What’s a Woman To Do?
I’m outside at Pier 80 in San Francisco and it’s sunny and beautiful and I’m with my friends at Portola music festival and we’re watching Adella who is just incredible. She’s singing and dancing in point shoes and a matching denim booty shorts and bra top set. She and her dancers are flying around the stage, sexy and hot. I don’t even know her music that well but all I can do is stare at the giant screen of her insane body. She flings herself back and forth and her legs shoot up and down. Even if there was no music, the choreography alone is impossible to look away from. When the song ends she speaks to the crowd, cheering on San Francisco, giving kudos to LA where she lives now, telling the story of her mother, and calling for female strength and empowerment in us all. She’s so beautiful and inspiring and then out of nowhere the story I read the week before pops into my mind about the seven boys who gang raped a girl at their frat party and they got away with it.
And I feel my heart drop to the pit of my stomach. And for a moment, as my eyes look at the most fun, happy, pink, scene, I see the screenshot from the case overlaid: “free pussy, pull up”.
Somehow, like a flip is switched, just when I was feeling the euphoria of being with people, in music, surrounded by love, I hate the world and everyone in it. I drop to my knees and I scream and I cry and crawl at the ground for that girl, and all the girls—all the women, all the victims whoever they may have been, I cry for myself, for my baby girl cousins who haven’t experienced yet, but will. And then the sadness switches again, this time to rage, and all the sudden I’m no longer at the concert: I’m outside and it’s nighttime and I’m back by that road by the stadium and instead of slapping him across the face I shove him against a tree and my hand reaches around his neck and my nails rip into his skin and I tell him to never. ever. ever. ever think about doing that ever again to anyone in this world. The scene zooms out like I’m watching it from outside my body and I see myself growing and growing and he’s still just this pathetic thing dangling from my grasp. Then I drop him onto the curb, and I crush him to dust and I blink, and I’m back. The song is still going and Adella is still dancing and the sun is still shining and there is no doubt in my mind that women are the strongest thing in this universe.
Yet they’re killing us for sport. THEY ARE KILLING US FOR SPORT. And they will get away with it.
I try so hard to hold hope—for the world, for myself, for the future, for my friends and their futures. But I feel guilty enjoying this day when I see in my mind this poor girl on some dirty mattress somewhere with her eyes rolling back into her head and I hear the jeers of men advertising free pussy as if they’ve gone hunting and they’re coming back with meat. And I want to kill them all. I don’t, but maybe I would if I had the chance.
God, don’t give me the chance.
What’s a woman to do?