Let’s say good bye to a word from 2016. Here’s what being a “nasty woman” means when misogynists say it:
- caring about the safety and welfare of women
- interrupting men when they want to take all the air time, take all the resources, or take our lives
- resting and listening to your inner voice above all others
- choosing your own way/refusing/not caring to look sexually inviting to men
- resisting cultural norms that require subservience
- not smiling
- turning one’s back on abusive people, families and institutions
- withholding the “forgiveness” demanded of you
- insisting on having a voice, on having issues dealt with
- breaking silence and not keeping secrets about male violence and abuse
- respecting women who have survived and struggled, listening to them and praising women’s voices
If you do these things, I have different words for you:
heroine, goddess, natural woman, fantastic woman, leader, warrior, grandmother, lover of life, womanist, feminist, liberator, lesbian trailblazer, aunt, sister, daughter, friend, lover, magician, transformer, playmate, truth teller, mother and sage
i love and salute all the women in my life who are awakened and awakening, and wish for you a beautiful 2017!
Pam Rubin
photo Sadie Hernandez
You are all of these good and powerful things, Pam. Thank you for your strength, wisdom, and kindness. Love to you and wishes for a magical 2017.
HOW TO SURVIVE THE RULE OF DUMBFUCKISTAN
Never leave home without flowers in your wallet
And when security asks for your ID show your roots
Hidden in seeds of discontent
Bear wild fruit in colors yet to be named.
Always know the buttons of force are fake and hidden
Up the amputee sleeves of tyrants and fascists—always hungry
Always sending back their orders to enslave their own kitchen
Because their coils of taste are rusted in mechanisms of old lies.
Know that nothing makes sense as much
As the rain falling on a wandering tongue.
Listen for the new languages that speak the body electric
Of pleasure in bones and blood out-foxing the daily news.
Mirror everything that moves and kiss the stillness
Of the spaces in-between musical notes
And your own silken breasts. Sing the notes of fertility ceremonies
To turn back the blows of greed with cries of constant re-birth.
Recognize the orange hair of the clown for what it is:
An old rug in a bazaar for tricksters who have lost their magic.
Try try try not to get stuck in the mud of gallows humor, even if it is fuuny.
When voyaging in vessels across oceans, know the wind is your passport.
What I am trying to say is that Mother Earth is facing her own funeral
Calling our bluff as we continue to bicker over the reading of her will.
Even the dead who once laughed at our election of an Emperor without clothes
Are offering to bury their dirges so we will rise with street angels singing bare naked truth.
~~~~~ Liza Simon