There is a machinery of silence and suppression that women are refusing to be a part of any longer.

Let me spell it out:

On the Motherless site that hosts the “sleep content” women have been in an uproar about, an icon of a red rabbit head marks another section titled “18 & Abused.” At the bottom of the page, there’s a footer that reads: “Motherless is a moral free file host… blame the freaks of the world — not us.”

This is Moral Disengagement: a social and psychological tool being used to normalize the dehumanization of women.

Social psychologist Albert Bandura identified eight mechanisms of this disengagement. They have been used all week against me and other women in our comment sections following the CNN report on the “Online Rape Academy.”

• Moral Justification: Reframing harm as a “greater good.” “I’m defending free speech.”
• Euphemistic Labeling: Sanitizing violence. It’s not rape; it’s “sleep content.” It’s not 62 million men; it’s “clicks.”
• Advantageous Comparison: Making harm look small. “At least he didn’t kill her.” Or, “there’s no such thing as rape in a marriage.”
• Displacement of Responsibility: Pointing away. “Why didn’t Biden release the files?”
• Diffusion of Responsibility: Spreading the guilt until it’s invisible. “It’s just the culture.”
• Distorting Consequences: Minimizing the damage. “Stop exaggerating; it’s 62 million site visits.”
• Dehumanization: Stripping the victim’s humanity. “She’s a bitter liberal.” “She’s crazy.”
• Attribution of Blame: Making it her fault. “What was she wearing?” “Why was she there?” “She must have been a part of it, like role play.”

I have had every single one of these used against me in the last 72 hours.

There’s a reason why people use Moral Disengagement.

Moral disengagement allows “ordinary” people to remain “good” in their own minds while participating in, or benefiting from, harm. It’s how a father who’s otherwise loving can laugh at a rape joke. It’s how a husband thinks his wife is “too emotional” because she carries the weight of the world.

This system depends on women’s participation for our very survival. It shows up in how women teach daughters to be careful about what she wears or how she acts, instead of teaching sons not to rape or harm. It shows up in how women police each other’s rage because the cost of naming the truth is rejection and exile.

But more and more, women are refusing to go along with the lie. And the fury in women’s comment sections is the sound of this machinery breaking. Men aren’t angry because we’re wrong; men are angry because the system only works if we agree with the lie. And the CNN rape academy story has broken the spell for millions of us.

I need women to understand this: when people argue that it “wasn’t really 62 million men,” what they’re doing is textbook distortion of consequences. Their goal isn’t accuracy; their goal is to trap us in a math debate so we stop talking about the horror and the victims.

The number is NOT the argument. The facts and existence of the horror IS the argument:

• A platform where men circulated 20,000 videos of drugged, unconscious women.
• * Videos averaging 50,000 views each.
• * The tip-sharing, the community-building, and the documented victims.
• Because even if every click was a bot — even if the numbers are inflated — the content isn’t. Bots don’t demand drugged women; men do. And the supply exists because the market was selling.

At the end of the day, all of that is academic. The only question we need to answer is, what is the fucking threshold?

How many videos? How many Pelicots? How many raped wives or children? At what number is a woman finally allowed to be afraid and taken seriously without being called “hysterical”?

The answer is, there is no answer. There is no threshold — no amount of data or proof — that will ever be good enough, or satisfactory enough, to get this system to acknowledge, and take seriously, the violence. The only thing that matters is whose comfort our culture and world is designed to protect. And the answer to that has never been women.

This is the water we swim in. Even the ‘good’ men and women are oxygenated by a system that suffocates us. And you don’t get to be neutral in water designed to drown women. You are either a hand holding someone under, or a hand pulling them out.

Refusing to see just how pervasive it is doesn’t make the water magically disappear. It just makes the people screaming and drowning in it look “crazy” to you for mentioning the waves.

We are furious because we are done carrying the silence. The weight women carry isn’t just the water itself: it’s the exhaustion of being the only ones honest enough to admit we’re all drowning and dying.

We are drowning or swimming. But from now on, you can’t pretend the water isn’t there.

This week was the start of the worker’s revolution.

Last Tuesday, a 29-year-old warehouse worker named Chamel Abdulkarim set fire to a 1.2-million-square-foot Kimberly-Clark warehouse in Ontario, California. He filmed himself walking through the building with a lighter, saying, “All you had to do was pay us enough to live.” Six hundred million dollars in damages. No one was injured and he texted a coworker afterward comparing himself to Luigi Mangione.

Between April 7 and April 11, six significant warehouse fires broke out across the United States: California, Ohio, New Jersey, New York, Bakersfield.

On April 11, a man set multiple fires inside stores at the Ontario Mills mall (the same city) four days later.

A 20-year-old from Texas threw a Molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s San Francisco home, then went to company headquarters. Two days later, two more people were arrested after shots were fired at the same residence. Three separate incidents at one man’s home in three days.

All in one week — a warehouse torched by a worker who filmed his manifesto. An AI CEO’s home firebombed, then shot at by separate people. Six warehouse fires across the country and a mall set on fire.

People are calling Abdulkarim the “warehouse Luigi.” That tells you where our collectively tensions and sentiment are at.

We are so done with the billionaire class and the unequal, brutally unjust system and world. Abdulkarim injured no one but faces up to life in prison. Meanwhile, the average convicted rapist in America serves only 5.4 years. And no one from the Epstein files has faced any consequences besides Ghislaine Maxwell.

When a man who burns inventory — stuff! — gets a longer sentence than those who destroy human beings, that’s not a flaw in the system. That IS the system. Our criminal legal structures don’t exist to protect us. They exist to protect businesses, assets and capital. They always have.

There is an African proverb that says, “The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.”

The village is being burned down.

This is what every early breaking point in history looks like; a series of seemingly unrelated acts of desperation that share the same root cause. The warehouse worker and the man at Altman’s door have nothing in common except the conviction that the normal channels of justice and equality are not available to them.

They’re not just unavailable to them. The systems that are supposed to absorb our grievances — labor protections, political representation, courts, etc — are failing us all. And when people feel unseen and unheard by the people and institutions that are supposed to serve us, we destroy things. We burn it all down.

To be clear, this is not me endorsing it. It’s me naming the pattern.

Mangione is a folk hero not because people support murder, but because the system he attacked made itself so hated and so allergic to reform that violence against it felt logical.

The warehouse fires are attacks on capitalism. The Molotov cocktail at Altman’s door is an attack on tech at the altar of capitalism. These are America’s guillotines.

The guillotines themselves weren’t the revolution. They were a symbol that the social contract was so broken that the people who broke it would no longer be protected by it. By the time the blades fell, the aristocracy had already lost.

Same thing is happening here.

The power hungry ruling class in the US are making the same miscalculation the French aristocracy made. They believe their wealth makes them untouchable, and they confuse our sleepy compliance with consent. But they shouldn’t be surprised when the people they’re squeezing refuse to play by the same rules anymore when the rules only ever protected the ruling class.

The difference between 1789 and now is that there’s no organized movement directing our rage. Instead it’s individual acts of destruction by people who’ve decided they have nothing left to lose. Which in a lot of ways is more dangerous than an organized revolution, because there’s no one to negotiate with, no demands to meet.

So it would be wise for the political class to stop doing what Marie Antoinette’s court did by pretending it wasn’t happening, or calling it criminality, or doubling down on the conditions that are causing the rupture.

Whether this becomes something organized or stays chaotic and destructive depends on things that haven’t happened yet. The power hungry ruling class can put a stop to this destruction if they place the needs of the people over their need to consume and dominate.

But make no mistake: what is happening, right now, this week, is the start of a revolution. And while I don’t condone violence, I do support the revolution.

Long live the revolution.

I’m lying on the floor next to my husband and my dog. I’ve eaten. I took a long walk in the sun earlier. I have a phone call in thirty minutes. I’m telling you this because I want you to know I’m functional. Barely, but awake and functional.

The president is going to war with Iran. A country and a people who have done nothing to us. He is demanding they reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which they only closed because we attacked them.

In the coming months, food supply chains will buckle. The norms we built our lives around are collapsing at a speed that doesn’t allow for processing. And what feels utterly insane to me is that so many people are behaving as though this is normal.

There’s a play by Eugène Ionesco called Rhinocéros. Written in 1959. One by one, everyone in a small town transforms into a rhinoceros. Friends, colleagues, lovers. Each one finds a reason why it’s fine. Why it’s natural. Why, maybe, the rhinoceroses have a point. Until one man is left, the last human, wondering if he’s the crazy one for refusing to change.

Ionesco wasn’t writing about rhinoceroses. He was writing about watching his friends become fascists in Romania. All intelligent, reasonable people who just went along. And the horror of the play isn’t the ideology. It’s how normal it starts to feel for everyone except those who refuse.

I am not a rhinoceros. If you’re reading this and agree, I suspect you aren’t either.

What I am tho is exhausted. Not the kind that sleep can resolve. It’s the kind that settles into your body like weather. I feel a heavy weight on my skin and in my soul. Maddeningly so, my body has registered that the world has changed, but my mind hasn’t caught up to the full scope of it yet.

The truth is, I’ve felt this before. After my father and brother were murdered in 1997, I walked through months — no, years — like this. I knew in my bones that life would never be the same. I didn’t know in what ways. I couldn’t comprehend it all, let alone process it. I could only exist inside the heaviness, day to day, not knowing if it would ever lift.

That’s how this feels to me. Only today is different in one way. I’m not alone. I know that millions of people in this country and across the world are feeling what I’m feeling right now. That’s not good news. But it changes the shape of the despair. It means this isn’t mine alone to carry.

So many in our political class are the weakest, most pathetic, cowardly, and useless group of people to ever hold office. They will go down in history as having colluded with the most dangerous people to ever hold power. History is fascinating to study, but it is horrible to live through.

I’m on the floor. My dog is next to me. My husband is at his desk. In thirty minutes, I have a phone call.

That’s all I have right now. And that’s enough.

I see many people defaulting into hopelessness right now. Cynicism. Resignation. It makes sense, given our times. But I want to name something: that response is not (just) a natural reaction to hard times. It is a function of patriarchy and white supremacy. It is trained into us.

Hope is an active force. It is not a bird perched on a branch, singing through the storm. That’s a pretty poem and a lie the patriarchy loves to tell us — the idea that hope is a passive and delicate thing that magically endures, or that some people have and others don’t.

Patriarchy indoctrinates us all, but especially white women, practically from the womb, with the idea that someone will save us: a father. A husband. A government. A God.

We are trained to pin our survival on aligning with the right one: the right man, the right religion, the right organization, or the right politician.

But that is not hope. That is hopeless-hope. And most of us don’t even know we’re doing it.

White men have their own version. Patriarchy trains them into hierarchy — an alpha-male pecking order. And most land nowhere near the top.

They become disempowered “nice guys.” They see women in danger, in trouble, or in need, and they don’t step up. Not because they’re bad or evil, but because unconsciously the hierarchy has convinced them that’s not their job — some other, more capable guy is supposed to do that. A bigger, stronger, heroic guy.

So they wait. Or they become confused (“I don’t know what to do”), or their fear paralyzes them into remaining comfortable. By default, they opt out.

But then it gets worse.

The ones who do step up are usually insensitive at best, violent at worst. They condemn anything that smells of femininity. They like war. And guns. And love to tell everyone the rules for who IS a man and who’s not a man. Who IS a woman and who is not a woman.

In the most virulent version of this system, only certain women deserve to be rescued. Only certain humans with a particular skin color, from particular countries, are deserving of humanity and compassion.

It’s no wonder cynicism and hopelessness are our easy defaults.

But again, hope is not a bird. Hope has teeth!

Black and brown people understand what it means to carry the weight of hope and faith. They have been in this fight for centuries.

From Harriet Tubman to Ida B. Wells to Fannie Lou Hamer to James Baldwin, every generation produced people who spoke truth to power and knew that isolation, repression, or death could be the price they might pay. They marched anyway. They wrote anyway. They organized anyway.

I wouldn’t even have the language to name what we’re seeing without today’s Black and brown leaders. Women like Charlene Carruthers, Mariame Kaba, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Imani Barbarin. These women had the moral clarity of hope for a better future, galvanized with incredible courage. They called out the stink of the shit around them long before it was safe to do so.

Hope is not a bird with feathers. It’s a woman who’s been punched in the gut, falls to her knees, looks her challenger in the eye, and dares to get up again.

Rebecca Solnit wrote that hope is not a lottery ticket you hold while sitting on the couch. It’s an ax you use to break down a door.

I’d take it further.

Hope is the ax that breaks down the door of a house that is on fire. And we are a country that’s on fire.

Hope doesn’t wait for rescue. Hope is us. It’s all of us.

White men wore the white cloaks and the pointy white hats, but white women sewed them, washed them, and ironed them.

This is not a metaphor. Historian Stephanie Jones-Rogers, in *They Were Her Property*, documented that white women made up about 40% of slave owners in the American South. They were not passive inheritors. They were active participants: buying, selling, managing, profiting. They attended the slave markets in New Orleans. They negotiated prices. They inflicted punishment. They built wealth on Black bodies and called it household management.

When Charlie Kirk was shot last year, I posted about the grift of Erika Kirk’s public grief. What followed was a flood of angry white women clutching their pearls.

She shouldn’t be judged. You’re horrible. She’s grieving. How dare you?!

A display of the only power conservative structures reliably offer women.

In a deeply patriarchal system, your options for identity are limited. The faithful wife. The devoted mother. The caretaker of the home and the mission. Independent ambitions — especially goals not aligned with the husband’s purpose — are dismissed or punished.

But there is one role that remains above criticism. One position that instantly grants moral authority, mobilizes resources, silences opponents, and turns personal suffering into political power.

The Exalted Victim.

When Erika Kirk became a widow, she reached the highest position a woman could attain in her world. Her grief was channeled by the movement. Her suffering became evidence that the enemy was real, the cause was just, and the fight had to continue. To criticize her was to attack a martyr’s widow. To question her was to reveal yourself as morally bankrupt.

That’s not grief. That’s infrastructure.

This is what white feminism has always done: take the language of liberation and use it to protect proximity to power. It centers white women’s comfort, feelings, and awakening while treating the experiences of women of color as secondary, supporting material, things to address later, once the real work is done. It is gatekeeping disguised as solidarity.

And it operates on the same belief as the Exalted Victim: that white women’s pain is the most visible, the most worthy of protection, and the most politically advantageous. Not because it’s true. Because the system was built to see it that way.

This dynamic isn’t just at the level of national politics. It’s a texture; how you move through the world every day. You practice patience until it costs you something.

All the while, you see yourself as the rational one, the balanced one, the one who made an effort.

You say, I just want a conversation. I’m just asking questions. You’re so angry. I’m being silenced!

You have constructed an identity entirely through the male gaze — and within that perspective, the Exalted Victim is the ultimate. She cannot be wrong. She cannot be held responsible. She is justified because of her injury.

The MAGA women now ‘waking up’ — posting tearful videos about finally seeing Trump for who he is after voting for him three times — do the same thing. They center themselves. They perform their revelation. They describe their dawning awareness in the language of courage, as if the people who warned them aren’t still living inside the consequences they helped create. And they demand their arrival be met with warmth, welcome, and careful handling. They say, explicitly, they don’t want to be shamed. No reckoning with who got hurt.

Just: Witness my transformation, and be gentle.

The circumstances of white privilege change. The structure remains the same.

Speaking from personal experience, I am a first-generation immigrant. My family comes from Cuba. Before the 2024 election, I tried to make my closest white friends understand what was at stake — not just in theory, but for me, my community, and immigrants across the country. I shared the death threats I’d received. I explained what my work with women meant to me. I begged them to see that this was not just a rhetorical exercise.

They didn’t believe me. They parroted Russian talking points. They claimed both sides were the same. They called me too emotional, too reactive, like a misguided child who needed to calm down.

When I ended the friendship after months of honest conversations, they told me I was crazy, that I’d done something terrible, and that they were the real victims.

Of course they did.

When your sense of identity is filtered through the approval of power, when your worth depends on proximity to the right man, the right cause, or the right victimhood, losing a friendship becomes an attack. And the person who walks away becomes the aggressor.

I am someone who doesn’t dye her hair. I’ve embraced my grey. I am a woman with opinions, presence, and a refusal to shrink to make others comfortable. Conservative white women often tell me I’m too much, too angry, too unlikable, too unrelatable. Why do you have to be so aggressive? They criticize my appearance, my tone, my volume — basically, they want me more palatable, more deferential, more like someone who knows her place.

They police what they cannot control. A woman who refuses to diminish herself is, in their view, a threat.

Those white women in the slave markets of New Orleans weren’t anomalies. They were participants in a system that empowered them by oppressing others. They may have ranked second, but not last. That reality has never gone away. It just changes disguise.

Today, that looks like voting to strip other women’s rights while calling themselves a feminist, like slick trad-wife marketing, and defending a grieving widow’s political pivot while ignoring what the movement she’s rallying for will do to her neighbors. It’s performing an awakening on social media and asking not to be judged for how long it took.

It’s sewing the robes and insisting they don’t know what they’re for.

White women have been the unseen backbone of white supremacy, not just in history, but now in their wine clubs, comment sections, friendship groups, and voting booths. You have carried water for a system that also seeks to diminish you. You have policed each other into compliance and called it love.

And when the cost finally arrives — when what you enabled turns against you, or when someone you couldn’t dismiss finally walks away — you reach for the only tool you’ve always had. You become the victim.

You’re really skilled at it. You’ve been practicing for a long time.

If you’re still reading, I’ll assume you want more than absolution, and you’re interested in what’s actually required.

• Stop centering your awakening. Your tears about what you finally understand are not the point. The people who tried to tell you — who lost jobs, relationships, safety, citizenship, and bodily autonomy while you were still deciding — they are the point. Your awakening isn’t an endpoint. It’s the beginning.
• Get comfortable with feeling uncomfortable. The system you’ve relied on your whole life has given you a certain kind of social currency — being agreeable, reasonable, and non-threatening. Allyship will cost you that currency. You might be called a traitor. You could lose friendships. You’ll say what nobody wants to hear. That discomfort isn’t a sign that something’s wrong. It’s a sign that you’re finally doing something right.
• Stop asking for gentle treatment. You don’t get to determine the terms of your own accountability. When a woman of color, an immigrant, a queer person, or a trans person tells you that your silence, your vote, or your “both sides” rhetoric caused harm, you don’t get to negotiate how they deliver it. You listen. You believe her. You sit with it even when it hurts.
• Put your body into it. Not just a profile picture. Not a repost. Your real presence, your genuine resources, your authentic voice in the rooms where decisions are made. Proximity to white male power is the one thing you possess that others don’t. Use it to open doors, not to guard them.
• And finally: this is not about being a good person. ‘Good person’ is not the goal. The goal is whether the people most harmed by the systems you’ve upheld can trust you, not with your feelings, but with your actions. Trust is built slowly, in the opposite direction of every instinct the patriarchy trained into you.

You were taught to perform, manage perception, and make yourself acceptable to those in power.

Unlearn it.

Not for applause. Not for redemption. Because the world is on fire, and you’ve been standing close enough to the heat to matter, and using that position to stay warm.

I didn’t know, when I started, that I would find these rooms in me.

Packed tight. Abandoned. Things shoved in for safekeeping - which is to say, for hiding. If no one sees it, including me, maybe it won’t hurt. Maybe it won’t be shameful. Maybe I can still pass. Maybe it will all pass.

But here is what was in the rooms:
- Goodness wanting to do good.
- Love wanting to love and be loved.
- Desire desiring to be desired.
- Grief. Deep sorrow. Presence aching for more presence.
- Fear. So much fear.
- Grace. The bittersweet taste of grace.
- Love.

Love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love...
So much love.

And this: I am a note looking for its song. Looking for the music I belong inside of.

It is a particular kind of pain to be a note without its song. To carry pitch and tone, and no place to land. No home to resonate or reecho.

I have hope. But hope is hard to hold.

And yet, here. This. The rooms cracked open. The inventory taken. Not because I am healed or whole or finally fixed, but because I looked. Am looking. Because I said, "Here is what is in me," and did not look away.
I do not look away.

Corruptible. Majestic. Horror and beauty both. All.

The monsters under the bed, the ones I was so certain were real —

Yes.

Yes to all of it.

“So, are you excited about your upcoming birthday?” Jerry asks me. I’m turning 35 in two weeks — a fact I’m not thrilled about.

“I am a woman in my mid-thirties, what do you think?”

He laughs. “But at least you’re going to be with friends.”

“Yeah, that’s true.”

“And you’re healthy.”

“Yup — true, too.”

“And you’ve got a job. Some people don’t have one.”

“All true statements.”

“So, things are good, right?”

Jerry has a need to alter everything I say so that it means what he wants it to mean; another fact I’m not thrilled about. It’s because he wants me to be happy. I want to be happy too, but the only way I know to be happy is to let myself be unhappy when I’m unhappy.

“You’re right, Jerry. Things are good.”

“And Allie?”

“Yes?”

“In case I haven’t told you this today, I think you’re wonderful.”

“That’s nice. Thank you.”

Lately, I really want to tell him to fuck off. I don’t because I care about him and don’t want to hurt his feelings. Besides, I haven’t been able to tell a man to fuck off ever since my father died six years ago. Losing my father was hard to do. Just thinking about telling a man to fuck off felt like I was losing him all over again, so I stopped doing it.

Jerry and I’ve been friends for four months now. At least, that’s what I keep trying to tell him — that we’re just friends.

We met last fall at a dinner party that Sharon, a mutual friend of ours, had thrown. From the moment he and I met, we couldn’t stop talking to one another. We just had that kind of chemistry. I wasn’t physically attracted to him, though. He was 20 years older than me, was 5’8” tall, wore his thinning white hair à la Donald Trump, and had badly capped teeth. But he seemed grounded in a way that was easy and comfortable to be around.

All in all, I liked him. Each time we’d get together, he and I would talk until we were kicked out of whatever place we were hanging out. Our conversations were all over the map. We talked about the meaning of life, heartbreak, and disappointments; we talked about schools, recreational drugs, and the stock market. It was great.

A few weeks into it, though, I began to sense he was attracted to me and was steering our relationship in a romantic direction. It wasn’t something I wanted. I had just gotten out of a romantic relationship that had left me a little fetal on the side of my ex’s road, so getting into another relationship wasn’t a good idea to me. Besides, I only wanted to be friends. The next time we got together, I told him this.

“Jerry, a relationship I was in ended recently, and I’m not over it.”

“What happened?”

I shook my head. “Too long and too complicated a story.”

“So tell me anyway.”

I shook my head some more. He looked at me as if to say, “Talk.” I shook my head again at him more vigorously.

“Allie!”

I rubbed my face before answering. “What’s there to tell, really? For a while, a man and I were in love until one day, he decided he wasn’t anymore.”

“Hmm… I’m sorry.”

I nodded and looked down. “Yeah, me too.”

“What’s his name?”

“Angus.”

“Angus?!”

I laughed a little. “Yeah, Angus.”

“That’s some name.”

I smiled and nodded.

“So …where are you in the process? I mean, how not over him are you?”

“…I’m uh …so not over it that I spend my Saturday mornings crying while I run around the track in Riverbank State Park.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah,” I laughed, “Oh. So listen, what I’m about to say is gonna sound sort of junior high school, but the truth is, I need a friend. I have lots of people I talk to and am friendly with, but I have only a handful of people I call my friend. For whatever reason, it feels like you might be someone it’s okay to call at 3 am if I have a problem I need to talk through — not that I’m in the habit of calling anyone at 3 am if I have a problem I need to talk through.”

He said my instincts were right. That he was someone I could call any day or night if I needed him, and that he needed a friend too. After all, he told me, he had just gotten out of a marriage, for crying out loud! The divorce papers had yet to be signed.

I knew about all this. Sharon had filled me in on him when I called her the day after her dinner party to thank her for inviting me. That’s why I had figured, given Jerry’s recent breakup and my own, that we could commiserate with one another.

Moreover, I was looking for a father/mentor-type relationship (I was always looking for a father/mentor-type relationship). Anyway, we agreed that we would “just be friends.”

On our first night hanging out after the “let’s just be friends” conversation, he said, “I don’t want to be just friends. I want to be more than friends with you.” Jerry has a dark, misshapen, melanoma-like freckle on his left cheek. I was looking right at it when he said this to me.

“You and I are in different places in our lives. You’re settled and retired, and I’m not. I’m building my life. Besides, you just got out of a marriage, not even a month ago.”

“True, but I think I’m really over it. I gave it everything I had when I was in it, so for the first time, I’m not obsessing and thinking about the relationship afterwards. I believe the whole thing is really complete for me.”

That struck me as a lie. “Um … Okay, that’s fair enough. But that’s not the case for me. I just got out of a relationship, and I’m still crying over it while jogging or riding the subway. I wouldn’t exactly call myself emotionally ready to be involved with someone, you know what I mean?”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. I understand. I’m just saying that I find you attractive and I want more than just a friendship with you. I care about you and want to get to know you better, is all.”

He jutted his chin forward as he said this. When he did, his head caught a shaft of overhead track lighting that cut harshly through his cotton-candy-comb-over-coif and reflected brightly off his scalp. It wasn’t his best look.

“Thank you, that’s very flattering — and getting to know me better is fine, but having more than a friendship is not a good idea.”

“Why? I love talking to you. I think you’re great, Allie. You’ve told me you love talking to me as well. What’s the problem?”

“Well… I …I …I might want a child at some point in my future. I can’t imagine that a child is something you would want at this stage in your life. Remember that I’m 34 years old. I have to be honest and tell you that I simply don’t think of you in terms of a romantic possibility, do you understand? I’m sorry, but I have to be pragmatic about matters of the heart nowadays.”

This was all true, but really, I was playing the odds with our ages. The truth is, the idea of sleeping with him was revolting to me, and I just couldn’t bring myself to jab him with that hard-edged truth.

“This is strange to be saying this to you so soon, but not having a child is the only regret I have in life. I do want a child.”

“Oh…” I shrugged and slowly shook my head. We sat for several moments in silence.

“Listen, I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable. If this whole thing makes you feel weird then forget about it. I just want you in my life — I don’t care how it is, okay? We’ll be friends.”

“Okay,” I said and let go of my breath. “Thank you for saying that. Really.” And we went on with our evening as though the subject was resolved.

To be honest, this wasn’t the first time I had found myself in one of these situations. For six years now — ever since my father died — I’ve been in one May-December relationship after another. The ages of these men have ranged anywhere from fifteen to thirty-five years my senior. To make matters worse, they’ve all been skewed variations of my father, who could at best be described as the imagined love child of Humbert Humbert and Tony Soprano. I knew I was looking for a father, but I didn’t think I was looking for my father. Unfortunately, he was all I kept attracting.

The next week, Jerry called me and told me he had informed Rachel, his ex-wife, that he was hanging out with me.

“Really — why?”

“New York is a small town. I didn’t want her to get the wrong impression if she were to accidentally bump into us one day.”

“Wrong impression of what? Jerry, we’re just friends.”

“I know, but if she were to see us, she wouldn’t know that. I just wanted to protect her from any misunderstanding or unnecessary hurt. I am a very honest person. Not telling her seemed like some sort of dishonesty on my part.”

From where I was standing, his telling a fifty-something-year-old woman he had recently separated from that he was becoming friends with a thirty-something-year-old woman seemed a lot to me like his trying to stick it to her, but what did I know?

“I’m curious, are you going to call her whenever you make any new friend? Like, if you become good friends with your butcher, are you going to call her to tell her that?”

“Allie, it’s not the same thing.”

“It is the same thing, but whatever. Listen, I don’t get this whole thing completely, but I’ve never been married, and obviously you two have your own way of communicating, so if this is something you needed to do for yourself, then fine.”

For the next few weeks, everything ran smoothly; we talked on the phone, went to brunch, and generally just filled each other in on our lives. It was beginning to feel like a good friendship, and I started to feel like I could relax. He even once asked for my advice on dating, which made me feel as though he wasn’t looking at me romantically anymore.

“I have a car, but last night, I didn’t feel like picking my date up in Brooklyn, so I told her I was going to take a subway to meet her. She got upset with me, and we ended up in a 15-minute argument about it. This was on a second date! Do you think I was being unreasonable to not want to pick her up by car?”

“Of course not. But it does make me wonder — are you really interested in her?”

“Now that you ask, no, not really. Why?”

I shrugged. “When we’re really interested in someone, we inconvenience ourselves for them. You didn’t want to be inconvenienced, so it sounds to me like you’re not really interested in her.”

He looked at me as though I was a wonder, like I was the Sphinx or something, and then smiled at me with his Chiclet gum-like capped teeth. I looked down, feeling a little uncomfortable. I noticed that his fingernails were freshly manicured. In the couple of months that I had known him, I couldn’t recall having ever seen him with manicured nails.

“Jerry, did you get a manicure?”

“Yes.”

“Since when do you get manicures?” I grabbed his hands to get a closer inspection.

“Since you said that you would never let a man touch you if they had ugly hands or fingernails.”

I dropped his hands.

“Allie, don’t get nervous. I just thought that if you feel that way, then most women probably do too.”

“Okay.” I changed the subject. I couldn’t tell if he was telling the truth or not. Besides, it felt easier to think he was telling the truth than to have another “let’s just be friends” conversation with him.

The following week, on the phone, he told me, “I really feel like hugging you sometimes.”

I laughed a little. “That’s good. Sometimes, I need someone to hug me.” We sat in silence.

“You’re not uncomfortable with what I said, are you?” he asked.

“About you wanting to hug me?”

“Yes.”

“No.” That was a lie. I just didn’t want to talk about it.

“Because I don’t mean anything sexual by that or anything.”

Now I was really uncomfortable. “No, I know how you meant it.”

“Because you got quiet.”

“I was just uh …I don’t know, feeling myself.”

He laughed. “You were what?”

I laughed back. “I didn’t mean it that way. I meant I was just feeling myself be …awkward and …whatever. Just sort of giving myself the space to be.”

“Oh. …Well, do you want to talk about it?”

I sighed. “Not really… Besides, I have to cut this conversation short. I have a train to Long Island I have to catch — my friend just had a baby and I’m going out to visit her.”

“Oh, okay…”

“Uh …maybe I’ll call you from the train, okay?”

“Okay.”

I didn’t call him. The next day, he called me.

“Allie, you told me you were going to call me yesterday and then you didn’t.”

“Yeah, I know. I thought about calling you when I was on the train but then, I don’t know — I just hate it when people talk on their cell phone as though they were in their living room. I didn’t want to do that so I didn’t call you. And then I got home too late from my friend’s house to call, so –”

“Oh come on! We’re getting closer and you got afraid. That’s why you didn’t call me back!”

“What? No — what are you talking about?”

“I told you yesterday that sometimes, I really want to hug you and then suddenly you didn’t call me back!”

“…What?”

“You heard me.”

“Jerry, what the hell are you talking about?”

“You! You got afraid of me.”

“No I didn’t.”

“Oh come on! Are you trying to tell me that this was all just a coincidence?”

“Yes.”

“So you’re telling me you didn’t get afraid when I said that to you?”

“…Listen …I always get a little freaked when people start getting close to me, but that’s not everything that was going on for me yesterday. I didn’t call you back because I didn’t call you back — that’s all. Now what is all this about? I mean, you’ve got a lot of intensity on this for it to be just about me.”

“Don’t give me your psycho-babble bullshit, okay Allie? If not you, then who the hell else is all this about?”

I gritted my teeth. “Jerry, this is not psycho-babble bullshit. Your reaction is over the top. Yeah, I didn’t call you when I said I would, but that’s something that gets hammered out in a conversation, not this big upset you have going on about it. Now what the hell is going on?”

We sat in silence for a few minutes over the phone.

“…Okay, you’re right. I’m overreacting.”

“Ya think?”

“Yeah… Yeah …I think maybe my break-up with Rachel has affected me more than I’ve been willing to admit.”

“Hmm.”

“…I’m going to have to give all this some thought.”

“Yeah …Alright then.”

“Alright then.”

Jerry was overreacting, but he hadn’t gotten the idea that I was romantically interested in him out of nowhere.

I have a charm; the same one my father had. The same one Bill Clinton had: I know how to make someone feel safe, heard, and really understood.

Let me be more direct: If I see someone I find interesting, especially a man — and especially an older man — within the next hour or so, you can bet that that man will volunteer up to me their most intimate, private selves. The kind of stuff they would never consider telling their priest or best friend. It’s partly because of how I behave; it’s unmistakably intimate. I touch them. I gaze at them. I uncross my legs and arms, open myself up, and thoroughly take them in. I surround them in a feeling of compassion and understanding so persuasive that it’s like we’re soul mates. Sort of. At least for a little while. And for that little while, no one else exists for me except that man. It’s a seduction. I make love to them without ever taking my clothing off. But it’s the emotional equivalent of a one-night stand. And it’s my twisted way of getting a father, any father out there, to love me.

I had given Jerry that kind of attention, and now he thought I was interested in him but playing hard to get. No matter how many times I said it, he refused to believe that I only wanted to be friends with him. I hadn’t seen this right off the bat, but whatever had happened to him in his marriage — or before his marriage — had turned him into someone who wouldn’t settle on “no” for an answer. Couple that with the fact that I was a confused woman with a daddy complex who had difficulty telling a man to “fuck off”, and we had a problem.

After that conversation, things calmed down for a while. We went back to our routine of hanging out and talking every other day, filling each other in on our lives. But I kept feeling as though he was covertly trying to woo or screw me, and I kept getting swept along in the process.

He made plans with me to go out for dinner. I said yes with the internal understanding that I would somehow explain to him (again) that we could only be friends. That didn’t happen. Instead — and when I think about this, I want to throw myself off a bridge — I became Sybil; I got tipsy from one margarita and began to flirt with him. Then I started babbling about Angus. And then I started to cry about him. Jerry’s response to all this was great. He listened to me without saying a word — just sort of held me in his gaze and nodded here and there to let me know he understood where I was coming from. It had a soothing effect. When I had calmed down enough, I said:

“Jerry, I feel as though I’m defective goods. Lately, I’m convinced there’s something wrong with me.” I blew my nose. It made a sound like a foghorn. He laughed. It made me start crying again.

“Allie, you’re not defective goods. You’re great. And you’re going to be okay. I know it’s hard for you to see that now, but I promise you, you’re going to be okay.”

He reached across the table and took my hands in his. They felt warm and generous. It was the most safe I’d ever felt with him. So when he asked me if I wanted to go back to his place to hang out, I replied, “yes.” It was when he brought me into his bedroom and invited me to sit down next to him on his bed that I became afraid.

“Jerry — I don’t want things to get physical between us.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t know who I am right now and can’t be responsible for whatever sleeping together might mean for me.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I’m ambivalent and don’t want to do anything.”

“Okay, but what does that mean?”

“It means I want to be friends — just friends.”

“Okay, but can we talk about it?”

“…Um …okay.”

We go around and around for 20 minutes about why I don’t want to get sexual with him. It’s basically the same thing over and over again: he asks me why, and I explain to him how ambivalent and fucked up I feel. If this is his idea of foreplay, it sucks. By the end of the dialogue, I feel so weirdly violated that all I want to do is coil up like an armadillo and never open up or out to him again. Had he just attacked me physically, the line he crossed would have been easier for me to read. This seemingly reasonable, quiet, 20-minute discussion over why I don’t want to sleep with him was something I was flat out emotionally ill-equipped to handle.

“Okay,” he finally says, “let’s just lie here and I’ll hold you.”

I don’t want to, but say okay, anyway. We lie there for half an hour. When the caresses on my arm start moving surreptitiously towards my breast, I get up abruptly and tell him I have to leave.

“Why don’t you just sleep over?”

“Because I don’t sleep well with people.”

“Oh. Okay,” he says and looks disappointed.

On the way to his door, he stops, pulls me towards him, and kisses me. Surprised, I keep my eyes open and come eye to freckle with the dark, misshapen melanoma on his cheek. I feel like vomiting. I pull back sharply and say NO. He pulls me back towards him and says Okay — shhhhh, as though he were soothing an upset child. We stay like that for a few minutes until he takes me outside to get a cab. When a cab comes, he gives me $40 to pay for it, hugs me goodbye, and tells me he’ll call me tomorrow. On the way home in the cab, I try to cry but instead go completely numb.

The next day, he calls me early in the morning to talk about the night before.

“How are you about last night? Is there anything you want to talk about?”

The absolute last thing I want to do in that moment, or possibly for the rest of my lifetime, is talk about last night. In fact, if I could scrape the memory of it from both our minds with a jagged spoon, I would.

“No, I don’t need to talk about anything.”

“How are you feeling about it?”

“Um …fine. How about you?”

“I can’t stop thinking about how hot and beautiful you are.”

I cringe so big in response to what he says, I practically hit my face with my shoulders. “Hmm.”

“By the way, I have a surprise for you.”

“What?”

“Well, you know how you told me you really needed to get away for a little while?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, I’m going to Atlantic City next weekend! Why don’t you come with me?”

“I said I wanted to get away and be completely alone for a little while. Alone. As in, with no one, so that I can think.”

“But you’ll be alone the whole time we’re there! I’ll gamble during the day, and you and I can go out for dinner at night.”

“Uh …That’s not exactly me being alone. That’s me hanging out in some hotel room in Atlantic City, waiting for you to take me out to dinner. It’s not exactly what I had in mind. Besides, I hate Atlantic City.”

“Why do you have to be so negative?”

“…I’m not being negative; I’m just trying to tell you that it’s not what I want.”

“Why can’t you just say that, then?”

“Okay, it’s not what I want.”

“Fine. I still think you should think about it, though.”

I say nothing to him in response.

The next day, I brought up how uncomfortable I was at his apartment, and more specifically, about how violated I felt during that 20-minute discussion over why I didn’t want to sleep with him. He doesn’t get it.

We have conversation after conversation about it all week long, where he asks me over and over again about what I mean. I answer him, over and over. It never gets through.

Finally, it came down to this. Two days before my 35th birthday (which was, coincidentally, his birthday), he decided to take me out to celebrate at a restaurant downtown by the South Street Seaport — a restaurant that was close to his apartment. Given his behavior, I had to assume his plan was to try to get me back to it after dinner. My plan, which ran contrary to his, was to terminate our relationship during dinner. This time, I absolutely wasn’t going to drink, talk about Angus, or vacillate.

My best friend, Sandy, asked me why I was even bothering with the whole thing in the first place.

“Why do you need to see him or talk to him about it? As far as I’m concerned, the guy’s a freak. Just throw him to the goddamned curb!”

“Maybe you’re right. But Sandy, I’ve been attracting freaks to myself for the past six years. It’s been weird and demoralizing and really, really depressing, and I just feel like I’m stuck inside of something awful. I’m not sure, but I think I need to do this so that I can stop having to do this, do you understand?”

She looked at me with her warm eyes. “No, I don’t understand, but I trust you. Go do this if you feel you have to. You have to promise me one thing, though — no more perverted, disgusting, old men! I mean, really. Enough already! Shit.”

I laughed. I nodded and then started to cry. “Okay.” I looked her in the eye. “I promise you I will do that.”

I met Jerry at the restaurant. During the main course, he said, “You’re not the same as you used to be with me.”

“I know.”

“Why are you so different?”

“I just am.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one I have.”

“Allie?”

“What?”

“Why can’t you be loving and sweet to me — the way you used to be?”

“Because I don’t feel like it.”

“You don’t feel like it?”

“Yeah, I don’t feel like it.”

“…What has happened to you?”

“Nothing’s happened to me. I’m sure I seem cold and distant to you right now, but that’s just the way it is. You want me to be different with you and that’s not going to happen. ”

“Why?”

“Because.”

“Because why?”

“Because it’s not going to happen — that’s all. End of story.”

“But Allie, we’re friends. I need you to reassure me and tell me that you still care about me sometimes. That’s what friends do for one another.”

“Well tough. I’m not gonna do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t want to.”

“But why? What have I done?”

“Nothing! Listen, you have all these needs and I don’t want to be the person who’s responsible for fulfilling them, do you understand?”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that what you want, I’m not willing or capable of giving you.”

“What do you think I want?”

“For us to be romantically and sexually involved with one another.”

He nodded. We looked at each other. After a moment, he asked, “Why can’t that happen?”

“Because I don’t want to be involved with you like that.”

“But why?”

“Because that’s just how it is.”

“But why?”

“Because I don’t want you that way.”

“But why can’t we talk about it and work this out?”

“Because there’s NOTHING to talk about! I don’t WANT you! Now will you PLEASE just FUCK OFF!” When I yelled, everyone in the restaurant turned around and stared at us. Jerry looked at me as though I had punched him in the stomach. I started to shake and swallowed back the metallic taste that had come into my mouth.

“Listen!” I continued more quietly to him, “You want someone to love you — that’s fine. Just go and look for that elsewhere. Not here!” I said and stabbed my chest with my finger. He looked at me. I coldly returned his gaze. He looked down and nervously pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and pinky, and rubbed his forehead with his other three digits. I looked out the window at a digital clock on the side of a building a half mile away.

We sat like that in silence for a full 8 minutes.

He looked up at me. I turned in his direction. He reached his hands across the table towards me and said, “But you’re hurting me.” I resisted the urge to lunge across the table at him and rip out his trachea. Instead, I turned my face back towards the clock, crossed my arms, narrowed my eyes, and shook my head no.

We sat like that for another 5 minutes.

“So what do you want, Allie?” he finally asked. I turned to look at him. He looked beaten and resigned. I felt sorry for him. I felt sorry for us both.

“I want you to back off and to give me space.”

He took another full minute before asking, “What does that look like?”

I took a deep breath in and said, “It looks like my leaving here and us never talking again.” I started to shake worse.

He looked at me again for a long time. I returned his gaze. Finally, he nodded and said, “Okay.”

I nodded back to him. “Okay.” I released my breath in one long stream and felt tears come into my eyes. “Thank you,” I said to him. And I meant it.

For two weeks after, I got emails and phone calls from him, imploring me to talk to him and tell him what I wanted him to do. I never returned a call or an email.

After that, I never heard from him again.

My mother starved herself. Denied herself of the very animal that lived in her.

Who’s kidding who? Every woman I knew growing up starved and denied themselves.

Not always of food. Of permission. Of hope. Of the simple animal right to want something and reach for it. My mother looked in the mirror her whole life and found a loathsome problem that needed fixing. And because I was hers, she constantly tried to fix me, too. Handed her starvation down like an heirloom.

But I had a compass. A GPS of my own, and it loved to eat life.

Then my father and my brother were murdered. April 30, 1997. And the way my father died was how I had wanted him to die.

The guilt became an all-consuming wound, and I did what the wound demanded. I turned my mother’s self-loathing into my own and aimed it inward. I starved. I denied myself. I stopped singing. I stopped acting. I stopped trusting the sound of my own knowing.

Patriarchy was right there waiting. It always is. It speaks first. It speaks loudest. It knows exactly where you’re already broken.

That was twenty-nine years ago.

I am fifty-nine years old, and I am done starving.

Done.

I want sex. I want adoration. I want my hunger satisfied and my ambitions fed and my voice heard in rooms that were never built for me. I want it all, and I want it now, and I have earned every yearning and wanting.

In this “too old” body, I feel beautiful in a way this pedophilic youth-revered world has no infrastructure for. Beautiful past the point of being decorative. Beautiful past the point of being chosen. Beautiful in my bones, in my fury, in my absolute refusal to disappear.

Thank Crone.

Fuck what the world says. Fuck what men say. Actually, just fuck men. And fuck all the women who carry water and punish those of us who refuse to play nice.

This world was built to manage women like me. Like us.

“Too old” is not a fact. It is a management strategy. A way of silencing the ones who’ve lived long enough to become ungovernable.

I am animal. I am untamable, unreachable, wild, and dangerous.

I am fifty-nine. I am at my most fertile, my most aliveness, my most sexy, my most powerful. My most usefulness. Fuck me if I am not ripe and ravenous.

If there is no place in this world for a woman like me —

I will take my place in a world of my own making.

If daylight always needs saving,
then I think it’s ok if we need it, too.

My preference is that it be saved at
4pm on a Monday,
or Friday,
not 2am on Sunday morning.

My preference is that I be saved whenever
I need it — 
like a lifeline.

Some call that God,
or prayer.
I call it creativity.

Same same.

Creativity is creation,
and that is proof
that God lives in us all.

Did you know the man who proposed modern Daylight Savings Time
was an entomologist from New Zealand
who wanted the extra light to catch bugs?

If that is true — 
which it is — 
then consider what creativity (and curiosity
and passion and desire!) can do.

They have the power to move,
alter,
shift,
create,
and disappear
time.

That means so do I.
That means so do you.

To love my mother was to gasp
for a breath I never possessed;
It was hers before it was ever mine.

She was always drowning.
I was always drowning with her.

I learned in lifeguard training
what to do when someone is so afraid
they’ll pull you under trying to survive.

You tell them
you’re here to save them.
You go around behind them.
You wrap your arm and swim them to shore.

But when terror makes them deaf and dumb
when their thrashing was so strong
it pulled you under,
you shove their head underwater
to make them stop.

I understood this in the pool.
I could not do it in her sea.

Her thrashing was so persuasive. Her pleas so
impossible to leave. I kept wrapping myself around
her panic, kept going under, kept trying to answer the
question: 𝙝𝙤𝙬 𝙘𝙖𝙣 𝙄 𝙜𝙞𝙫𝙚 𝙝𝙚𝙧 𝙢𝙤𝙧𝙚 𝙤𝙛 𝙢𝙮 𝙖𝙞𝙧?

The answer always pointed back to me — 
I couldn’t breathe underwater well enough.
I couldn’t breathe in.
There was nothing left to breathe out.

My father almost strangled me to death.
Five years old, his fingers around my throat,
squeezing until my world went black.

He never laid a hand on my mother.
She never laid a hand on me -
not in anger,
not in protection,
not in love.

I asked her once, as a young woman: 𝙒𝙝𝙮 𝙙𝙞𝙙𝙣’𝙩 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙡𝙚𝙖𝙫𝙚?
𝙔𝙤𝙪 𝙨𝙖𝙬. 𝙒𝙝𝙮 𝙙𝙞𝙙𝙣’𝙩 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙩𝙖𝙠𝙚 𝙪𝙨 𝙨𝙤𝙢𝙚𝙬𝙝𝙚𝙧𝙚?

She considered it as though for the first time.
Shrugged.

𝙔𝙤𝙪 𝙬𝙚𝙧𝙚 𝙨𝙪𝙘𝙝 𝙖 𝙨𝙩𝙧𝙤𝙣𝙜 𝙘𝙝𝙞𝙡𝙙. 𝙄 𝙣𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙧 𝙩𝙝𝙤𝙪𝙜𝙝𝙩 𝙮𝙤𝙪
𝙢𝙞𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙙 𝙞𝙩 𝙢𝙪𝙘𝙝.

I chose her figurative suffocation
over his literal one.

A child will take what love resembles.

For decades, I drowned.
Drowning became the map.

I became so strong
that no one ever thought
I minded it very much.