Women fascinate me; everything about them is interesting. The way they look, smell, talk, laugh, move, and feel… all the classic stuff. But I also love the weird, fucked-up parts, the bits they’re reluctant to let men see; the stuff they work so hard to pose and primp and prance around.
Jesus fucking Christ… women’s own bodies punish them for being sexual entities; from the loss of virginity to the misery of menopause, through every menses-soaked, yeast-infected minute in between, it’s just one long fuck-storm of maintenance, worry, frustration, and physical pain. And none of it is due to the systematic oppression of anyone by any -archy you can name: it’s just fucking life for them. How do they even survive that? How does a woman manage to get out of bed in the morning, knowing today is just one more day when she might wake up to ruined sheets, an invisible fist clenched around her uterus, an overwhelming urge to alienate everyone she knows, and the near-certainty that every dog she meets is going to announce her personal business to the world? And so much horribly worse, she has to live with the knowledge that all of this is perfectly fucking normal.
I look at women and think: what must that do to your head? How does the constant connection of blood, pain, and dread to your sexuality screw with your ideation? Your body is built to house more than one brain; how does that alter your perception of what it means to exist within that body? How maddening must it be to intellectually crave autonomy as deeply as any other human, and yet physically crave invasion and occupation? And this is all before we even touch on the societal stuff like misogyny and patriarchy, mind you. Once you get to know the generic Alice, you begin to realize she doesn’t need to fall down the rabbit hole; she is the hole.
So I suppose one reason I write this stuff is my deep appreciation of the beautiful horror of womanhood and femininity.