WOMB POWER
Just when we think it can’t get any darker or more regressed, here we go again with women’s bodies. The creatrix, the womb, the incubator of life. We all have free will and it is becoming more and more clear how much we will have to fight to keep our personal freedoms. The recent events in Texas took me back to 1989, a budding political activist ready to fight for a women’s right to choose if she wants to bear a child or not. It was in those college years I awakened to the injustices against women, racial minorities, and the LGBTQ community. I soaked up every book in my women’s studies classes like a bone-dry sponge ready to expand and be quenched by the words of writers like Bell Hooks, Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich, Riane Eisler—to name only a few.
Like many young feminists, it was hard to know where to put my energy and what to do with the anger. I call this my intellectual feminist awakening. I didn’t burn my bra but I quit my side gig of modeling because I decided it was a sexist industry. I refused to shave or pluck any hair on my body for about a decade. I marched, voted, and worked in social services jobs that supported women and children.
I had 3 different incidents of sexual misconduct on my college campus as an undergraduate, all involving publicly exposing a penis I did not ask to see. I consider myself lucky no one ever touched me. Recent statistics from the national sexual violence resource center say 1 in 4 women will experience this type of sexual violation or assault on college campuses. 1 in 5 women has been the victim of sexual assault. The vast majority of women—81% according to NSVRC—have been sexually harassed. Do we need to make it any clearer here? Women are sexualized, taught to please men, be attractive to them, but also say no and mean it when a man makes a move or overpower us. Talk about a double bind! I grew up amid old-school feminism that laid a tremendous and necessary foundation but ended up mimicking the hierarchical patriarchal structures and making us dependent on paradigms we didn’t create. Women tried to be superwomen and started having symptoms of the toxic patriarchy similar to men such as burnout, health issues, and overworking to get it all done.
It was empowering at 22 years old to march in DC with N.O.W. wearing shirts we had printed that said “Abort the Supreme Court” screaming “Bush, Bush get off my bush!”. It was exhilarating to be amongst that many people demanding to be heard and rallying for our beliefs. It was a necessary and powerful growth experience for me to help define who I was and what I believed. Empowering as it was, my faith in our political leaders has steadily waned since those days. My intellectual awakening transitioned to a spiritual one when I discovered the path of the Goddess in the late ’90s and a spirituality that not only included the feminine but worshipped it! As the years have gone by, I have felt more like an outlier in a culture where we continue to get more physically and mentally ill. I went from working in the front lines to something more sustainable for an extreme empath/sensitive like myself. Alternative/holistic medicine and spiritual healing became my way of combating the toxic culture that was making us all sick.
