The System That Made Us

A Threads post, a Rolling Stone exposé, and my father's fists.

Hello Loves,

I’m about to talk about sexual assault, suicide, and domestic violence, so hold onto your seats. Or move off this page to something uplifting like my interview with Enrique Enriquez! Seriously, take care of yourself.

Still here? Let’s talk.

A Recent Thread

“Tell me a woman on death row not dying after two lethal injections isn’t a sign from the Goddess. The Venus Rx games are just getting started.”

I wrote those words as Venus stood very still at 8 degrees Scorpio, where she will retrograde this Saturday, October 3rd.

For the astro newbies, I’ll break this down: Venus is very loud in the sky, in a sign that suffers no fools, and she just released an official statement: “Fuck you. You’re not killing another woman.”

The last part’s my translation.

What’s that? That sound of shouting in the distance?

“But she’s an awful woman who deserves to die!”

I hear you, and hold the fucking phone, please.

The Gods Don’t Have Time for You & Your Petty Bullshit

This isn’t about you, or even Christa Pike, who cruelly murdered another human. This is about giving a “Hell no” to a system that thinks it can solve any problem by watching a woman die.

This is about the Cornell Seven. This is about all the women in jail for retaliating against their abusers. This is about all the women and girls who are being harmed as I write this. This is about the trad wives suddenly realizing that maybe they deserve better than their piece of shit husbands.

This is about the fact that Colleen Slemmer was brutally murdered, and that we, as a society, failed her.

This is about sitting with the fact that Christa Pike wasn’t born a monster. A long line of men sexually assaulted her from the time she was a child, and that led to one horrific act.

This is about looking beyond, not away from, this horrible incident to ask:

What if our society were as passionate about locking away the men whose monstrous acts broke a woman down as it is about seeing her die?

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Wait, Why Am I Defending Him?

Shortly after Mars ingressed into Cancer, Rolling Stone published an exposé on the comedian Reggie Watts in the wake of his ex-girlfriend’s suicide.

I suggest you read the article yourself, but for the sake of this story, I’ll give you the really crude breakdown:

Following the death of Katherine Early McCollough, her sister and friends started to ask themselves: Would she still be alive if she had never dated Watts?

The brilliant journalist Cheyenne Roundtree picked up the thread in her sobering piece, Reggie Watts Is a Prominent Ketamine Advocate. Was It His Ex’s ‘Undoing’?

What she found was a relationship where a super charismatic, well-loved, and, in my opinion, narcissistic artist allegedly pushed his girlfriend into taking all sorts of drugs with him, ketamine most of all, while she worked for him unpaid and poured her savings into his projects. Eventually, she had a breakdown, and he left her.

As part of her investigation, Roundtree interviewed several of Watts’ ex-girlfriends, and most of them recognized the pattern. My takeaway? He’s a garbage human. And, BTW, three women say he didn’t tell them about his STD until after they’d slept together, and one says he had sex with her without a condom when she’d been promised he would always wear one.

And yet, after mumbling “what a sick monster” to myself throughout the entire piece, as soon as I came up for air, I watched these words form as a thought bubble over my head:

“Why would anyone take drugs because a man told them to? Is it really all his fault?”

And then I sat with how fucked up that is. And I’m still sitting with that.

Why would any part of my brain want to make an excuse for that man, even for a moment?

I’ll Tell You Why

One of my earliest memories is of my father tearing off my mother’s shirt and bashing her head with his fists.

As I rushed up the stairs to my bedroom to hide, my mother chased after me to call the police. My father followed behind, begging me not to make the call.

For context, I was maybe five, and my father was the parent who looked after me. The one who took me on bike rides, watched movies with me, and helped me with my homework. When I was ten, and my mother finally left my father, and me, he became my primary caretaker.

Both my parents were alcoholics with nightmare childhoods. And both were abusive to me in their own special ways.

But somehow it was always easier for people to make excuses for my father. This was true for my mother, for the string of girlfriends he knocked around, for my mother’s family (”You can’t imagine what he saw in the war”), and for me, his daughter, who depended on him for my survival.

Despite my father’s abuse, it was always easier for me to find anger for my mother’s actions.

She was the one who didn’t take me away from my father. She was the one who ignored her creepy boyfriend’s advances. She was the one who told me I was a liar when I told her a family member tried to molest me.

As an adult trying to make sense of all of this, I’m now capable of holding multiple truths at once.

I can acknowledge the real harm both my parents caused me while also looking at the larger systems of abuse my personal narrative sits inside, and at how those systems shape the way I respond to the world around me now.

This means recognizing that my mother, for all her faults, was a victim too.

She had a mother who told her to go home when she confessed her husband was beating her. Just as my grandmother had a mother who told her to stay put when she confessed she was scared and wanted to go home.

It’s true: understanding that my mother hurt me, and allowed others to hurt me, because she was scared doesn’t make her any more innocent.

But it helps me direct my anger and action toward broken systems of power that, if they aren’t addressed, will keep producing childhoods like mine.

So when I say “this is a sign from the Goddess,” I’m not being cavalier. I’m being hopeful that a lot of us are ready to face our own shit and overthrow these systems of abuse.

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