The world is no safer for silent women than it is for women who are loud, wild and opinionated. This is to say, being a woman in the world today, is an extreme sport. No. Worse! It's like an extreme sport at the point of sudden death when you know the odds are stacked against you so high that there is definitely no winning. You know how in some sports, when there is a tie, sudden death is when play ends as soon as one of the players is ahead of the other! But in this game, there is no landslide for women. Just a constant egging. Like we are in a perpetual struggle or antagonism, fashioned against us, from it's very inception.
Women, the world over are reorganizing, altering and reshaping their political struggles in the new world. A world that is coming for our necks, our skin tones, our sexual preferences, our ideas, our solidarity, our silence, our ways of gaining economic security, and our means of climbing up ladders. We are moving beyond fighting for women's rights to actually just constantly negotiating ourselves into waking up the next day, and sometimes just walking out of our houses, or just across the street. We are literally struggling to stay alive. Can you hear us choking? Burning? Bleeding?
The erasure of women's ideas, experiences and concerns through violence is becoming unbearable. We are living in a world where women are expected to take responsibility for intrusions against them, and we are being conditioned to believe that violence against women can simply be avoided by the victim.
It is not easy being a woman. There is no one type of woman. Not even one type of woman to avoid being in order to survive. Audre Lord said, "The Master's tool will never dismantle the master's house". And I agree. For as long as we struggle for equality within the very same system rooted in exclusion, we will never succeed. We cannot win the struggle to stay alive on someone else's terms.