It Is a Powerful Thing

Content Note: Sexual violence & gun violence.

A woman 

doesn’t get to be violent

when she can’t have sex

anymore because a man

used her pain,

her body, to feel powerful.

I doubt it would be considered powerful

for a woman

to 3-D print her pain

and react violently to a violent

culture; a culture in which, evidently, a man

can’t be expected to be nonhomicidal and go without sex. 

I haven’t had sex

in nearly a decade and I don’t feel powerful

when I remember the young man 

who did horrible things to the young woman

I used to be. The young man who was sexually violent,

physically violent, consistently indifferent to or aroused by my pain.

But like so many other women and girls I’ve known pain

for most of my life. I knew pain long before I knew sex,

and it took 20 years for a doctor to believe me; yet, violent

I have not become. Perhaps it is a powerful

thing to be a woman

when it seems such a fragile thing to be a man.

I’m sure there’s much I don’t understand about being a man,

but I’m intimately familiar with being a woman in pain.

A woman

in pain is gaslit to hell, denied treatment, economically disadvantaged, her sex

a powerful 

silencer – and I do believe that is violent.

I do believe the American healthcare system is violent;

but I also believe a young man

is not a hero for murdering another man, no matter how powerful

and corrupted that other man may be, or seem to be, to a young man in pain

who can’t have sex.

But that’s just the opinion of one woman.

It is a powerful thing to choose to be non-violent

when most of the women you know hold at least one memory of a violent man,

when pain holds you as tightly as he did when he held you down during sex. 

Author's Note: I was inspired to write this poem this week because Luigi Mangione is back in the news. I remember feeling like I must be a bad leftist for not considering Mangione a hero when he allegedly shot Brian Thompson, but I didn't consider him a hero then and I don't now. I know from personal experience how awful the American healthcare/health insurance system can be, but I don't feel like that makes what Mangione allegedly did excusable. I read that he was suffering from pain severe enough to prevent him from having a sex life, and I have empathy for him, but it blows my mind how many leftists (including prominent ones that I admire) have pointed to his circumstances as justification for murder. Lately, the whole situation has had me thinking about how eager society seems to be to excuse the violence of men, and I can’t imagine society would ever be that eager to excuse the violence of women.