Tag: women

"you are terrifying and strange and beautiful something not everyone knows how to love."

For women who are “difficult” to love.

Leave a comment

For women who are “difficult” to love.
by Warsan Shire

you are a horse running alone
and he tries to tame you
compares you to an impossible highway
to a burning house
says you are blinding him
that he could never leave you
forget you
want anything but you
you dizzy him, you are unbearable
every woman before or after you
is doused in your name
you fill his mouth
his teeth ache with memory of taste
his body just a long shadow seeking yours
but you are always too intense
frightening in the way you want him
unashamed and sacrificial
he tells you that no man can live up to the one who
lives in your head
and you tried to change didn’t you?
closed your mouth more
tried to be softer
prettier
less volatile, less awake
but even when sleeping you could feel
him travelling away from you in his dreams
so what did you want to do, love
split his head open?
you can’t make homes out of human beings
someone should have already told you that
and if he wants to leave
then let him leave
you are terrifying
and strange and beautiful
something not everyone knows how to love.

A Black woman in her 80s wearing a t-shirt that says "I had an abortion."

I had an abortion. I also have white privilege.

Leave a comment

I have the same shirt as 86-year-old Florence Rice in this photo. But thanks to quite a bit of privilege in my life, I don’t have the same story.

instagram.com/p/B5xo2skAnWU

Florence Rice, 86 (at the time the photo was taken), was raised in the foster care system in NYC. She saw her mother only a handful of times throughout her childhood. When she got pregnant as a young single woman in the 1930’s she decided to have the baby. A few years later as a working single mother, she found herself pregnant again and knew that she didn’t want to be like her mother – unable to take care for the child. She made the decision to have an abortion. Unfortunately, she received her abortion from an illegal provider, and contracted a serious illness afterwards.
In 1969 when feminists began speaking out about their abortions, Florence was one of the first to do so. Her story underscored a class divide: richer women got safer abortions, poorer women were more likely to end up at a butcher.

– Tara Todras-Whitehill, instagram.com/p/B5xo2skAnWU
Comic panels about Sally Ride from Femme Magnifique

Kickstart a comic collection about awesome women

Leave a comment

I was excited to see the proposal for Femme Magnifique, a comic anthology with “inspirational” stories about “powerful” mostly-American women. The name was frankly a turn-off for me. I guess it’s supposed to be French but I don’t think of my self as “femme” in the typical American use of the term, and it seems kind of insensitive or clueless about trans identity (although there is at least one trans woman included).

I guess they were trying to make it appealing to a less-politicized audience, but I’m concerned that it’s pretty heavy on white women and entertainment figures (Beth Ditto?) and light on civil rights and feminist leaders. Where are Angela Davis, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ida B. Wells, Grace Lee Boggs, Ava Duvernay, Carrie May Weems, bell hooks? Not even Ruth Motherfucking Bader Ginsburg?

Nevertheless it does sound like a good project with some really great artists, and I donated last week. Yesterday their Kickstarter hit 100%, so it’s going to happen!  They have more rewards that will be released if they make their extra “stretch goals.”

For Strong Women by Marge Piercy (1980)

Leave a comment

A strong woman is a woman who is straining.
A strong woman is a woman standing
on tip toe and lifting a barbell
while trying to sing Boris Godunov.
A strong woman is a woman at work
cleaning out the cesspool of the ages,
and while she shovels, she talks about
how she doesn’t mind crying, it opens
the ducts of her eyes, and throwing up
develops the stomach muscles, and
she goes on shoveling with tears in her nose.

A strong woman is a woman in whose head
a voice is repeating, I told you so,
ugly, bad girl, bitch, nag, shrill, witch,
ballbuster, nobody will ever love you back,
why aren’t you feminine, why aren’t
you soft, why aren’t you quiet, why
aren’t you dead?

A strong woman is a woman determined
to do something others are determined
not to be done. She is pushing up on the bottom
of a lead coffin lid. She is trying to raise
a manhole cover with her head, she is trying
to butt her way though a steel wall.
Her head hurts. People waiting for the hole
to be made say, hurry, you’re so strong.

A strong woman is a woman bleeding
inside. A strong woman is a woman making
herself strong every morning while her teeth
loosen and her back throbs. Every baby,
a tooth, midwives used to say, and now
every battle a scar. A strong woman
is a mass of scar tissue that aches
when it rains and wounds that bleed
when you bump them and memories that get up
in the night and pace in boots to and fro.

A strong woman is a woman who craves love
like oxygen or she turns blue choking.
A strong woman is a woman who loves
strongly and weeps strongly and is strongly
terrified and has strong needs. A strong woman is strong
in words, in action, in connection, in feeling;
she is not strong as a stone but as a wolf
sucking her young. Strength is not in her, but she
enacts it as the wind fills a sail.

What comforts her is other’s loving
her equally for the strength and for the weakness
from which it issues, lightning from a cloud.
Lightning stuns. In rain, the clouds disperse.
Only water of connection remains,
flowing through us. Strong is what we make together,
a strong woman is a woman strongly afraid.