Prize witlessness

Back at the end of 2020, I naïvely thought that after his election defeat, we’d stop hearing from and about the Kleptocrat. Even after J6, I thought that—having literally been beaten back at the Capitol—he’d slink off into retirement and devote his remaining life to cheating at golf and telling lies about all his non-existent accomplishments as president.

Boy—my bad.

No, as the Bard said, the evil that men do lives after them, and this applies to twice-impeached one-term presidents. In fact—as he campaigns again for the job, Cadet Bonespurs is ratcheting up his public intentions to run the office as an imperial grift for life, and his Republican sycophants (which is to say: the entire party) are willing to put up with it if it means they can rip away democratic freedoms like the vote, women’s bodily autonomy and racial/religious equality.

They are hell-bent on returning us all to the bad old days when [white] men were men, and everyone else shut up and made sandwiches.

So I thought that for today’s entry in National Poetry Month, we might have something that speaks to this. I cast about and found Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

I first met Sor Juana (“Sor” means “sister”, as in a religious sister) in a high school Spanish class. (Along with Maimónides, Carlos V and some others, but those would be another post.) Born near Mexico City in 1651, she was the illegitimate daughter of a Spaniard and a mestizo, a polymath who learned to read and write at age three, and who was teaching Latin to other children by age 13. She asked her mother’s permission to disguise herself as a boy so she could go to university, but was unsuccessful. Nonetheless, by age 17 she impressed a convocation of theologians, philosophers, poets and jurists with her intellectual capabilities.

In 1667 she entered a convent of Discalced Carmelites (a very strict order); two years later she joined the monastery of the Hieronymite nuns largely because it allowed her to pursue her studies. Sor Juana’s writings got her into trouble with the male establishment of the Church and the state. The Bishop of Puebla famously told her to shut up and make sandwiches (more or less), and she replied that “one can perfectly well philosophize while cooking supper.”

Well, she wasn’t going to win that one, and she was eventually forced into silence, selling all her considerable library and collection of scientific instruments and retreating into prayer. She died during a plague in 1694, but we are the better off for her body of work that she did leave us.

Viz.: “You Foolish Men”. In this poem, Sor Juana captures and skewers the male propensity to project their own base thoughts onto women, and to refuse to own up to their own actions. There is no mincing of words here; spades are not dressed up as garden implements. She’s got the acid of Dorothy Parker under her Hieronymite wimple, and she’s not afraid to use it to lay bare their outrageous and unjust sexual hypocrisy—“you whimper if you’re turned away, and sneer if you’ve been gratified.” Seriously: this is the GOP platform in a nutshell.

Is Sor Juana a Nasty Woman? I believe she might have turned this one over in her mind, probed the implications, explored the current environment, and given us a well-reasoned, thorough and stylish reply.

“You Foolish Men”

  You foolish men, so very adept
at wrongly faulting womankind,
not seeing you're alone to blame
for faults you plant in woman's mind.

    After you've won by urgent plea
the right to tarnish her good name,
you still expect her to behave--
you, that coaxed her into shame.

    You batter her resistance down
and then, all righteousness, proclaim
that feminine frivolity,
not your persistence, is to blame.

    When it comes to bravely posturing,
your witlessness must take the prize:
you're the child that makes a bogeyman,
and then recoils in fear and cries.

    Presumptuous beyond belief,
you'd have the woman you pursue
be Thais when you're courting her,
Lucretia once she falls to you.

    For plain default of common sense,
could any action be so queer
as oneself to cloud the mirror,
then complain that it's not clear?

    Whether you're favored or disdained,
nothing can leave you satisfied.
You whimper if you're turned away,
you sneer if you've been gratified.

    With you, no woman can hope to score;
whichever way, she's bound to lose;
spurning you, she's ungrateful--
succumbing, you call her lewd.

    Your folly is always the same:
you apply a single rule
to the one you accuse of looseness
and the one you brand as cruel.

    What happy mean could there be
for the woman who catches your eye,
if, unresponsive, she offends,
yet whose complaisance you decry?

    Still, whether it's torment or anger--
and both ways you've yourselves to blame--
God bless the woman who won't have you,
no matter how loud you complain.

    It's your persistent entreaties
that change her from timid to bold.
Having made her thereby naughty,
you would have her good as gold.

    So where does the greater guilt lie
for a passion that should not be:
with the man who pleads out of baseness
or the woman debased by his plea?

    Or which is more to be blamed--
though both will have cause for chagrin:
the woman who sins for money
or the man who pays money to sin?

    So why are you men all so stunned
at the thought you're all guilty alike?
Either like them for what you've made them
or make of them what you can like.

    If you'd give up pursuing them,
you'd discover, without a doubt,
you've a stronger case to make
against those who seek you out.

    I well know what powerful arms
you wield in pressing for evil:
your arrogance is allied
with the world, the flesh, and the devil!

Here it is in Spanish:

   Hombres necios que acusáis
a la mujer sin razón,
sin ver que sois la ocasión
de lo mismo que culpáis:

    si con ansia sin igual
solicitáis su desdén,
¿por qué quereis que obren bien
si las incitáis al mal?

    Combatís su resistencia
y luego, con gravedad,
decís que fue liviandad
lo que hizo la diligencia.

    Parecer quiere el denuedo
de vuestro parecer loco,
al niño que pone el coco
y luego le tiene miedo.

    Queréis, con presunción necia,
hallar a la que buscáis,
para pretendida, Thais,
y en la posesión, Lucrecia

    ¿Qué humor puede ser más raro
que el que, falto de consejo,
el mismo empaña el espejo
y siente que no esté claro?

    Con el favor y el desdén
tenéis condición igual,
quejándoos, si os tratan mal,
burlándoos, si os quieren bien.

    Opinión, ninguna gana:
pues la que más se recata,
si no os admite, es ingrata,
y si os admite, es liviana

    Siempre tan necios andáis
que, con desigual nivel,
a una culpáis por crüel
y a otra por fácil culpáis.

    ¿Pues cómo ha de estar templada
la que vuestro amor pretende,
si la que es ingrata, ofende,
y la que es fácil, enfada?

    Mas, entre el enfado y pena
que vuestro gusto refiere,
bien haya la que no os quiere
y quejaos en hora buena.

    Dan vuestras amantes penas
a sus libertades alas,
y después de hacerlas malas
las queréis hallar muy buenas.

    ¿Cuál mayor culpa ha tenido
en una pasión errada:
la que cae de rogada
o el que ruega de caído?

    ¿O cuál es más de culpar,
aunque cualquiera mal haga:
la que peca por la paga
o el que paga por pecar?

    Pues ¿para quée os espantáis
de la culpa que tenéis?
Queredlas cual las hacéis
o hacedlas cual las buscáis.

    Dejad de solicitar,
y después, con más razón,
acusaréis la afición
de la que os fuere a rogar.

    Bien con muchas armas fundo
que lidia vuestra arrogancia,
pues en promesa e instancia
juntáis diablo, carne y mundo.

 

 

 

Dead in his eye

It’s the first Friday in Women’s History Month (also Girls' Day), the first post-Dobbs WHM, with Republicans at all levels scrabbling to out-rage their mullah and Taliban confrères around the world to return us to those halcyon days of the 15^th Century, and I am done.

So here’s Queen Latifah in her early days, giving us “U.N.I.T.Y.”

 

Somewhat beauty and poetry

It’s Ada Lovelace Day, the single day out of 365 that we devote to honoring women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. In the past, I’ve written about the architect Julia Morgan, engineer Beatrice Shilling, physicist Joan Strothers Curran, Nobel Laureate for physiology Rosalyn Sussman Yalow, computer scientist Grace Hopper, radio frequency pioneer Hedy Lamarr and chemist Marie M. Daly. Among others.

This year, I’m shooting for the stars. In particular, astronomer Maria Mitchell, whose Quaker family believed girls had the same right to pursue their passions as boys.

One of seven children, Mitchell was born on Nantucket Island in 1818. She started her own school at age 17, where she accepted any child, regardless of race or gender.

On 1 October, 1847, she discovered Comet 1847 VI, which came to be known as Miss Mitchell’s Comet. There were other female astronomers around, both in the US and Europe, but her discovery raised the stock of New World astronomy among scientists in the Old World. It also brought her celebrity, which she used as a platform to enable other women to pursue their dreams.

Although she didn’t hold a degree, in 1865 Mitchell was the first professor appointed to the faculty of astronomy at Vassar College. Under her leadership and through her inspiration, Vassar enrolled more mathematicians and astronomers than Harvard from 1865 to 1888. Her students and she began photographing sunspots in 1873, the first photos of the sun. This allowed her to explore the hypothesis that sunspots were cavities on the sun’s surface, not clouds. (As it turns out, they aren’t. They’re regions of lower surface temperature caused by magnetic field flux.)

Despite the international reputation that Mitchell brought to Vassar, the college paid her and a female colleague lower salaries than younger male professors. Mitchell and Alida Avery persuaded the administration to give them parity.

One of the things she said that resonates with me is, "We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry."

Mitchell retired from Vassar in 1888, and died a year later. She left a legacy of scientific achievement, intellectual curiosity and moral strength that everyone can admire.

Women's rights are human rights

On International Women’s Day 2019, I’ve got two things to share.

First, this memento of the Women’s March in 2017:

Second, Aretha and the Eurythmics singing this anthem:

Gratitude Monday: Power to the people

March being Women’s History Month, today I’m grateful for the women in both houses of Congress, who are making history. Women comprise 25% of the Senate (17 Democratic, eight Republican) and 23% of the House (89 Democratic, 13 Republican). It’s not a full representation of women in America, but it’s not only a start, it’s a major step forward.

(US News & World Report has given us photos of the women of the 116^th Congress, which I find fascinating—a vast range of ages, backgrounds, colors…)

In particular, I’m in awe of the freshman class in the House. Here’s a photo of that class:

You’ll notice that Republicans basically sent more of the same of what they’ve been electing since the Hoover administration. But the Democrats—whee doggies. They look like…America.

And those freshmen women are stepping up to do the job their constituents elected them to do. They are not standing around waiting to be asked, they’re digging in and getting it done. Just the public questioning of klepto-fixer Michael Cohen was inspiring. In her five minutes at bat (and in stark contrast to the screeching pearl-clutching and middle-school taunting of every R on the committee), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s focused queries elicited names and details that will keep phalanxes of state and federal investigators on the hop for months.

They’re brash and outspoken, these women, which royally pisses off the political old guard, who are, let’s face it, old, white, male Rs. You can’t go a single day without one of them shaking his old, white, male conservative finger at AOC or Ilhan Omar or Ayanna Pressley, who are irrefutably guilty of being not old, not male, not white, not Republican and even not “Christian”.

Yes, their youth and brashness lead to sometimes cringeworthy moments. But I’ll take them over those fossilized parasites any day. They give me hope, which is always something worthy of gratitude.

Belles are ringing

Well, I have some extra primo good news to relay—Bennett College, the historically black women’s college in High Point, N.C., announced yesterday that it met its goal of raising $5M by 1 February, so it retains its accreditation.

Yay!

Actually—they blew their goal away and raised $8.2M as of Monday. Financial stability was the one standard they’d failed to meet in December, so they should be good to go for generations to come. More than 11,000 donors contributed, ranging from $5 from some folks to big gifts from musicians, entertainers and others. Churches, sororities and fraternities held fund raisers. The CEO of Papa John’s gave $500,000; High Point University contributed $1M.

I love the way people rallied around Bennett. When I heard their history last month I was inspired by the multiple stories of Bennett Belle sisterhood, and I felt I needed to be a part of that community. I’ve spent the last few weeks watching the campaign on Twitter and worrying about whether they’d hit their goal.

And now I’m relieved and proud to be able to say I #StandWithBennett. I had a little slurp of Champagne last night to celebrate. I hope that's okay, on account of them being connected to Methodists and all.

Raising our voices

My ex-manager and I had our regular catch-up session yesterday; our first in several weeks, what with one thing and another. At one point the conversation veered onto the Brett Kavanaugh…drama last Thursday, and he asked me my opinion on a couple of related issues.

One was ambient sexism, the double standard for male/female behavior. An egregious example was Kavanaugh’s drama queen performance, flouncing into the Senate chamber and alternating belligerence with sniveling and sobbing. The entirety of the Republican party applauded him and gave him full-throated himpathy, for having his life completely torn apart by not having the greased slide into SCOTUS that they’d all promised one another.

I reported that at GHC last Friday, Anita Hill mildly commented that no female nominee to SCOTUS (or any bench, I’m betting) would have the license to throw a meltdown even vaguely resembling that witnessed the previous day. And therein lies the ambient sexism.

In the business world (and politics, and pretty much everywhere), behavior that in men is considered strong, direct, no-nonsense and effective, in women is seen as strident, angry, unattractive and aggressive. If women don’t speak up they’re mowed down. If they do speak up, they’re too forceful. Performance evaluations will tell women that they’re not assertive enough, while at the same time they’re too bossy.

If a female nominee had pulled a Kavanaugh, Senators would be clutching their pearls and every news outlet in the nation would run banner headlines that include the words “hissy fit”.

Essentially what this ambient sexism does is tell women everywhere that we have no place in the greater world, so we should remain at home; behind; out of sight; silent.

We also discussed this exercise: a professor asked a classroom full of students what tactics they employ generally to avoid sexual assault. Here’s the result:

Men (outside of prisons, I suppose) never think about it; women pretty much always have to. (My manager made a good point: if the professor had gone back and asked white and black men what precautions they take to avoid crime, the white side would probably still be largely empty while the black side would be full. “The resulting table would be full on the black male and all-female sides, while the white male center would be empty. And therein lies white male privilege.”)

That came across my Twitter feed, and I tweeted that, while most of them have been in my arsenal, the one that resonated deeply was the one about never renting a ground-floor flat. I have always steered clear of them. Several people engaged on this, with one pointing out that you have a greater risk of dying in fires if you’re on upper floors. I said I’ve consciously considered that I’d hang from an upper window and drop—not jump—and take my chances.

(I also don’t even have my actual home address programmed into my sat-nav, and even entering it into Uber and Lyft creeps me out.)

But in response to my manager’s question, I said this kind of ambient sexism is like trying to walk in the ocean when the water is up to your waist. The effort to take even a few steps just wears you the hell out before you even get to your destination. And why the fuck are women having to weigh which risk they’d rather live with, death by fire or sexual assault?

Then he asked what my response would have been had Kavanaugh said something along the lines of, “Yes, I drank way too much in high school, and I did things I’m truly not proud of. I don’t recall the incident Dr. Ford describes, but if I did it, it’s an appalling thing, and I apologize profusely for the pain it’s caused her, both then and now in coming forward,” and then proceeded to itemize what he’s done in the intervening three decades to turn his life around and be a net-positive citizen. How would I respond to that statement?

Well, I’d be inclined to accept that acknowledgement and move on to considering other things, like his crackbrained notions about imperial presidencies and whatnot. Because here’s the thing: high school is when kids are supposed to do all kinds of stupid stuff (although you’d hope that assaults aren’t part of the repertoire). They push boundaries, and sometimes they push way too hard, especially where alcohol or other substances are involved. They commit crimes—sometimes felonies—and they make mistakes. Even in college that kind of shit happens, because 18-22 year olds are still trying to transition from children to adults. If every kid who did something lamentable during this time had to carry it around his or her neck forever, well, we’d very few of us escape.

It’s what you do after you realize what appalling choices you made (and what harm you've caused) that counts—how you turn your life around, make something good of yourself because of those experiences. If Kavanaugh had taken that approach, I think there would be a lot less derision and contempt, certainly from me.

I mean, I would definitely keep an eye on him, monitor his alcohol consumption and probably never share an Uber anywhere with him, but I’d move on from him being a prize prick in his youth to examine what kind of a putz he’s become since then. And he certainly does not disappoint on that count.

However, as I went on, it’s his arrogant denial that he ever engaged in any kind of non-choirboy behavior—despite his paean to beer—that I find reprehensible and unforgivable. For sexual assault survivors, the denial that the attack occurred (or that they were involved in it) basically constitutes a second assault. It denies us our experience, demands that we pretend it never happened, makes us less-than our attacker, assures us that we imagined it and that there’s therefore something wrong with us even bringing it up, even thinking about it. It also denies us the opportunity to heal fully, because that begins with bringing the pain and memories into the open for validation and when those loud bass voices drown us out, it’s just so much harder.

I did not speak in the first person with my manager, but I felt my throat tightening in anxiety and my eyes beginning to water, so I changed the subject, although I’ve not been able to shake the conversation.

I am grateful for Christine Blasey Ford’s courage, her steadfastness and her grace, which has driven a crack through the wall of belligerent denial and shouting, and released a tsunami of accounts from women of all ages, conditions, locations of their own assaults. As Anita Hill said to Ford, “You will feel isolated, but you are not.” Ford has freed us from our isolation. There are tens—probably hundreds—of thousands of us, and our voices are rising together. We will not be silent ever again. As for strident—these guys ain’t seen nothing yet.

Gratitude Monday: First Monday in October

The final day of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing was kind of the high point for me, to some extent because hearing Anita Hill talk about the Past, Present and Future of the #MeToo Movement resonated so deeply. She wasn’t exactly the antidote to the previous day’s shitshow in the Senate Judiciary proceedings, but her measured discussion of where we are gave me heart.

One of the things that struck me most deeply was when Hill assured Christine Blasey Ford that she is not alone; the audience burst into applause at that. There cannot have been a woman there who was not channeling personal experience into the clapping of her hands. Further, and stating the blindingly obvious WRT Brett Kavanaugh’s pucker-faced, flouncy angrylittlebitch performance, she commented, “No female candidate for the Supreme Court would ever have the license to cry or get angry at her hearing.”

Again, a wave of concurring applause.

Hill’s message would have been relevant even had it not coincided with the SCOTUS hearing, although I’m pretty sure that the timing accounted for the session being at capacity and GHC having to livestream it. (Most of the conference’s 22,000+ attendees were not born when she testified at Clarence Thomas’s hearing in 1991; from what I observed, the preponderance were focused on finding internships/jobs at cool companies, getting cool company swag and going to cool company parties. I suspect that they heard someone cool was speaking, so they wanted in on that, too.) But coming as it did within 24 hours of that entitled white male attack on Ford and the cringeworthy meltdown of Kavanaugh, Lindsey Graham and other entitled white males enraged that non-entitled, non-whites and non-males are calling bullshit on them—well…

On the one hand, it’s just heartrending to realize that we’re 27 bloody years on from the Thomas hearings, but we’ve appeared to regress to decades before then, to a time when entitled white males had everything, ran everything, took everything, destroyed everything without fear of questioning, much less of accountability. The arrogance of Graham, McConnell, Hatch and the rest of the Republicans representing the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries as they steamrolled this nomination through what they claim is a Sacred Process (although of course it wasn’t for Merrick Garland) attests to that. I experienced a wave of nausea at that realization.

On the other hand, I believe these little pricks with their hissy-fits and their patently desperate attempts to pervert democracy so they can retain all the power have woken a sleeping giant: the monstrous regiment of women they’ve feared for millennia, and our allies, who have had enough of this shite. Nemesis and her lieutenants, the Erinyes, are suiting up for this battle, I can feel it. And I’m ready to serve in their ranks.

So here’s what I’m grateful for today: we are taking on these angry bitches with dicks—on the Senate floor, in restaurants, at their offices, on elevators; every single place they are, we’re in front of them. And we’ll take them down, however long it takes.

Five artists

Was it six months ago that I saw this challenge on Twitter?

Maybe so; I just clipped it and dumped it, because I was in the middle of the work day and couldn’t go fishing for examples. But it was very easy for me to come up with five women artists.

The first one that came to mind was Artemisia Gentileschi, 1593-1643. In an age where women painters were rarer than hens’ teeth, Gentileschi kicked ass. It didn’t come without cost—at age 19 she was raped by one of her father’s art students, and underwent a seven-month trial during which her rapist her not only accused of having been a slut before he had her, but also sniffed that she was without talent.

Take a look at the power of Gentileschi’s “Judith Slaying Holofernes” and see if you think she’s lacking in talent.

P.S. He was eventually convicted, but served less than a year. Some things are eternal.

My second thought was Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986), one of the most powerful figures in 20^th Century American art. O’Keeffe’s journey from commercial illustrator to creator of modernist dreamscapes of New York City and New Mexico was an extraordinary transformation. Many of her paintings have elements of female sexuality—they have to make a lot of men as nervous as Gentileschi’s Judith.

Back in the last century I bought two posters of O’Keeffe studies—one a red poppy and the other this:

I took the poppy into work to hang in my office.

My third artist is Judy Chicago (1939- ), whose “The Dinner Party” was electrifying back in the day of the second wave of feminism. Chicago’s art—which encompasses painting, sculpture, textiles, ceramics, fireworks and more—continually explores her relationship to herself, to society and to the universe.

“The Dinner Party” is an installation of 39 (13 times three) dinner place settings at a triangular table, with each setting—linen, dish, glass, utensils—unique to the woman sitting there. The table stands over a floor inscribed with the names of 999 other women. The dinner guests include saints, goddesses, queens, warriors, writers and artists. O’Keeffe is there, along with Gentileschi, Sappho, Emily Dickinson, Saint Bridget and Christine de Pisan. Chicago enlisted many women to help in its creation—you might say, a coven of women. I saw it in Los Angeles; it’s permanently installed in the Brooklyn Museum

Chicago’s next effort was called “The Birth Project”, and it explored women’s journeys through motherhood. The one after that was “The Holocaust Project”.

Lee Miller (1907-1977) and Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971) were artists of the camera, who turned their lenses on (among other things) the Second World War.

Bourke-White cut her teeth on architectural and industrial photography where she experimented with the available technologies to capture steel smelters at night. She was one of Henry Luce’s first pho-jos, joining Fortune in 1929.

While Bourke-White was exposing plates in steel mills, Miller was in France, exploring the world of surrealism (one of my favorite movements) with her lover, Man Ray. The architecture she recorded was fashion, as she worked for French Vogue and other publications.

During the war, both Miller and Bourke-White became accredited war correspondents. Bourke-White happened to be in Moscow during the first days of the Nazi invasion; forced to go to her hotel’s bomb shelter in the basement, she set up her cameras in her room to capture spectacular shots of the bombings. Miller spent most of the war in London.

With the Normandy landings, both Miller and Bourke-White moved back to the Continent. As it happens, they were both in Leipzig when it was discovered that the Bürgermeister, his wife and his daughter had committed suicide in emulation of their Führer. Their approaches to documenting the scene were quite different.

Miller got up close and level with the dead:

Bourke-White took a more clinical—architectural, if you will—view:

If you saw the 1982 biopic Gandhi, Bourke-White was played by Candice Bergen.)

I’ll end with Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), an artist of extraordinary fire, whose personal physical (her body was shattered in a traffic accident; she spent months in a body cast and lived in pain for the rest of her life) and mental (her pelvis was crushed in the accident, leaving her unable to carry a fetus) pain drove the passion in her paintings. Amongst other things, she—like Miller—was a surrealist.

She painted herself again and again, exploring her relationship with her womanhood. This is perhaps one of the most famous.

Those are my fivesix; I could easily come up with more. What are yours?

Where's the flashy-thingie?

This week scored about a 9.5 on my Weird Shit-o-Meter (to appropriate Men in Black’s Agent Jay). And that was even before the pardon of Dinesh D’Souza.

But here’s another example: the BBC reports on the top ten reasons that (British) corporations toss out for not having women sit on their boards. The pathetic lameness of these things is extraordinary.

(Here’s the list, in case you’re not up to clicking through to the Beeb.)

If I were a stockholder I’d seriously consider selling my shares, because men so stupid as to go on record backing these crack-brained excuses in the 21^st Century could not possibly run a company at a sustainable profit. And that’s before we even get to the fact that businesses with a good mix of women in leadership positions consistently outperform those packed with the XY-chromosome set.

Tá

Today is a historic moment in the Republic of Ireland. The referendum to repeal the 8^th Amendment to the Irish constitution—the one (written by men) declaring that a woman and her fetus have an equal right to life. The one that has driven women for decades to make difficult, lonely, painful, shame-filled journeys to other countries to terminate pregnancies.

It was meant to ban Irish abortions. In reality, it only banned them on Irish soil.

As you might expect from a country under the thrall of an extraordinarily reactionary Church for centuries, Ireland has some of the most repressive laws on the planet WRT women’s reproductive rights. Basically: a woman has no rights when it comes to what goes on inside her uterus. The Evangelical Taliban in my country looks to these laws with drooling envy.

The hashtag #Hometovote is trending across Twitter as women (and men, to be sure) are traveling back to the old country to cast their votes—some No, but the preponderance Yes. Bankok, Los Angeles, Stockholm, Toronto, Hanoi, Sydney—some booked their tickets as soon as the referendum was announced. Some, unable to fly home themselves, have offered to pay the fare for others able to go.

(Part of the scene at Dublin Airport yesterday, welcoming citizens returning to vote.)

The stories told in the length of each tweet (just cast your eye here, if you’re wondering) are at once uplifting and heartbreaking. The #Repealthe8th movement originated out of sorrow, following multiple cases where women (and girls) were forced to carry deformed or dying fetuses, or bear children resulting from rape; where women died from dangerous pregnancies because abortions were denied them.

I see that the opponents are waving the false flags that we see here; if abortion becomes legal then hardly any pregnancy will come to term. Blah, blah, blah. There’s a lot of talk from the Church about the sanctity of life and women’s sacred role in it. This ignores the fact (noted above) that Irish women still get abortions; they just have to leave the country to do so, or seek back-alley providers, as women have done for centuries. And it’s not a good look for an institution that for decades brought the Irish the Magdalene laundries and endemic sexual abuse of Irish children by Irish priests who were protected by the entire Church infrastructure.

(Look—I’m not anti-Church. Entirely. I’m anti institutions that do not accept accountability for their crimes, and which still think they’re living in the Twelfth Century, and that we should join them there. I am of the opinion that they should either catch up to us here in the Twenty-first, or shut the fuck up. This includes the Republican party.)

If the referendum passes, it’s likely that the Dáil will enact legislation allowing abortion under some conditions up to 12 weeks into pregnancy. This is hardly the abortions-on-every-corner state the Noists are predicting. I get it—allowing women to make decisions about their own reproductive plans is a massive threat to the Patriarchy. Getting the vote in the first place was bad enough; #Repealthe8th is another shove at the pillars of the Temple of Men (by Delilah, not Samson).

But—whether it’s this time or the next, or the one after that—it’s coming. Vote, my sisters (and my brothers). Be brave and proud. Make history.

Paschal Moon: All these liberations

Today’s entries for National Poetry Month come from Audre Lorde. Early on Lorde found poetry her channel for communicating the complexities of being as intersectional as you can get: American-born to black Caribbean parents, lesbian, wife, activist, mother—basically an outsider no matter where she found herself at any given time. This may have been a reason why she continually defined herself in terms only of herself. 

In high school in New York City, Lorde participated in poetry workshops run by the Harlem Writers Guild, which she described as not accepting her because she was “both crazy and queer.”

At age 20, in 1954, she spent a year studying at the National University of Mexico; she returned to New York and graduated from Hunter College. She embarked on an academic career, teaching and writing, drawing on her experience as being “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.” She held that binary divisions of male and female are simplistic, and that, while feminists have found it necessary to present a united front, there are many subdivisions of women.

Lorde’s poetry ranges everywhere she did; I’ll give you a couple of examples.

“Hanging Fire”

I am fourteen

and my skin has betrayed me   

the boy I cannot live without   

still sucks his thumb

in secret

how come my knees are

always so ashy

what if I die

before morning

and momma's in the bedroom   

with the door closed.

I have to learn how to dance   

in time for the next party   

my room is too small for me   

suppose I die before graduation   

they will sing sad melodies   

but finally

tell the truth about me

There is nothing I want to do   

and too much

that has to be done

and momma's in the bedroom   

with the door closed.

Nobody even stops to think   

about my side of it

I should have been on Math Team   

my marks were better than his   

why do I have to be

the one

wearing braces

I have nothing to wear tomorrow   

will I live long enough

to grow up

and momma's in the bedroom   

with the door closed.

“Who Said It Was Simple”

There are so many roots to the tree of anger   

that sometimes the branches shatter   

before they bear.

Sitting in Nedicks

the women rally before they march   

discussing the problematic girls   

they hire to make them free.

An almost white counterman passes   

a waiting brother to serve them first   

and the ladies neither notice nor reject   

the slighter pleasures of their slavery.   

But I who am bound by my mirror   

as well as my bed

see causes in colour

as well as sex

and sit here wondering   

which me will survive   

all these liberations.

Paschal Moon: A thousand years of poison

Last month, the New York Times woke up and realized that it has basically ignored women when it comes to publishing obituaries. Not because we don’t die in equal measure to men, but because we lack (in addition to that all-important Y-chromosome)…newsworthiness. So they’ve decided to publish belated obits in a feature they call “Overlooked”.

They started out by publishing a fistful of them, including one of the Chinese feminist, revolutionary and writer we know as Qiu Jin, sometimes styled China’s “Joan of Arc”, so you know her story doesn’t have a happy ending. Her pen name, Jianhu Nüxia, means “Woman Knight of Mirror Lake”, which gives you an idea of her character.

Born into a family of provincial gentry in 1875, one of her earliest revolutionary acts was to unbind her feet, following an arranged marriage and relocation to Beijing. She took up with other bluestockings, got into dressing in men’s clothes, learned swordsmanship and educated herself. At the age of 29 she sold her jewelry, left her family and moved to Japan, where she studied at a ladies’ university, joined anti-Manchu secret societies and wrote. When she returned to China, she founded and ran a publication that spoke out against (among other things) female foot-binding and arranged marriages.

She also learned how to make bombs.

Unsurprisingly, the revolutionary rhetoric and activities—which she took no pains to hide—brought her to the attention of the government. In 1907, she was captured and beheaded. She was 31.

I’m giving you two of her more militant poems, because Qiu speaks for me eloquently and succinctly.

“Capping Rhymes with Sir Shih Ching from Sun’s Root Land”*

Don’t tell me women

are not the stuff of heroes,

I alone rode over the East Sea’s

winds for ten thousand leagues.

My poetic thoughts ever expand,

like a sail between ocean and heaven.

I dreamed of your three islands,

all gems, all dazzling with moonlight.

I grieve to think of the bronze camels,

guardians of China, lost in thorns.

Ashamed, I have done nothing;

not one victory to my name.

I simply make my war horse sweat.

Grieving over my native land

hurts my heart. so tell me;

how can I spend these days here?

A guest enjoying your spring winds?

*I do not know who Sir Shih Ching is, or where you’d find Sun’s Root Land, but “capping rhymes” sounds like a very gangsta thing to do.

In this next poem, Qiu reflects on her life as an exile—she feels liberated, but has paid a heavy price for it.

“Preoccupation (Written while in Japan)”

Sun and moon have no light left, earth is dark;

Our women’s world is sunk so deep, who can help us?

Jewelry sold to pay this trip across the seas

Cut off from my family I leave my native land.

Unbinding my feet I clean out a thousand years of poison,

With heated heart arouse all women’s spirits.

Alas, this delicate kerchief here

Is half stained with blood, and half with tears.