On Saturday women everywhere walked down wide avenues and narrow streets. They filled parking lots and smiled and held signs and felt proud of themselves. They were in the mood to protest, and they did, thinking, they said, of each other, of the greater good, of the way they dream things were and the way they wish things could be. One woman stood for a photograph, feet spread wide in a show of standing her ground, smiling under big black letters that she had carefully printed on poster board: F*ck Hate.
They came out in droves, American women with their fresh cut and color. With their trendy boots and warm wool coats. They left their precious children safe at home with family or friends or even their husbands. They drove nice cars to rendezvous points with the marker still drying on their handmade posters, and they made sure to carry their new iPhones with them to capture their good deed.
They said they marched for women’s rights and human rights. Both are things that I care deeply about. Women should be revered and admired and compensated like we are amazing, magical creatures (because we are). Human beings should be loved and nurtured and treated with kindness. All things that I can get behind.
But, the idea of marching for human rights and women’s rights falls a little flat when you don’t allow pro-life women to join your protest. The truth is, at the heart of this march was a passion for seeing a certain kind of woman succeed. And that kind of woman isn’t me or most of my friends. We are the women they want to silence.
Today’s feminism isn’t a pro-women movement. It’s a pro-feminist movement. And, while the women marched for more of everything, down safe streets in a country where opportunity is banging on so many doors, in other places in our world women were starving to death. Watching their children grow distended bellies. Feeding their babies dirt just so that they will feel full for a few minutes. In other places, women are being sexually mutilated daily. They are living under cruel dictatorships. They are forced into prostitution. They are murdered for daring to say that they want a divorce.
And, right here in the US millions of babies, many of them girls, are being torn apart limb by limb, burned alive, thrown in a trash can, or chopped up and sold for parts. And the women of our great country, the very ones who claim that they want women to thrive, are leading the march that ends with millions of baby girls splayed out on a cold metal tray in some clinic, lying there alone until they are dead.
So, forgive me if I don’t feel the love behind the signs that tell us to f*ck hate. Forgive me if I doubt the sincerity of the richest women in the world when they organize an event that is about getting even more for themselves. Forgive me if I am disgusted by the reality that this march was actually about the most free and privileged women on this planet making much of themselves. Not when there are women all over this world who know what real suffering is. Not when the end game is tiny corpses filling up American dumpsters.
That’s just not a beat that I can march to.
