There are plenty of informed and evidence-based understandings on the topic of reproductive rights. But, in this moment we share now, if you are not someone who can get pregnant, I am instead asking you to consider how comfortable the ability to make choices has made your experience with higher education. I ask you to know what I know:
Misogyny is alive, well, violent and systemic.
I am a woman who goes to OU. I cannot speak for everyone who is impacted by the fall of Roe. I have been here in Norman going on four years, I have cheered at football games with you, drank at the bars with you and lived in the towers with you.
I love studying here. I will weep with friends over wine and laughter when my time here ends.
But I want you to know the only reason I get to be here is because women before me did not shut up and take it. They clawed and bit and fought and voted and screamed and left.
Sometimes, they died.
They cried in the faces of angry men who controlled everything about their lives — where they worked, when they had sex, where they worshipped, how many children they had, and sometimes whether they got to keep living at all.
I ask you to remember a story you may have heard before:
When British suffragettes were arrested in the fight for the right to vote and began a hunger strike in prison, they were force-fed through a tube shoved into their noses and mouths. History shows us that when we ask for more choices, the choices we can make are ripped away from us. They are made for us.
This issue of Crimson Quarterly is about the impact a lack of reproductive rights has on our community. I am that community, and so are many of you.
I don’t have an interest in your views on abortion or to change them. I will, however, share that there has not been a moment in my time at OU where I felt removed from the threat of patriarchal violence and misogyny.
Be truthful. If you hate women, if you find them annoying and good for one thing, if you wish they would pipe down in class and stop being such bitches, I invite you to be honest about that. I want you to ask yourself if women matter to you beyond their ability to get you off or smile in college flashbacks you will look back on with fondness. What parts of you hate women? Can you admit, maybe even in small ways, to fostering this misogyny at OU?
Alright. I have asked you to be honest, so I will do the same:
I want you to know that, in our community, women are “roofied,” sexually assaulted and handed drink after drink by men who prefer us unconscious. I went out a few weekends ago to the bars, and men shouted at me, tried to touch me, asked me questions about what kind of sex I like — uninvited, loud and aggressive. They were bigger than me, stronger than me and more sober than me. They would not go to jail for what they maybe wanted to do to me. I would not ever be a believable victim.
Our naked bodies are sent without consent in group messages and posted online, our open mouths mocked and simultaneously expected. Men take off condoms without telling us, make bets about how far they can take us. Women do not have the choice to opt out. We are faced with two options: maintain a state of hypervigilance that saves none of us or attempt to have fun at the risk of life-altering harm.
Many of you live comfortable lives in the sense that you can sleep with as many women as you want here knowing it will not reflect poorly on you. You’ll still maintain your fraternity memberships, score that internship, become lawyers in nice suits, own businesses, fix cars or be fathers. Maybe you will become a supreme court justice. Nobody will wonder if you were a bit too easy in college to be respectable.
If you have ever called a woman on this campus a slut, laughed at her with friends after the fact or looked down on her post-hookup like you weren’t also there, I ask you to consider whether you deserve access to women’s bodies in the first place.
You hate the thing you fuck.
You demand us to be available, expect the college hookups you’re promised, and yet want nothing to do with the fight for our survival and liberation. How will you have us if we are dead? If we are so scared we never leave home?
Whatever world you think feminism is actually needed in, some far-off country where women are actually less than men — that place is here. It’s been here. If you’re a man, fascism is at your door. If you’re not, it’s already in your bed. Our governor has blood on his hands. Our university has said nothing. Nothing. I know it’s complicated. The issue is fraught. Someone will be mad.
But, if you want women on this campus, you must have all of us. You have to care about us even when you aren’t fucking us.
When you talk about our bodies like we aren’t here, remember we hear you. We’re angry you’ve said nothing. We’re disgusted that you only care about our right to choose when harm is done to us first. This isn’t just an issue about women. Many of us can become pregnant and not identify as women. But how can I ask you for nuance when you offer no outrage whatsoever?
As a student who pays the salary of the men who say nothing as my rights are in question, I hold a disappointment I truly cannot express. To instruct your offices not to speak about the current political circumstances, to limit their freedom of speech and then host Free Speech Week, is laughable.
The only respectable option is to remind your faculty, staff and students that their right to have an opinion on this issue is absolutely protected.
I wish I was safe attaching my name to these thoughts, but I’m not. I consulted a trusted professor about this decision, but she believed it would be unsafe to claim my authorship. Don’t mistake my anonymity with fear — let it tell you something about yourself and our community.
I’m not aiming for objectivity by not offering a personal opinion on abortion. I’m sure that you have a stance at this point that I don’t have a shot at changing.
But I’ll tell you misogyny is real. Violence is happening. I am really, really scared. I have always feared misogyny, but now I fear speaking out against it more than ever.
Whatever decision you make about the illegalization of abortion, I ask you to consider the active hatred of women on our campus as you make that decision. The landscape of your choice on the matter is not a peaceful one, and it’s certainly not one that’s invested in you having a choice in the first place.
To those of us who are impacted by misogynist violence and hatred at OU: I love you. I’m sorry. We’ll survive this, too.
Everyone else: I am sick of waiting for your anger. We are dying in your closed mouth.
