I am the Prison Guard, and the Prisoner
As our sisters in Texas have their rights stripped away, I'm sitting with the complexity of how we have all played a part in the creation of this shocking situation. And how we can also create change.
Hey!
My friend just left my apartment and he wondered aloud what we could do about Texas’ new abortion law. I think my answer surprised him. And it may surprise you.
But first…
I emphatically believe in a woman’s right to choose. As you know, I myself have had to make this gut-wrenching decision. I often think about what my now-31-year-old child would have been like had I not had the option to terminate that pregnancy when I was 18. What would I have been like? Would I have had the career I had? How could I have been able to intern full-time at magazines in college if I also had an infant. Would I have even been able to graduate? I can’t imagine working 48-hour days launching CosmoGIRL! as a 26-year-old single mother with an 8-year-old at home. Would I have ever had the band-width to do the super intense and deep work required to heal from the incest that marred so much of my childhood? I suspect I would have (like my own mother) done the best that I could, but that child would have also been vulnerable to childhood sexual abuse being raised by an emotionally unprocessed mother…just as I was…and my mother was. This is how intergenerational trauma happens, right? Parents with unprocessed trauma. I had so much unprocessed trauma when I got pregnant at 18. Ironically, if you would have asked me for my political views at that age, I would have said pro-life. As a person with so much baggage, I was looking for a strict daddy-type in charge to keep me safe. I supported that type of person and value system outwardly…and held with secrecy and shame my other parts.
Gear shift to what I loved about being me.
As a child, I had so many opportunities for self-expression. At age 8, I was distraught about the fact that boys could play sports shirtless while I had to cover up, so I would run out of the house without a shirt every chance I got. Then I went through phases of experimenting with my mother’s heels and my sister’s makeup. I went through my pink and purple phase, my goth phase. An Olivia Newton-John in the last scene of Grease phase. (‘You better shape up. Up, up, up…”) The very unfortunate Kristen McMenamy no-brows phase in the ‘90s. (Unfortunate for me, not for her 🥸.) I worked like beast at a career I loved. I also experienced not working, being PTA President and staying home with my children. Today, I feel pretty settled in myself, because I have literally explored every version of me that I’ve ever been curious about.
But somewhere in all that exploration (it sounds so full of freedom and self-expression, right?), I also fell into the trap of unconsciously striving to hit that standard our society holds for women. A standard that imprisons us: The Clown Agenda. I not only subscribed to it myself, I was a major pusher of it at CosmoGIRL! and especially Seventeen. Think about it: We buy and wear face paint, stilts, and wigs. We choose to call them makeup, heels and extensions. So many euphemisms in our quest to ignore the fact that while Susan B. Anthony and her fellow suffragists fought tirelesslessly for our right to vote, we stopped fighting for our right to be taken seriously. I’m talking about me, too: Back in the day when I was unconciously a pusher to our beloved teenage readers. And me today, with my professional blow outs and sky-high Rick Owens boots.
Let’s just sit with what we consider acceptable as a society.
I mean….We rip women’s vaginal hair off. Within most mainstream circles, women can’t bare their legs or arm pits unless they are hairless. When the weather is warm, we paint our toenails. Extra weight - even from a baby - is shameful. As soon as a celebrity loses that baby weight, they feel the need to pose in a magazine. “See? It’s like it never happened!!! 🤩” I don’t need to list all the inequities between men and women, right? You know what they are. Just think about the hoops most women jump through before they simply head out the door compared to a typical man. So much thought, effort and time. When did we become the entertainment? The Eye Candy? And this agenda starts very early. I’ve been to a 5-year-old’s birthday party that had makeup, nail polish and hair extension stations. 5 years old. That was shocking to me. But yet again, I was also selling this agenda to my young teenage readers. I remember Britney Spears, also a teen, dressed and marketed essentially as a stripper. No wonder that child had a breakdown. We are all complicit in what happened to Britney and that’s why we’re all committed to freeing her. Freeing her finally. All the while we, too, are imprisoned.
But what’s happening in Texas got me thinking about what our culture is doing to men, too, which is equally upsetting.
I think about a close male friend of mine. One of his most visceral memories is when he picked a beautiful pink balloon at a party when he was a little boy. His father got visibly tense, looked him dead in the eye, and growled, “Pink is for girls” and swapped out his balloon for another. My friend’s joy immediately devolved into shame. Just think about most boys you have known. They wear different iterations of one outfit their whole lives: A collared shirt and pants within a very limited color group. Sure there are always outliers. But those outliers are usually ridiculed and called names. Thankfully, it has gotten much better. But go to any office and look around. The women self-express with color, jewelry, pants, skirts, dresses. The men…well they’re in the same costume they’ve been wearing all their lives.
There’s also this expectation on boys as they get older that they will make academic and/or career choices to make as much money as possible so they can support their family. Go to work every day, come home, hand the money to their family. This scene is on repeat. Over and over again.
I recently re-watched an old episode of Charlie Rose (ironically) where I told him how concerned I was about boys. Girls have so many outlets to explore and understand their feelings. Even if your family of birth didn’t make space for your emotions, think about all the magazines you grew up with…the content geared toward helping you navigate yourself emotionally through this world in a safe way. The easy access you had to health information. Love advice. Inspirational words. The conversations you would have with your friends. The journals you may have kept. Your feelings were welcome. Your feelings were encouraged.
Boys are simply not raised this way in our culture.
There’s not much room for self-expression. There’s not much room for exploration. But there is a shitload of expectation. And underneath it all, I suspect, resentment. Anger. Maybe even rage. And with that, perpetration…bad behavior toward women. And as women have mobilized to rightfully protect themselves against sexual harassment in the workplace, even non-perpetrating men have been put on notice. They can’t look or speak to a woman sideways or they’re out of a job. Most men I know have been instructed not to be alone in a room with a woman at work as a measure of self-protection. Sounds like being served a big old shame sandwich to me.
And again, I am complicit here, too, on a macro and micro level. Although for the first half of my marriage, I was the “bread winner,” for the second half, I had and raised three children and had the space to work on healing my childhood trauma full-time – all while my husband worked to support our family. Three kids in private school. House in the country. Family vacations. All the bells and whistles. He would go to work every morning, come home for dinner every evening and literally just give all his money to us. Day in and day out. And yes, there are many exceptions to this cliché type of family unit. But it’s the model that our society is based on and the gold standard many men are indoctrinated to go for. In my 20s, so many of my friends’ boyfriends didn’t feel comfortable proposing until they had gotten their finances to a place where they felt comfortable taking that step. None of my girlfriends even had that consideration. For them, they were stuck on the woo-ing. The Clown Agenda. I DO think things are changing with the younger generations. I see hairy armpits on young women. Men with nail polish. More partnership. But change takes time and effort. And intention.
We often talk about the patriarchy we live in. And when we look at situations like what’s happening in Texas, it’s hard to argue with that. But I guess what I’m trying to say is…I think it’s more complicated. We are all complicit as a society for putting our boys in boxes and men in made-to-measure cells. Yes, they may rule the world from those cells but the limits we place on them their whole lives then dictate the choices they make and the rules we have to live with as a society. And the limits we put on women largely keep us out of the proverbial Room Where it Happens. Only 9 women are serving as US governors. 27% of the House and 24% of the Senate are women…and these are record numbers.
I got curious about this topic after thinking long and hard about my own abuser. As a survivor of incest, it was low hanging fruit to be angry and blame the family member that molested me. After all, he was a grown up and I was a kid. He should have known better. I have no doubt about that. But then you have to zoom in and look at his unique set of circumstances. Mental illness in the family. Lots of physical and emotional abuse. And set that to the backdrop that every boy is raised in: No room for emotional expression and no outlets for emotional support. It was a recipe for disaster. I can sit there and shame and blame him for his actions…and I wouldn’t be wrong because he did a terrible thing…over and over again. But is that really the whole story? It’s not. It’s just not. It would be way easier to just see him as a bad egg, but my whole family system was complicit. One could argue our whole society was complicit…is complicit in every perpetration.
We can’t expect to change injustices today by simply vilifying the people creating those injustices. I believe we need to have curiosity. Curiosity about what their life experiences were to get them to the place where they would victimize someone, whether it’s an assualt on a single person or an entire state. To be in true community with each other, a community where we can really depend on safety, support and freedom, we must ensure the safety, support and freedom of all of our members. I love seeing how woman have been advocating for themselves in the past few generations. The change is slow but the intention is there. We are getting there one hairy arm pit at a time. 😜.
But let’s keep our boys close. Let’s consider their emotional lives…their self-expression. Perhaps if we hold them physically and emotionally as gently as we hold our girls, they will be gentle with us, too. Perhaps if we give them space to explore who are, they will give us space, too. When I was growing up there was an iconic t-shirt that said, “Anything boys can do, girls can do better.” So many girls at school wore that shirt, including me. What signal did that send to boys? And what signal are we sending to boys about the value of their emotional lives? I think we have a clue based on the signal their most powerful brethren are sending to women from their many high offices including the Texas Governor’s office. I, for one, have heartbreak for my own role in how we got here. So before I start protesting with righteous anger, I will sit with this grief and see where that river of tears takes me.
I’m here, 24/7, as always at atoosa@atoosa.com.
xo, atoosa
The soundtrack of my 🤍🖤❤️ :