SuicideGirls

Today there were three girls in a bed. And we were not pretty, not as the patriarchy sees it. And we were not fulfilling patriarchy-approved sexual fantasies. We were watching a movie. We were talking about our lives.

A woman on the screen laid down, with bottles of pills all around her. We laughed and joked about it, because all of us know, all of us were alive and there to prove that overdoses rarely do the trick. We all know from experience. Some of us more than one experience. I know from two experiences with suicide-by-pill; the latest being...the latest, I guess.

A woman screams, howls with rage about how her mental illness has incapacitated her. Not the illness itself, but how everyone around her has become convinced that they must make every decision for her, and her life ceases to be in her hands and in her control, and she ceases to be human. It's patriarchy; textbook. She is dying of patriarchy. And every one of us could identify. We could all talk about it and make jokes about it because every one of us knows that. We know that to the point that all women do, and beyond; to the point where all mentally damaged people know that. We feel that dehumanization.

We've all been dehumanized.





I wrote about it last week. How I was dying, and all anyone could see was to what extent I conformed to patriarchal beauty standards.

Well take a good look, patriarchy. You and your pornification, you and your trendy girl-on-girl, you and your fucking beauty standards. Look at us. How we were today, together on that bed and you would have seen the real SuicideGirls. And they are not the girls who are pornalicious subculture objects. They are PEOPLE. We are people who bear with the burden of being young and female. Because no one has less power in this world than a female child.

Take a look at us. Take a good look. One underweight, two over. Their stomachs ravaged by the eating disorders and the side effects of the medication they need to survive, to cope. Of all the drugs they have pushed into themselves to fill that hole, that empty set, by nullifying it completely. Look at our scars. All kinds of scars. The addiction, the need to hurt ourselves more than you can ever hurt us, even though that's a losing battle. Look, if you can, into that space where everything becomes chaotic and dark and terrifying, that place where no one who hasn't been there will ever know or understand, and everyone who has will spend the rest of their lives trying to escape. Every victimization we have suffered, directly or indirectly, by patriarchal means, has left us fracted for life. Every hurt we have ever done to ourselves. Every glitter sore is a scream against the world we will never live to see changed, if it ever changes. A scream for every other female, and especially every other female child who will most likely end up where we are, until the world changes, or comes to an end, or every woman dies of patriarchy, dies of femininity.

We are what you hate. But we are still here, despite your efforts, and our contrary efforts. And I love you, girls, women, my friends. You are PEOPLE, despite the whole world trying to make you less. You are what beauty should be.

Fuck those other SuicideGirls, living tamely, reaping the rewards, empty as eggshells, as lightbulbs; of conformity. We're the real deal. Fuck the beauty standards that made my friends hurt themselves so much that I can feel it just standing next to them. Fuck the queerbashers who wounded me, fuck the rapist who attacked me as a child, and fuck the men who mentally, emotionally, and physically abused every one of us. Fuck the women who have internalized misogyny and wield it as a weapon against every iconoclast who dares to live her own life. Fuck religion. Fuck hairlessness and skinniness and stupidity and frailty and servility as The Ideal Woman. Fuck the patriarchy.

And FUCK SNOW WHITE.