Because honestly, where the hell are all of you?

Every day I reluctantly wake up to the screeching of my alarm, forced to start another day. I snooze the demonic noisemaker a few times before I open up my phone to clear my notifications, and then I force my feet to the floor to face whatever new horrors befall us. And boy oh boy, are those horrors bountiful.

I walk around pretending that everything is fine when everything is very, very not fine because everyone else is doing it so it feels like I should be too? It’s as if we’re all in on this silent conspiracy to pretend that everything is business as usual when in fact there is absolutely nothing usual about it.

Women are going to usher their daughters into adulthood with fewer rights than the generations before them for the first time in history. Brown and Black humans are being dragged out of their homes naked by masked terrorists, many of them to be disappeared and never seen again. Families are being ripped apart. Children are losing their special education services. People cannot fill their refrigerators and are agonizing over the choices they have to make, often between food and electricity, food and medication, food and gas, food and rent. Everything is too expensive, unemployment is soaring, the country is being run by a handful of limp dicked losers who are punishing all of us because no one likes them and they were bullied as kids. Now they’ve made that everybody’s problem rather than just keeping it between them and their desperately needed therapist. We are one of the wealthiest countries in the world and our leaders revel in our suffering, rather than trying to remedy it. Something they could easily do.

And who are the loudest voices amidst this throng of fuckery? It’s the women. It is ALWAYS the fucking women. Mostly Black women- 92% of whom did not vote for fascism last year. Because Black women are always on the right side of history. And just in case I haven’t mentioned this recently– I will NEVER forgive the 52% of white women who did vote for fascism last year. Fuck you and your internalized misogyny. Being Master’s favorite dog is still having a master and being a fucking dog.

The men, however, have been so blaringly loud in their silence. The greatest con job in history is the men somehow convincing everyone that they are the natural born leaders when, in reality, the only thing they actually excel at is being submissive. Men thrive in positions like the military and law enforcement because they’re good little boys who are great at taking orders. Well, from other men anyway. Because nothing screams “I’m so masculine!” like doing exactly what daddy tells them to do. They play these “super masculine” sports like football and wrestling that center entirely around them fondling and humping other men and swearing it’s not gay. They “provide” for the family but almost every household I know has two working parents. But instead of dividing the household duties equally since both parents are working, the mom, 99.9% of the time, takes on more while working just as much and contributing financially.

Why is that, I wonder? Could it be that women are better at literally everything except for feats of brute strength? Yes. Yes that is exactly the reason. An “exceptional” man is an average woman. She can work, nurture, nest, and lead a whole household on her own, and she can do all of it well. The same simply cannot be said for men. Yes, of course there are good men that exist who are decent husbands and fathers; but even those men, if left completely to their own devices, would see the train running off the tracks without a woman leading the home. The world would crumble without women, and the reason men don’t believe that is because they do not value nor acknowledge the unseen labor that we carry every single day.

Even more than that, though, women are fearless. We face down danger and adversity every single day, whether it be on the street or in the workplace, and have never had the luxury of fear. When we see injustice in the world, we face it head on and lead the charge. The men though? The ones that claim to love us? The ones that have sworn to “protect” us? Absent. Silent. Fearful. Useless. Prioritizing the comfort of the other men in their lives. Insisting on maintaining the status quo since the alternative will not affect them directly. Encouraging political theater and arguing my rights to death because the loss of rights is not something they have ever faced. It is theoretical to them. It is so fucking real to us. They cannot, will not, and have no interest in trying to conceptualize any reality but their own.

There are exceptions to this rule, to be sure; but they are few and far between. It has been truly horrifying to see the men that claim to love me, my daughters, my nieces, my friends plunge their heads into the sand and pretend that nothing is wrong. When I’ve pointed this out in the past, a rebuttal is always, “Well, if the women are so great at being social justice warriors why do they need men?” And I will never stop screaming that it’s because MEN ONLY LISTEN TO OTHER MEN. We can scream until our throats bleed. We can write blogs until our fingers fall off. We can protest, donate, share information until people are so sick of us they block us entirely. But until men start calling in and calling out other men, nothing will change. Many women only listen to men, as well. Internalized misogyny is a very real thing. Right or wrong, men hold the power to influence, and until the progressive men start making their beliefs real loud and fucking clear, progress will stagnate.

There has to be a reckoning. There has to be a breaking point at which you will unburden us of fighting this fight alone. The men have done an excellent job of doing a very bad goddamn job since the dawn of time. They are responsible for every war, every bomb dropped, every political scandal, every religious atrocity, every crack in the Earth because they are terrible leaders. It is time that they not only step aside, but they take their considerable influence and power and channel it for good.

Until you’re all ready to commit to this, kindly shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down. Get out of our goddamn way and let us clean up your never ending messes. As you well know, it’s what we fucking do best.