Sunday, June 26, 2022

Repeating History, To Our Great Detriment And Astonishment


Yesterday evening May sent a around a text saying that she'd just gotten off work and was sitting outside her apartment and that it was so beautiful and any of us who could, should go outside for a little while too. 
Of course I'd spent a great deal of time outside already but it's never a bad idea, if the weather's nice, to sit on the front porch. I am so damn lucky to live here where I live, surrounded by these oak trees. 


So much green. The little lady Golden Orb weaver spider in the photo at the top is the first one I've seen on the porch so far. She will grow to be much bigger. There's a dead one behind her and whether that was a male or another female who just didn't make it, I do not know. There will be more webs with more spiders as the summer progresses. They will mate and will lay their eggs and build and rebuild webs and when it gets cold in the fall, they will have lived out their span and their children will be back next summer to take over the duties of spiders. 

It has been back up into the nineties today but the humidity is down in the lower thirty percent so it has not seemed so hellish. I didn't do any actual work in the garden but I picked beans and tomatoes. Even my seemingly indestructible rattlesnake beans have taken a hit from the heat, yielding half as much as they usually do this time of year but between the ones I picked today and the ones I've picked recently, I had enough to make getting the canning kettle out worthwhile. So I did. 


Back to trimming and jar sterilizing and brine making. I only made six pints though, saving enough back to make supper for me and Glen and Chip who will be getting back from the island soon. 


I hope they're good. 

I also picked my first handful of field peas today. I will wait until I get a decent amount and then either I or Mr. Moon will shuck them. Those and the green beans are truly the only things that show any signs of bounty this year. My tomato plants are turning yellow, drying up. Same for peppers and cucumbers. Been a hard year for the garden. 

I don't have much to say this evening. I am still low in my spirits. Last night I watched about half an hour of "The Janes", a documentary on HBO about a group of women who helped other women from 1969 to 1973 to get safe abortions in Chicago when they were still illegal and women were dying from back-alley abortions and self-induced abortions. 
I am not an easily triggered woman. It has happened before, but not as frequently as it happens to other people who have been in traumatic situations. However, this doc triggered me. I was not quite as old as those women- I graduated high school in 1972, but I definitely remember those times and when I was going to college in Denver, I volunteered at a place called the Open Clinic where we helped people with everything from possible drug overdoses to legal problems to getting mental health treatment to women needing abortions. Those women had to go to either California or New York, generally, because that's where it was legal. I suppose that's when I became radicalized. And watching these incredibly brave women in Chicago talk about how women were dying because of the lack of safe and legal abortion and how they started helping took me right back to those times when women were shamed and shunned if they got pregnant "out of wedlock" and birth control pills had just recently become available and only more recently available to unmarried women and how incredibly hard it was for a woman to have control over her own reproductive system short of not having penetrative sex (unless she was raped, of course) and I just kept thinking of all of the courageous and determined women who worked so hard for women to achieve the legal right to get abortions  and...well...I was overcome. 
I had to turn it off. 

So that's where I guess I am on this post-supreme court ruling journey right now. Every memory unlocks another memory and a resulting realization and with my age and experience, another perspective on all of it. Right now I am thinking of how, when I was raised, there were "good girls" and "bad girls" and only the bad girls had sex and the good girls waited until marriage and I realized fairly early on that I was not going to be a virgin on my wedding day and so I assumed I was a bad girl and accepted that as truth. Men, of course, had no such constraints but were expected to have as much sex as they possibly could and let the devil take his due. 
The problem with that of course, is that only the women got pregnant and only the women were marked as bad, as wicked, as sluts, as whores, as loose, as easy, as defiled, as impure, as "in trouble."
In trouble. 
Where we all are now again. 

Well. 
See you tomorrow.

Love... Ms. Moon



 

26 comments:

  1. It doesn't help that Alito said the ruling only hurts fertile women. Some defense, huh?

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    1. Not only is he stupid, he's ignorant. Society as a whole will suffer from the results of so many children born into situations where they are either not wanted or in which circumstances do not allow for them and their siblings to be provided for properly. And that is all I will say right now because if I said any more, there would be terrible cursing.

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    2. Not only is he stupid and ignorant, he's an asshole. (There. I cursed on your behalf -- not that you need me to! LOL)

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  2. Yep, back to the demonization of women by the religious. I'm pretty sure women got married right out of high school back then because they were pregnant. It's why my MIL married her first husband. Everything you said about religion (because it was religion that those mores and opinions came from), women, men, and sex...those attitudes drove me away from religion as much as anything else did. 'God' made the drive to reproduce the prime biological imperative, made it feel good so we would want to do it, made it so it is nearly impossible to resist and then tells people that women can only do it under certain circumstances with one person and if she does it other than that then it's nasty, she's nasty and a sinner and should be shunned. That is so fucked up. And now those assholes are going to legislate their fucking religious repression.

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    1. The Mormons figured this shit out- send the eighteen-year old boys (and now girls) into the world on a mission where they are kept exhausted and completely immersed in the religion and then when that is over, send them to a college (BYU) where they are also immersed in the religion to get an education but more importantly, to find their spouses as soon as possible. Because they can't have sex until marriage, they meet and marry within months. And then begin having babies right away. The men continue on with their educations and the women who have been taught that it is their sacred duty to raise children for Zion, drop out of school to begin raising those Zion babies.
      And that's fine if you're convinced of your own religion's beliefs but it is NOT fine to make laws based on such religious bullshit.

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    2. Unmarried Momon men and women can participate in any form of sex except penetrative. The answer to preventing out of wedlock children.

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    3. I believe that they are not SUPPOSED to engage in sexual activity at all until marriage but I have heard crazy stories about how kids get around this sin.

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  3. My mum was forced to have an abortion in the 1940's by her own mother. My grandmother was pregnant with my aunt when she got married in 1920. Men and women will always have sex, women will always get pregnant because no contraception is 100% foolproof. To pretend otherwise is misogyny.

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    1. All humans, except for those who are not interested in sex at all (and there are those) will have sex. It is one of our most basic needs. To tell women that if we want to enjoy this most basic need and pleasure we have to be married is ridiculous. I am sorry that your mother had to go through that.

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  4. Goddammit! same old shit- smash the goddamned patriarchy , now is our chance to step up and crush its balls! I am well and truly fired up- no more victim shit, I will cut a muthahfockah!! Pull up our big girls and march, send shit through the post I dunno, may get shot because , you know...pro life and all. ha ha. but I am not long for this world anyway, i will take a bullet for any sister.

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    1. You are braver than me. I would only willingly take a bullet for someone I know and love.
      Your attitude is powerful, Linda Sue. I love it. I love YOU! Hope I never have to take a bullet for you though.

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  5. Here's a pocketful of hope.....

    I love Egberto Willies in his prescient delivery of important news topics. I found hope and wisdom in this clip of guest Elie Mystel opining on the Supreme Court, its slow slide into toxic conservative waters, and what can ACTUALLY BE DONE right now to stop that avalanche. It gave me hope. Something we can all use.

    https://www.democraticunderground.com/1017745524

    Karen

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    1. I had never heard of Egberto Willies but thank you for introducing me to him. I have watched about half that video and so far, I'm liking it. Now will Biden do these things?

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  6. While at dinner tonight I overheard another table discussing Roe v. Wade. One man (obviously an idiot) said, ‘if you don’t want to have a baby, just don’t get knocked up.’ At the risk of being asked to leave, I said loudly ‘then keep it in your pants asshole.’ —-Catrina

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  7. I went to Pride today and it was overwhelming. Prolly 100,000 people of all kinds and trans and bi and queer and kids, especially kids. Oh, the beautiful drag queens, I need them. And the leather daddies with their, um, equipment hanging out. I loved it all. We stood with a gorgeous trans woman from Peru and I mean gorgeous and her new husband. Marching bands, baton twirlers and naked women on bicycles. Covered in pride paint. Many times I wanted to cry because it's been a while and we're so splendid and there are those who hate us and want us gone, want us dead.

    All this to say, I'm willing to get arrested now. Why not? I'm old, I've lived a life like Linda Sue said. But I saw the young ones today and they are MAD. BTW-step up men!!! Gay, straight, I don't care. Show up for women, show up for yourselves. Sweet baby Jeezus.

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    1. Yes, yes, yes! To all of this. Except- don't go to jail. Please. Truly, what would that do to help?
      I have always been in awe of the beauty of the LBTQAllOfIt community when they are showing their power, their own unique gifts to us as a species. PRIDE is a gift.
      And you are exactly right about the men. I don't think they can understand but fucking hell, they need to try.

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  8. So it has all come full circle and now we women have to fight again, (and again and again and again...) on and on, because men can't learn to keep it in their pants or any other kind of self control.

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    1. Because that would interfere with their RIGHTS! As men. To fuck anything and everything they want. Theoretically, at least.

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  9. 37paddington: I’ve been thinking of the privacy implications of overturning Roe. How exactly will the state know a woman is pregnant and tried to access abortion. How will they know the treatment doctors prescribe except by violating doctor patient privilege. The gov is prowling around in our bedrooms, sick fucks.

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    1. You are so right about that. Is there going to be a special branch of the various state governments whose purpose is to collect information about women who may be seeking abortions? I've always been so aware of the Republican hypocrisy when it comes to their claim of being the party for personal freedom when they are the ones who are always trying to tell people what they can and cannot do in their bedrooms with other consenting adults.
      Now when it comes to gun ownership? Personal freedom all the way.

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  10. I just hope that this tragic and terrible ruling by the US Supreme Court does not send waves around the world. When our Little Phoebe becomes a woman and for whatever reason needs an abortion, I hope that she will be able to access a professional medical service without fear or shame. Unfortunately such a service was not available to my grandmother when she sought an abortion in the late nineteen twenties. She went to the back streets and almost bled to death. She could never become pregnant again and this impacted badly on her second marriage.

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    1. Every family, I bet, has a story like your grandmother's. Until abortions were made easily obtained and safe, this was just a fact of life for women.

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  11. So much of the conservative talk starts with "when a woman becomes pregnant..." a though it's an immaculate conception. Better we should say "when a man impregnates a woman...".

    YP - your grandmother's story is so sad, and was so common. It was events like that which pushed my very staid, conservative grandmother to support contraception when it became available but was very much against the law.

    Chris from Boise

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    1. You're right- women aren't out here getting pregnant all by themselves.

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