Stoking Fires and Poking Bears
The Evolution of a Nasty Woman
I am 13 years old.
My best friend Beth and I lie with our backs flush against the cool concrete of my suburban driveway.
And it is late, late at night. The kind of late that felt like drugs before you knew what drugs were. Do you remember?
I cannot recall the catalyst, but I cannot forget the curve of her cheek as she turns over, looks me in the eye and says,
“I would never vote for a woman president.”
I cannot recall the catalyst, but the memory of the sudden dryness of my mouth and the incredulous bark of a laugh that comes out of me feeling like fire is indelible.
“What are you talking about?”
I am no feminist at 13, at least, I don’t think I am. My conservative Christian school has taught me that abortion is evil, the gays are to be avoided and prayed for, Evolution is a lie created by atheists to test our faith, and that the best kind of woman is the silently supportive one.
But a year or two of this does not negate the lifetime of strong women who raised me, or the gnawing absence of the father whom this ideology considers to be the unquestionable pinnacle of the family structure.
“I don’t think a woman should be president. We’re just not good at that kind of thing.”
She speaks with absolute certainty and I just… don’t understand.
“Just because you wouldn’t…” I deflect, poking my finger into her ribs, trying to get out of this itchy feeling in my skin. She doesn’t laugh. I think of all of the boys in our class. And this hard little knot in my tummy solidifies, just a little. “So if it was between me and John, you’d vote for John.”
She giggles and lays quiet for a moment.
“I don’t know. He wouldn’t be good at it.”
She’s right. He really, really wouldn’t.
“What about… Queen Elizabeth? She ran England for… Lots of years. Or. Isn’t a woman president of Germany now? How can you say all of us are bad at ‘that kind of thing’?”
She pauses, and she thinks, and the silence kind of hurts in a way that I don’t have any words for.
“I just don’t think a woman should be above men. The Bible says so.”
This echoes in my brain for years.
I am 16 years old.
My AP U.S. History class is taught by a man who could best be described as “extraordinarily partisan”. I’m back in public schools now, and the two years of being surrounded by Evangelical ideology has pushed me firmly in the opposite direction.
I’m mouthy, and this teacher, despite his strong conservatism, is happy enough to let the two or three liberal kids in class argue with him at length. Power to that man, he tended to encourage critical thinking, if only because we wanted to argue with him and we wanted to win. (I occasionally wonder if this was entirely intentional on his part.)
Unfortunately, it is also 2008. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are locked in a heated bid for the Democratic nomination. And as much as I would like to blame him for it, the illustrious Donald Trump was far from the first to attempt to discredit her in vitriolic and unapologetically sexist terms.
Five minutes left, and talk turns to the upcoming election. My teacher half-sits on an empty desk. One girl, pretty and smart and much better at math than me, speaks up. She’s popular and very used to being both right and well-liked, She sits up straight and speaks quickly,
“The Democratic candidates are both complete jokes. Obama has no experience and is maybe a Muslim.”
Her nose scrunches up when she considers Clinton. “Hillary sucks,” she says plainly.
Our teacher begins to chuckle and nod, face scrunching as he puts on a show of trying to contain himself. As she trails off, he adds,
“Besides, if she can’t control her husband, how is she going to control the country?”
My heart drops into a familiar rhythm of ‘not fair, not fair, not FAIR’. I try to swallow past that tightness in my throat and this time I can’t say anything, because I’m too busy watching.
Her face goes red, and she laughs with him, but there’s a flash of something else in her eyes, just for a second. I wonder if she feels the same rage and sadness somewhere deep inside her that I do.
I’m 16, a young white girl with extraordinary privilege, and this is already exhausting.
The bell rings.
I am 19 years old.
My boyfriend sits at a desk behind mine in the International Politics course I convinced him to take with me.
The professor is an old school fellow with impressive credentials, and he is incredibly attuned to the consequences of race and class discrimination, colonialism, and the hegemony of the West, but he has a blind spot precisely the size and shape of womanhood. He begins, apropos of absolutely nothing we are studying in class,
“In my country, women who have abortions are considered whores. Not like in this country- they just sleep with whoever they want and boom, get abortions.”
My knuckles are white around the curved edges of my desk. My heart is beating fast, so fast, and I feel my hand shoot up and my mouth is speaking before my brain has time to permit it,
“Sir, you know that’s not how it works, right?”
“Excuse me?”
“That isn’t how abortion works. It’s an expensive, uncomfortable medical procedure. Women aren’t just running out to get abortions. Countries where abortion is illegal don’t see any drop in the number of women getting abortions, they just see the number of women dying from back alley procedures skyrocket. If it were just out of convenience that wouldn’t happen.”
I’m raising my voice now, and I feel it reverberating in me.
“Miss Hayes, where are your sources?”
“The Guttmacher Institute; yours?”
“This isn’t-”
He puts his hands up in an attempt to calm- me, I know he must be trying to calm me, but that is ridiculous because I am not irrational, I am not even upset, I simply know this is the right thing and I cannot shut my mouth.
“They are in an untenable situation. They aren’t doing it because it’s fun.”
He smiles, as though he’s diffusing the situation.
“How do you know, have you had one?”
There is a silence like I have never heard before. Only blood rushing in my ears. My chest is tight and I can’t quite grasp what has just happened.
“That is absolutely none of your business.”
Distantly, I feel proud of my mouth for being able to jump on what my conscious brain genuinely cannot process.
My eyes have not shifted from my professor through this entire exchange. They drop, now, to my desk, and this is some kind of adrenaline rush, man.
As the professor turns back around, the girl who sits beside me in the next aisle reaches out and touches my hand. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Thank you.” I’m not really even lying. My boyfriend puts his hand on my shoulder. I’m grateful for it.
As the class ends and everyone files out, the professor motions me to his desk. I pretend I’m not shaking from adrenaline. He looks genuinely concerned, smiles slightly.
“I’m sorry if I embarrassed you.”
I jut my chin up.
“Nothing about that embarrassed me. It was just completely inappropriate.”
I walk out.
I am 24 years old, and the knot in my stomach has turned to fire.
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