is a wonder that I still believe in men at all. I rather think the opposite. Why would I not? I have three brothers whom I love dearly. I know their hearts and I know they are good. I have friends who are men earnestly seeking to build themselves into good human beings. There are many men in my life now and in my life before and I see them and know that we are all just humans trying to make our peace in this contentious earth. I see men in stories and books and in my best friend’s family and I know that the majority of them, the widest swell of the gender, are good or trying to be. 

I am not a feminist because I think men are monsters. 

I am a feminist because I have seen how crippled men become when they believe they must be the best, the highest form of God’s green creation. I have watched gender norms cripple and shame men alongside of women. I am a feminist because I believe in the goodness of the species, of men and women alike, and that for us to succeed, we must do it together or not at all. 

I am a feminist because no woman should ever be told she is owned. I am a feminist because I believed that about myself for too long, and I refuse to be told I should do so again. 

I am a feminist because I am so tired. Tired of men’s expectations. Tired of being told my friendship is just a consolation prize and that it has been found wanting. Tired of being lied to in efforts to manipulate because they want more from me than I am willing to give. I’m tired of protecting myself against all comers, tired of men who just want and want and take and take and use but never care. I am tired of men playing the devil’s advocate, as an interesting exercise for themselves, when I am sitting here beating my hands against the walls yelling but this is my life. This is my everyday life. I am tired of being treated like an interesting debate topic, tired of being told it’s not okay to call a spade a spade and a sexist a sexist. I am tired of all the men who’ve ever used me or tried to and tired of being told I cannot use the term misogyny because that’s just too hurtful. 

I am a feminist because for the majority of my life, a man has had absolute control over my hair, my clothing, my reading material, my schooling, my entertainment choices, my worldview, my food, my appearance, what goes into my brain and what comes out of it. I do not know if I can properly convey to you the level of stifling control I lived under. Picture a box, locked, pinholes allowing in just enough air and light to survive. Picture emerging from it after eighteen years with limbs too atrophied to walk. 

I am a feminist because I have a wild and untamed heart that had led me here. 

I am a feminist because this is what it’s like, being a woman. And that has to change. 

****

These days, I have a college degree. It’s one I earned fighting, and with a lot of help from unexpected persons and places. I provide for myself and no one calls me worthless anymore. I created a safe haven for my soul to rest in, and every night when I go to sleep I curl up in my bed, comforted by the fact that I am safe and there will be no one pounding on my door in the morning to hurt me. 

These days, I don’t often speak of my parents. I haven’t communicated with my father in well over two years. I don’t know if he thinks of me at all, but if he does, I hope it is with the knowledge that I would not allow myself to be harmed at his hands, that he never did break me, that I am free of him and happier for it, and I hope that knowledge cripples him. 

Oh yes, I am an angry feminist. I am angry because I have the right to be. Go on and search my past, live my history, and then come back to face me and tell me that I do not have the right. 

But know that when I curl up safe in my very own bed, in my very own space, where no one but myself tells me when to sleep and when to rise and how to speak or dress or act – know that before I go to sleep, I pray for my father. I pray for the men who have used me and hurt me and done me wrong. I pray for their forgiveness and their absolution and that one day, they might be changed. 

And I pray that they never get the chance to hurt another little girl like they did me. 

****

I am fire and I rage bright. I am a wind that cannot be contained. I go where I please and I go where I will. You cannot unmake me. 

Trust me. They’ve tried.