Disclaimer: This piece briefly mentions subject matter related to sexual assault and abortion that some may find hard to read.
***
The final Catholic school that I attended had a requirement that students could not graduate until taking a semester of a class titled “Morality.” On one of the first days of Morality, my teacher passed each student an index card and asked us to write whether we were pro-life or pro-choice. Once everyone had finished writing, he, my twenty-four year old male teacher, collected our cards and looked them over. All of the students who wrote pro-choice, myself included, were called out in front of the class and asked to defend our stance. I said that women who were raped should not have to have those babies. My explanation was met with a silent, dismissive nod as he interrogated the next student. Others gave explanations of personal accounts, spanning from severe financial instability, to fearing mothers’ health and risk of death in some extreme scenarios. Nod after nod after nod.
As a child and as a teenager, my opinions had always differed from those around me, but on lighter topics. Such as what an appropriate uniform skirt length should be. In class, I wasn’t given opportunity to weigh heavier topics such as abortion. Things of this nature were treated as morally unethical, no questions asked.
Later that week, I received half-credit on a test for providing a pro-choice answer to the question “could having an abortion ever be justified?” I remember the darkness of the classroom practically suffocating me. I remember death-staring the crucifix positioned high up on the wall across from where I sat, my knuckles white around my pen, feeling absolutely outraged and thinking this isn’t fucking appropriate.
Graduation in spring of 2018 brought relief.
It brought me a new apartment in Maine, and it brought me art school. It brought me the radical idea that I do not need to uphold the opinion of the majority. For the first time in my life, I was standing up for what I believed needed standing up for. I liked and reposted political content on my social media. When election season came around, I did research on the democratic party candidate and made a decision on who to support based on my own worldview. Based on research, not based on the “facts” that I was force-fed growing up, and certainly not based on the conservative propaganda posters plastered all over the city with the exception of my Arts District haven.
No one ridiculed me for my thoughts. No one threatened me with eternal damnation. No one told me I was wrong.
I am immune to, and even expectant of, these judgements due to my upbringing. However, in a strange and slightly paradoxical way, my upbringing can also be credited for my inability to judge others. While my right to an opinion was suppressed in the back of my mind, I am glad that my open-mindedness continued to hover front and center.
In my second semester of art school, I read The Handmaid’s Tale. I distinctly remember my literature professor urging me to take it somewhat seriously because, as he put it, “America is not far from becoming a dystopia like the one in the novel.” It’s not that I didn’t take my assignment seriously, this particular book was simply the opposite of everything else I had ever read. This was back in spring of 2019, and it feels as though ten years have passed between then and now instead of… one.
I mean that in regards to both society itself as well as my personal life. As I read The Handmaid’s Tale in the following months, I found certain scenes to be incredibly disturbing, but still thought of them like an episode of Black Mirror, a topical but ultimately fantastic story, rather than the impending fate of our nation.
I found the most disturbing aspect of the novel to be the theme of people in power throwing their weight around. And for what? To control people’s bodies. This is the main parallel between the novel and society today.
A girl learns of her sense of opinion, just in time to learn that the government doesn’t care for opinions and wants complete control over her body.
This is perverted. It was perverted when teachers were telling me how to dress between the ages of four and eighteen. It was perverted when a human sans uterus was justifying rape babies, but not abortion. And it’s possibly the most perverted to have the current president of the United States endangering Roe v. Wade. How will Catholic schools uphold their stellar skills of “educating” teenagers on abortion, if getting an abortion is no longer a right?
For women across the country, Ruth Bader Ginsberg was one of the final beacons of hope, shining bright above all the bullshit. With her passing came an opening in the Supreme Court that President Trump seems eager to fill with someone who’s morals are as far from pro-choice as they are from his own unabashed pornstar-fucking, pussy-grabbing, bleeding-from-wherever mentality. This is as disgustingly abusive, if not more disgustingly abusive than the blatant sexualization I was subjected to in school. Morals. Apparently, men at least twice my age deciding how distracting my body and clothing is, and what the potential repercussions of such distractions are, is an ongoing theme that seems to uphold all possible definitions of what morals are in their eyes.
The same eyes that reduced elementary-aged me to nothing but what was hidden by a piece of plaid fabric.
Ginsberg’s dying wish was for her position to be filled after the election. It is absolutely mind boggling to hear the president actively attempting to replace her with someone who is the antithesis of Ginsberg in every way. I don’t care what the president’s thoughts of the left-wing, right-wing, or chicken wings are. Facts are, Ginsberg was a co-worker, someone who worked under him to make America a better place, and at times, out-working him to do so. The least he can do is honor her last words.
Instead, Amy Coney Barrett, a conservative judge who is unapologetically known for her regressive political opinions based in Catholicism, is poised to take Ginsberg’s place. Barrett is a woman who literally holds the title of “handmaid“ in the Christian group People of Praise, which has since taken down their archives to protect the judge from totally valid criticism.
Plan B is still available. But the fear and uncertainty projected onto me and my fellow uterus-owners that it will soon become a Black Market item has us all wondering if it’s time to stock up on armfuls of the stuff. All of our fear is caused by the fear projected onto us by old men and their cronies who clearly have nothing better to do in the 21st century than to uphold their immortal, unquestionable morality.
In spring of 2019, I wouldn’t have been thinking this far ahead though. I wouldn’t have had a plan, a sense of urgency. Feminism sounded foreign, similarly to how forming my own opinion sounded foreign. At the time, I understood feminists to be crazy cat ladies, pressuring me to unleash my “girl power,” whatever that was. So, I never considered myself one. It took me surviving a sexual assault and pulling myself out of the dusk that immediately cascaded over my life to come to the realization that this so-called “girl power,” this feminism, is a synonym for strength.
Like in The Handmaid’s Tale, and many of the other countries this administration calls out for their “evil” morals, we are all victims of patriarchy.
The murkiness that surrounded my ability to formulate opinions, especially opinions about my body, and the freedom (or lack thereof) of other bodies in society can be traced back to a single muddy stream that contaminated my entire pool of thought. Being told by teachers, the people in power, and the figures of authority that my skirt was too short. That my socks were too high. That my shirt was too low. In elementary school, middle school, and all the way up until my last day of high school.
Buttoning my shirt didn’t save me from what they warned me about. I was wearing a jacket over my shirt, and a pair of “nice” sweatpants when I was attacked. The police were the most hung up on whether or not they had a zipper (which they did not). Can someone more “moral” explain to me how that matters?
I was raped four hundred and thirty days ago, and I am still healing through telling myself that a zipper wouldn’t have made a difference.
And that is solely dependent on the fact that women’s bodies are treated as nothing more than political property. As grounds for debate. As material to mold ballot questions from. And they waste no time in instilling this in us.
It’s subtle at first. I used to think that once I hung up my school uniform to wear whatever my wild little heart desired in college, that my body was mine. Wrong. This was an illusion. I never had, nor will I ever have, any real control. Aside from my own personal opinions.
And what good can my opinions serve, can voting in favor of them serve, if the government has the final say?
My worst fear is life as we know it tipping further towards dystopia. We are leaning dangerously close to a world where there will be no more index cards passed out to steer students into thinking a certain way because any choice having to do with any human body could quickly become a thing of the past once Coney Barrett creeps into Ginsberg’s seat.