A quick hello before we dive into todays essay! I’m back from a much longer hiatus than I expected when I decided to take August off. To say I have had a “Weird” year is an understatement. Professionally I have had the most amazing opportunities, gigs and once in a lifetime experiances. Persoanlly I have had the most terrible year filled with health s**t, chronic pain s**t, loss and then obviously just the general dumpster fire that seams to be a person in the world. I know grief and magic are so intertwined but holy f**k is it exhausting.
I had written this essay back in August and truthfully have been terrified to share it. But I do really think I’d be much more embarrassed to lay on my death bed and think about the essays i didn’t write then the ones i did. And theres nothing like a week and a half wondering if you’re gonna die to help you get over yourself. 💃🏻
I’ve been dating the same guy for 12 years. It’s embarrassing to be turning 30 and knowing I’m a seasoned relationship veteran. This is not at all what I pictured for my life. I pictured bad relationships, bohemian escapades, silk scarves strewn over lampshades. Stevie Nicks type love affairs where I make the men that fall in love with me sing my lyrics back at me on stage while we make eye contact for the rest of their life.
We walk our dog on the weekends and plan where we want to go for lunch on Saturday. We’ve been together long enough to have fought out weather or not to get a cat, got a cat, and for that cat to have lived a long and happy life and for that cat to have died at an elderly age. We’ve both gotten sober together, instead of closing down the bars and dancing on the tables like we used to on Friday night, we got for ice baths and breath-work mediation classes and I love them. My boyfriend is also a perfect angel, he thinks im extremely beautiful and very talented and humble and does most things more me. I haven’t gotten a beverage for myself from the other room for over a decade. The only thing more embarrassing than admitting I have been hooking up with the same guy for 12 years would be to marry him.
I do not think marriage is an achievement or the ultimate expression of love. Shock horror, I am a child of divorce. Weddings, and I would argue subsequently marriage has devolved into the performance of it all. You cannot tell me 99% of weddings happen only for/because of instagram. Alternative, destination, elopement, family style or otherwise. All a production for the people from middle school that still follow you, a potential moment for #content and the opportunity to showcase how much power (money) you have. The manic string of engagement party, engagement shoot, bridal shower, bachelorette, day before, day of and day after wedding has become standardized for instagram. I could write another essay about the expectations of bachelorette culture (you do not need a 6 day trip to Charleston, South Carolina to celebrate marrying a guy named Joe, please) or the finances and debt incurred in order to be able to out perform Trish in finances euro-summer-wedding, let alone the amount of waste generated for these rituals.
I feel as if I am on an ice float left alone in the ocean. All the other women in my life, a raft we all agreed to stay on, where we were safe as long as we were together, severed off one by one to go back to the island we swore we’d never return to. All thrown out, all “compromised”, in order to marry a man.
The cognitive dissonance required to say some of the most radical, powerful feminist things I have heard from the women in my life and to then choose to wear a white dress and change your last name to a man's is a stunning leap, I an Autistic women do not have the physical neural pathways to perform. Feminism feels likes a flimsy thing to try on in our 20’s only to shrug off in our 30’s.
What I hate most about weddings is watching women compromise their values because they think they need a man to complete their life, make it better, give them something they don’t already have.
I am not supposed to say any of the above. It’s bad feminist of me. We railed against the cringe capitalist mirror of Girl Boss feminism, and instead of pushing the needle we birthed Choice Feminism. A watered down version of feminism that allows us to be BFF’s with transphobes, and tolerate much more filler and plastic surgery than we think is ok, we’ve all sung out as “I wouldn’t do it but it’s her choice”. The degree in which we are asked to tolerate choice feels far from feminist to me. Choice feminism espouses the idea that any choice a women makes is inherently feminist. That just because a woman chooses to side with her oppressor and against other women makes that choice, fine? Exempt from criticism.
White women have been doing this for centuries. I could point to the big ones, the women that voted for trump, the trad wives we all seem so enamored by, the women that side with their abusive husband over their own children. But I think “choice” is more insidious than that. The choices women make in the everyday uphold patriarchy as a way to bash other women with it. All while being good lefty liberals but with lip fillers, blood diamond on their ring fingers, credit card debt for a dress they’ll only wear once for the opportunity to change their last name to a mans. All in the name of protecting, ultimately, themselves.
Arguably it’s the only choice women are ever actually making. To side with oppressors or not. White women really are quite stunning at spinning this into victim hood. Intelligent, smart women I know get married to horrible men, men who hate them, who think that getting married means the women will “settle down”, quit their jobs. All men are Steve’s and when they marry Miranda’s they are shocked they don’t rearrange their lives for them, move to Brooklyn and mother their children. The self inflicted victimhood of white cis hetero women, the ability to be both oppressed and the oppressor, and unable to be accountable for the patriarchy they uphold day to day in the micro and macro movement they make.
“Women’s rights is not only an abstraction, a cause, it is also a personal affair. It is not only about “us”; it is also about me and you. Just the two of us.” - Cinderella's Stepsisters, Toni Morrison
A couple months ago I was in the shower and felt two lumps in my right tit. I really hate saying breast. I called my doctor's office and ended up in a paper gown the next day. The dance of formalized medical performance begins. I in my paper gown, my doctor in her “this is serious but let’s wait and see” face.
I laid down on the vinyl table and made eye contact with Jesus on the cross. My doctor opens my paper gown and my right flopped to the side. To diffuse the tension building between the three of us I loudly ask my kind young Orthodox Christian Doctor with a too big engagement ring poking my in my armpit “what even are tits made out of anyway”.
While stilling prodding around in my armpit she says “the breast is made up of different glands and fibrous tissues”. Her ring get caught in my armpit hair I insist on growing up to let anyone that may catch a glimpse of my armpit hair, I am a feminist. She places the paper back over my chest and tells me it's a good idea to get some scans done. We skip mammogram and go right for ultra sounds. I go for scans the next day and my doctor's office calls me back that afternoon to tell me the results came back “weird”. A departure from the medical jargon of “different glands and fibrous tissues”. My tits are now, formally, medically “weird”.
I go back for scans the next day again, they come back “inconclusive”, another scan reveals the are “abnormal”. This dance goes on for the next week.
Throughout scans and pokes I insisted on using the word “tit” much to the upset to many a nurse, ultrasound tech and Doctor. I remember having the forethought enough on doctor visit number three, when I could tell my she was preparing me for the worst case scenario results, to ask about what would happen to me if I couldn't make a decision for myself, if my autonomy was stripped from me. She looked up from typing her notes and asked me very sharply “are you married?”. My common law relationship status would not get Simon through locked hospital doors, it would not grant him the right to make decisions for me, we can pay our taxes together, but we cannot make life and death choices together.
I very rarely talk about my boyfriend online. Mostly because he has nothing to do with what I write about, make, and quite honestly I think my relationship is the least interesting this about me. Women online share photos of their husbands glaring at them over the dinner menu and begrudgingly hold the phone to take OOTD photos. Their proximity to a man as something on par with the art they make, the songs they sing the businesses they run, their contributions to the world.
Simon got into bed at 11pm, after doing the washing up, taking out the garbage and cleaning the house (because I do none of these chores). He leaned back, closing his eyes like a porcelain baby doll as it tips back, and just as his head touched the pillow I took a deep sigh and with tears in my eyes “I think we should get married”. Throwing the last 12 years, my rioting every time someone gibed at a wedding “you’re next”, my staunch hatred of marriage, the implications that I would be someone's wife, all out the door all for the privilege of letting him change my morphine dose if I was in a vegetative to make that decision. True love. I will never change my name. I will never be someone's wife. And all of the sudden I don’t feel like I have a choice in the matter. It will be hard for my boyfriend to advocate for my health care unless he is my husband. That actually it is easier to be married to a man. Simon’s response was “ok, sure”.
I can’t help but think marriage is a compromise of my feminism. I am sure I have pissed off plently of people that won’t make it this far into the essay, but I don’t think being married makes you inherently not a feminist, and I hate that the internet makes me feel like I have to caveat this essay with that statement. But I do think of my ancestors before me. The ones that would dance and cheer for me for this opportunity of a lifetime. Unmarried, childless, educated woman. Don’t f**k this up they whipser in my ear.
The doctor called me at 5pm on a Friday afternoon. She asked loudly over my cars bluetooth “is this a good time”, it really wasn’t, I was driving and the car behind me was honking its horn because I hadn’t made my left turn yet, paralyzed with fear that it was cancer and that I was about to get in a car crash before I even got the chance to have chemo. But when a woman you've been harassing all week with your lack of medical jargon asks if it's a good time, the answer is “yes”.
“Results are all clear, we need to monitor in 6 months but we’re happy with the results”. Click.
I don’t remember driving home, the rest of the words my doctor said to me on the phone. I walked into the kitchen and saw Simon shaping two sourdough loves, folding the gluten stands under each other, flour dusting the floor of the kitchen and forming a little halo about his head in the sunlight. I wrapped my arms around his back as he twisted the little white mounds on the work top, “We don’t have to get married now”.
Thanks for reading weird girl.
If you want more me while I kinda return to a usual schedule you can find me and my “day job” over at DoYouEver. We interviewed Cody Cook-Parrott and they were so generous with their time.
Ok thanks for being here
I’m feeling mucho back so you can expect regularly scheduled nonsense in all it’s forms back again 💕
xx
Phoebe
P.s
Some IRL stuff if you wanna hang with me!
Hamilton folks! IRL workshop at Bambinos with me Nov 28th, deets here, sliding scale come yap with me! We’re getting better at talking about ourselves, our work 🤸♀️
Toronto area folks I am performing some new work next week at Replay Storytelling Wednesday November 13th @ 7pm along with some other amazing storytellers!
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