Insomniac Thoughts on Roe v Wade’s Overturn: Dudes Where You At?
If you’re a dude I need you to face to face and one on one talk to all the people in your lives affected by these decisions, and assure them that you are not a dude that requires a law in order to act right.
Because the thing about laws is that they’re put in place because A LOT of people won’t act right without them. And, if you are a dude who’s paired up with a person impacted by the recent overturn of Roe et al., I need for you to know that that person is looking at you and wondering “is he one of them?”
You need to out loud in person assure them that you wholly believe in their bodily autonomy and will adhere to whatever decisions they might have about what happens to their body and any clumps of cells therein. You need to out loud in person assure them that you will never attempt to control where they get to go.
Dudes, you no longer get to pretend you don’t know that people stay with men because they’re afraid of what men will do if they try to leave. If you’re a decent dude, you need to assure the person or people in your lives that you only want them to be with you because they are actively choosing to be in your company.
Tell the people in your lives that if NOT being with or around you is what they require for their happiness, that they will be safe from you, you will not endeavor to harm them, punish them, or attempt to manipulate them into staying. Then you need to do whatever fucking work it takes for all that to be true.
In my lifetime I have heard dudes threaten to “put a baby in her” as a method of control, one set all her stuff on fire, one threatened suicide multiple times, tried to run her off the road then did commit suicide and made sure she found him, one stalked her for a year, one let her leave but kept everything they spent decades building together. That’s just the ones in my personal sphere. Women get killed all the time for trying to leave, I’m fortunate not to have lost any close ones. Yet.
This all means so much. And we are all just reeling.