Dear Patriarchy
Please protect us from yourselves
From the violence sent out by your jokes
clothes
language
hatred
fear
insecurity
Please stop hurting yourselves
Cutting away pieces of you to make room for the fear
the fear we are more than you can see
the fear we are everything you wanted to be
the fear we are the same
How can we be like you?
The world tells and tells and tells and tells you
we are different
must be lesser
have to be weaker.
Dear Patriarchy,
Fuck off.
We are louder
stronger
angrier
and we are less fucking afraid than you are.
We fear the deaths, rapes, assaults, beatings.
You fear the jokes. The judgement.
From people like you.
How hard it must be to exist in such a state of fear.
Looking always for the loudest, dumbest voice in the room who may mock you.
How hard it is for us.
Looking for the stranger in the dark
Fisting keys like claws
Checking for my whistle, my phone, my map, hairspray because mace is illegal.
How earth-shattering it must be for you, to have the suggestion of a curfew.
To look at some freedom you have and the mere suggestion it be curtailed to stop the death of these Others.
How tragic. For you.
How earth-shattering it is for us.
To see the latest sister fall at the hands of the very people sworn to protect us.
From you.
Trust the system.
Less than 0.01% of rapes are successfully prosecuted.
Avoid strangers after dark.
One hundred and thirty seven women are killed by partners or family.
Every day.
Every. Single. Day.
Lean in then. Become part of the system and change it from the inside.
Eighty two percent of serving parliamentarians identifying as women reported experiencing some form of abuse.
Just over four out of every five.
Protest the treatment you don’t like.
Clapham. Fucking. Common. March 13th. 2021.
Dear Patriarchy,
Keep trying to declaw these cats.
Keep going. Push harder.
Betray us again.
Because every extra cab home, crossed street, ignored call, blow, bruise, missed friend, dead sister.
Every single moment of the cyclone
breeds another wave of rage.
Another woman who looks up.
Takes a breath.
And chooses.
No more.
Another woman who snaps her head around in the playground.
What do you mean? Like a girl?
That’s no insult darling. Let me explain.
Another woman in the workplace.
Shut up. I’m speaking.
Another woman looking at leadership, strapping on the support of her world and wading in against the tide.
Swimming. Not drowning.
Fucking bring it.
You loud, uncouth, ill-educated, people.
Dear Patriarchy,
Not all men.
Because the subject of violence against women is, in fact, all about men.
Not all men.
Some men stand with us.
See the ledge they stand on and reach across to bridge the gap.
Who point to the men around them, at the barbs they throw and the club-like ignorance they drag around.
Who cut the chains of stupidity from their legs, and the legs of their brothers.
Some men.
But it’s not enough.
Because it’s all fucking women.
All women who hear the catcalls and pray it’s just noise, and not noise and a hand reaching. Grabbing.
All women who bite back words, equivocate, smile when they just don’t fucking want to, and apologise for the space they take up.
All women who have felt cornered.
Felt the stale, cold hand of a terrifying future slid uninvited around their shoulders, ushering them towards silence.
Felt the simmering, bubbling, expansive, explosive, uncontainable fucking tsunami coming.
Dear Patriarchy,
I hope you feel the walls closing.
Every generation of women coming
are coming up armed to the teeth
with the experiences and anger of their mothers, aunts, grandmothers.
We will fucking push until you fall from that exalted position.
Until the pile on which you sit, you see is built on other people, and the field isn’t level, and when it is, we have taken nothing from you.
We will smother the campfires you cower by with the wildfires of our creativity.
We will fan the flames of those wildfires with the sad wheezes of your last breath of ill-gotten power.
We will liberate history from it’s stale, pale overwritten handwriting, and throw it into the light of the colours and experiences it’s really built from.
We will march right through the walls you throw up.
All the way into the boardrooms, governments, homes, closed spaces, bars, building sites,
institutions and yes, the fucking police service too.
We’ll bring our allies with us.
And we’ll stay.
Dear Patriarchy,
You picked the wrong fight.
You tried to take on all women.
Well, now you have our full attention.
All. Women.
Dear Patriarchy,
Fuck you.
And just you wait to see what women can do together.