Okay full disclosure,
this is one of those days where I’m fully in tune with the anger of a million generations of women. You’ve been warned.
Here it is: Contextual paradigms that try to excuse or explain sexism, racism and exclusionary prejudice are just another tool used by a typically white male patriarchy to continue to oppress minorities, like trying to tame and cage the power of women, both individually and collectively.
I was a literature major at uni and in high school got the highest mark in all three of my English classes (yup, nerd alert!). So I’m pretty well practiced in arguing for contextual paradigms. I’ve argued a thousand different ways about viewing texts through a thousand different lenses, from time, to gender, to literary genre. But it wasn’t until this year that I started questioning deeper about where everything I’ve learnt in institutions is coming from. I’ve never done well with authority figures, but I never felt into the reason why from deep in my blood.
But I’ve HAD it with the demonisation of all things feminine: our ability to heal, how we are drawn to and work with animals, how we are drawn to and tend to the earth, our sexuality, our birth, our intuition. We’ve been torn apart, from each other and from ourselves, by threatened old men who repackaged our magic as evil and sold us a guidebook to life that f*cked us over and, if they couldn’t tame us, at least kept us in cages. Threatened old men who took our knowledge and repackaged it in institutions we were banned from. Who sold us an image of “woman”, of “mother”, of “femininity” that kept us quiet and good and ladylike. That took one side of our endless matrix and told us that was all we could be: either the virgin OR the whore. The docile, submissive homemaker OR the evil sorceress. The maiden OR the mother OR the crone.
The one thing that rational, masculine thought can’t reconcile: we are everything else.
Keep trying, though. We’ll keep wearing the badges with pride, adding them to the collections on our lapels, finally allowing the wildfire of ancestral remembering to wash us over, awaiting the reckoning.
We are the nasty women. We are the green collar criminals. We are the untameable shrews. We are the harlots and abominations of the earth. We are the original bitch, Artemis, goddess of the hunt and dogs. We are the crooked noses, the ugly warts, the green skin, the cackling of our hundred thousand sisters who burned to ash.
I am the slut. I am the freak. I am the healer. I am the dakini. The moon princess. The shadow. The hag.
I am the witch. ✨