Convoluted Sexism...Guilty

NAPOWRIMO Day 19

* Disclaimer: Contains mature content and an instance of bleeped cursing.

The Convoluted Sexism of Which I Am Guilty

 

I despise when men cry. Perhaps I shouldn’t. Perhaps you wouldn’t. But I unabashedly justify that I am a woman. This means that

I stamp and I scream and have trouble with mason jars; I dance, I plant, I brush my hair a  thousand times. I get my gory periods.  I cook. I fight. I love.

 How do I have time for crying? How does a man?

Crying is not for a man that I can stand for any length of time. No. He must abhor tears.

(And while we’re on the matter here, have arms as thick as my waist and stronger, a silent smile, a temper worse than mine and a cultivated mind. I write this just in case this man also reads poetry.) 

All strength, virility, spirit, discernment; this is what is for a man.

For I fear for a world where trained athletes cry over scores, or boyfriends over the thresholds of their girlfriends’ doors, or even the look of the woman becoming a wife, or the birth of a child in the laboring night

 (though these two are more understandable).

I fear it unsafe to stamp and to scream, to glare at pickle jars, to dance loosely in bars, admire the flowers I’ve arranged, to reconsider sideswept bangs; somehow irrationally, impossibly emasculating to the sex of men, for me to drip blood down to my thighs once a month, to cook coq au vin for dinner, to fight sweeter and love harder,

until I am no longer myself and a woman, but become an anomalous androgynous  wonder whore—that’s all I’d be good for—

with a misbegotten streak of smile when I’m pissed buy my groceries all in plastic containers not brazen enough to dance forget the garden and go to a florist let the salon pick my haircut sneak tampons ashamed fill the freezer with freeze dried flash fried frozen munchies

never fight never love all that’s left is f*cking and

true, it doesn’t make sense, but this is why I despise when men cry.