One Thing

Welcome to a Secret Subject Swap. This week 7 brave bloggers picked a secret subject for someone else and were assigned a secret subject to interpret in their own style. Today we are all simultaneously divulging our topics and submitting our posts.

My “Secret Subject” is:

What is one thing you could start doing today to improve the quality of your life?

It was submitted by: https://thethreegerbers.blogspot.ch/

Probably not what anyone would think of as appropriate for 4th of July week but it's honest. 

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The one thing I could do to improve my quality of life immediately is to move out of the United States.

I’m not exaggerating.

I have a chronic illness and no access to adequate or affordable insurance. I don’t have access to doctors who take my issues seriously undermining them both because I am a woman and because I am chubby. Women in this country experience so many issues in the healthcare system even when they do have a thin figure, insurance, and enough money to pay their copays. We have a higher rate of being underdiagnosed, misdiagnosed, and with harassment from healthcare workers. All of it adds up to me not at all being able to get adequate care. I need a fair healthcare system, one that isn’t rife with misogyny. I need universal healthcare. I need doctors who are actually educated on my disorder and who take the issues I face seriously. I need doctors who are educated on the new research involving weight, how weight is often out of people’s control and not remotely tied to every single health issue a woman might face. I’ve gone to the doctor for colds, literally, and had them blamed on me needing to lose weight. How is that at all the kind of healthcare system that works for people?

The United States doesn’t even rank in the top 20 when it comes to women’s equality. Pay rates, healthcare, programs… we are seriously lacking in every regard when it comes to women having an even playing field with men while our government remains dominated by men and often by women who pander to the male demographic by denying the issues that social sciences prove to exist.

Capitalism relies on extreme poverty and homelessness to function. Economic theorists have found this to be a certainty. Without people to show how terrible it can be when you don’t “work hard” people refuse to take the lowest pay for the hardest work. That's the way capitalism works. We lack the social programs that prevent these issues that other countries have. It’s not even about socialism. We can look to the Scandinavian countries to see that if the United States is hellbent on having capitalism (which I don’t think works not as it is here and perhaps not at all), it can do so with a heavy foundation of social programs that put its most vulnerable populations on better footing. I’m disabled. I cannot work with the illness I have without risking being bedridden or worse for the rest of my life. I’m barely hanging on to not being completely homebound. I need a cane to get around my house because I insisted on working when I was initially sick and have gotten worse in the 3 years since this started. Being in this country is fucking terrifying. There are no safety nets for people like me. The amount of money I would have to pay and years I would have to wait to still be denied disability is outrageous, and our disability programs are constantly being threatened. People are cut off at random. And it’s never enough for people to actually get by. If I somehow found the money to make the kind of appointments and do the testing needed to prove I qualify for disability and keep it going for the years it takes (more than 3 on average) to finally get it approved, it would take years and years of disability to finally recoup the money I shelled out for specialists and testing and scans… And in my current situation, sure it would help but it surely wouldn’t alleviate my poverty. Not here. People literally die waiting on their disability. My dad did when he was diagnosed with cancer.

Being queer in this country is equally as terrifying right now. Sure, you’ll roll your eyes and say that we can get married. What else do we want? How about protections against being fired for being gay? Those don’t exist in many states and federal protections were rolled back under Trump. How about not being denied housing because we’re gay? Not being turned away from healthcare? Not being killed LEGALLY because of gay panic defense? Being able to adopt? Being able to shop without discrimination being disguised as “religious freedom?” Not being forced into conversion therapy by bigoted parents? Or kicked out of the house and put on the streets where the country doesn’t have any sort of programs to help out? The United States doesn’t even rank in the top 15 friendliest countries for the LGBTQIA+ population, and it’s no wonder. Violence continues with hate crimes against the community especially trans women of color. Murders, attacks, fear… what kind of life is that? We can’t even hold hands in public without fearing our safety much less live our lives out and happy. It’s absolutely a MOMENT when you see a gay couple living out and loud and not looking over their shoulder or minimizing their affection. It makes you feel so hopeful and so less alone, but it’s so fucking rare that it’s only ever really okay at pride and even then we encounter protestors who would like nothing more than to eradicate us from the world. We may have come a long way from where we were in the past several decades, but we already had so much more to go before this administration, and it’s not going to get any better any time soon.

At least 5% of America identifies openly as LGBTQIA+. As many as 1 in 5 have a disability with 1 in 10 actually having a severe disability. Half the fucking country almost is female. So while this may be a harsh critique of a country you love, for some of us, it’s a matter of the life, liberty, and happiness others already get without worry. If that’s you, great. But there is so much work left to do. We’ve been browbeaten with this idea that America is the greatest country in the world without fault and without complaint, but that’s hardly true. It may feel good to think in the moment when you’re a few drinks in, fireworks exploding in the background on Independence Day, but the rest of us are exhausted. The rest of us get nauseated when we see those displays of patriotism without criticism. We were founded on questioning what’s right and moral, but that stopped a long fucking time ago, and there are a lot of times I wish I could afford to be done with it all as it was made very clear to me that even though Guthrie sang about this country belonging to us all, there are far too many red-blooded Americans who want the population to look, act, and believe a certain way or we aren’t welcome here.

I’m tired of living where I’m not wanted and couldn’t get help if I was.

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Here are links to all the sites now featuring Secret Subject Swap posts. Sit back, grab a cup, and check them all out. See you there:

Baking In A Tornado https://www.bakinginatornado.com/2019/07/sobriquetless-secret-subject-swap.html

Wandering Web Designer https://wanderingwebdesigner.com/blog

Spatulas on Parade  https://spatulasonparade.blogspot.com/2019/07/be-our-guest-be-our-guest-or-not-sss.html

The Bergham Chronicles https://berghamchronicles.blogspot.com/

Part-time Working Hockey Mom https://thethreegerbers.blogspot.com/2019/07/secret-subject-swap-dream-car.html

Our Prime Years https://ourprimeyears.blogspot.com

#Gamergirl

Lissa is sprawled out and halfway under the cream colored comforter on her bed when she hears her phone vibrate. It snaps her back from near-sleep with a jolt, but she just as quickly dismisses the idea of checking it. It’s too late as it is, and she figures whatever it is can wait. If it is an emergency, the person will call, right? Right. That internal semi-debate is over almost as soon as it begins then she settles herself back into the pillows pulling the comforter up higher over her shoulders.

It’s not long before the phone vibrates again. And again. And again. It doesn’t finish that signature buzzbuzz buzzzzz before it starts again. She’s mega-annoyed when she finally sits up in bed and snatches the phone off the nightstand. If it’s Amy, she thinks, pining over some guy she saw at the bar, I swear I will kill her. She swipes the lock screen on her phone and enters in her security code. In her frustration and sleep-state, it takes a couple tries before she enters it correctly while the phone continues its neverending cycle of vibrations. What the fuck is going on? Finally she gets it unlocked and slides the notification menu down. Twitter. Twitter. Over and over and over. She can’t delete one notification before another one pops up. She swipes the notification menu back up to open the Twitter app itself. She doesn’t even have 100 followers on Twitter, so she has no idea what's happening.

Her heart is beating harder with her frustration and a slight sense of panic. Nothing good could come from a blow up like this on her Twitter. She’s read the stories. She knows what women on the Internet have to go through or really anyone on the Internet.

When her feed loads, she touches the icon for her notifications. By now there are dozens of them, but she doesn’t stop to read them yet. She wants to see what started it all.

Oh shiiiiiit, she thinks. She sees it and knows immediately how fucked she is. She tweeted a photo of her GTAOnline character, a woman dressed in a corset and made a snarky comment about how ridiculous it is to think a woman would boost cars in that thing without her tits falling out. She meant it to be funny. I mean, she’s the one that put the corset on her when there were other options. And she tagged it… Of course she did. How stupid could she be.

#gtaonline

#allaboutthecleavage

#sensibleoptionsforcartheft

#gamergirl

#toosexyforyourcar

And that’s all it took. The tweets are still pouring in calling her an idiot, telling her she gave gamers a bad name, demanding she shove her feminism up her twat. The insults come hurtling toward her at light speed.

Cunt.

Bitch.

Psycho.

Fat.

Ugly.

Stupid.
Everything that people will call a woman when they don’t like what that woman says…

She has a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach as she reads through more. There are people threatening to shove her game controller up her various orifices, to rape her with it, and even to kill her. There are more telling her she should kill herself. Fuck. Her address! Her whole entire fucking address is posted. Photos from her personal Facebook page have been uploaded with comments about her appearance. Photos from Instagram! Even that risqué one she took in the bathtub with the hashtag gamerslut.

And then she sees it… some guy retweeted her address and says he’s exactly 57.4 miles from her house and will be there to burn it to the ground in just over an hour.

Her heart thunders in her chest. Her ears are ringing. In the glow of the phone, the room looks like it’s spinning. She has to make a run for the bathroom barely making it to the toilet before what’s left of her midnight snack is reversing its trajectory.

What do I do now? Do I call the cops? Would they take it seriously? Is it serious?

Am I safe?

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It’s quite possible that in this scenario, the main character IS fairly safe. She *might* not actually get her house burned down as the threats against people online often end up being empty ones meant to scare a person into silence, but that’s not always the case either. We live in a world where women have been targeted and murdered simply for not wanting to sleep with a man or for being a female in a male dominated industry because, as a lot of men will tell you, no woman could ever be successful in

a field that men love without fucking men to get to the top and those “females” deserve their unethical actions to be exposed, right? Amirite?? We seriously live in a world where a woman who states publicly that she believes in the gender wage gap and wants equal pay will be threatened with rape, where a woman can tweet a smartass comment about a sports game and be threatened with rape. And, unfortunately, this world is one where 98% of rapists never spend time in prison.

How can we guarantee safety for women in that kind of world?

Our society has evolved to a more technologically based one. We live and thrive on social media. We stay buried in our phones. We summarize our lives in 140 neat little characters. We exist in snapshots and tidbits. There’s no denying this change. Yet, there are no ways to protect yourself as an adult when online threats and cyberstalking happen. Most state laws that actually have cyberbullying laws use those laws to instruct public schools to have policies to punish these occurrences for students. Adults have nothing. Elliot Rodgers uploaded his entire manifesto online, but no one would do anything. Rape threats are made every second, but no one has a way to take legal recourse for those threats. Regardless of many people feeling like the government has enough power, that we have enough laws as is, the safety of women, of men, of children is truly at risk when there is no legal statute nor court precedent to protect them allowing assholes to make threats, publish addresses and terrorize others freely without consequence. That freedom only bolsters these bullies increasing the intensity and frequency of their attacks.

Even if you can argue the absence of any real threat, the potential for crippling mental health issues stemming from the kind of situation the character in the story faced is very much present, accounted for, and real. Stress, anxiety, depression… even post-traumatic stress disorder has been claimed following an attack. Clinical psychologists have agreed that this is a very real possibility. Given my education in counseling/psychology, I agree. The constant barrage of threats and bullying could most definitely lead to the development of PTSD which involves anxiety, emotional deregulation, emotional intensity, avoidance of triggers, nightmares, insomnia, inability to focus, reckless behavior, hopelessness, intense shame or guilt, and interpersonal problems.

There’s no magic fix that will eliminate this sort of behavior, but if these sorts of things happened face to face, the offending person would be charged with harassment, stalking, or possible even terroristic threats. An evolving, technologically dependent society needs laws that reflect the times. We should already be at this point instead of leaving people with no actual way to legally protect themselves. Many end up fleeing their own homes and hiding out until the blowback dies down.

As a society, we need to demand more be done and stop dismissing these behaviors as empty threats from neckbeards still living with their moms. That may actually be the case, but why are we so willing to risk people’s safety to protect assholes who hide behind a computer screen?

Fuck that. People’s wellbeing should always come before the unhindered freedom to be a dickhead. Period the end.

So, share the stories, demand people listen, and push for more to be done. That push is the only way to get anything done.

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This has been another installment of Sunday Confessions! Be sure to check out the More than Cheese and Beer page for other linkups and the Facebook page for anonymous confessions

Cultural Misogyny

Rejection has been a theme over the past week for good reason. Elliot Rodgers felt the need to gun down 6

people before turning the gun on himself because he was so often rejected by the opposite sex that he found it to be unfair and needed to punish those he thought were responsible for his unhappiness. He was rejected so often he became miserable, full of hate, and violent and decided the only way to right these wrongs was to take lives—to make people pay.

That’s tragic. It truly is. But, when it all comes down to it, rejection is not the real reason Rodgers committed the atrocious acts he did.

We’ve all been rejected at one time or another and many of us handle it well or somewhat well. But to dismiss this case as one where a mentally ill man couldn’t handle rejection completely ignores the underlying cultural issues at work that have been creating an antagonistic environment for women throughout history that continues, obviously, to plague us today. So, at face value, it may seem like this is a story about a lone mad man who couldn’t stand rejection and ultimately and tragically reacted with violence, but once you take a closer look at things, you being to see the sense of entitlement at work—an attitude that women can tell you is all too common in so many men with whom we have contact.

Rodgers said he wanted to kill women for never finding him attractive enough to fuck him and for ruining his

time at college. He wanted them to sleep with him but the fact that these women slept with other people made them sluts. It’s the double-edged sword issue that women have been facing for ages. If we’re sexually active, we’re sluts, but if we won’t sleep with someone, we’re prudes. It’s this cultural idea that we’re not in full ownership of our own bodies. Being in control of ourselves, doing what we want with who we want is such a foreign fucking concept that instead of being “allowed” to do what we want without commentary and with the same respect given to men in the same situations, we have people constantly policing our bodies and telling us what we should be doing with them.

To add to that, we’re expected to dole out sex to men who want to sex us without giving any thought to whether or not we’re attracted to the men in question.

No seriously. Think about it. Think about every fucking time you’ve heard the “friendzone” or heard a guy complaining that “nice” guys finish last…

In every single instance, if you really think about it, you have a man complaining that a female friend of his whom he attempted to hook up with through falsified niceties and friendship strategies had no interest in fucking or dating him. In essence, he cannot handle the fact that this person only thought of him as a friend (oh the fucking horror of actually being a friend to a woman) and was not sexually attracted to him. It is not a simple case of lack of attraction, it is now the fault of all women everywhere because we only want to fuck assholes who act like jerks and lie to us to try to get in our panties because we’re bitches.

But, wait…if this guy was putting on a bullshit act to be our friend just to try to get in our panties isn’t he the

asshole who lied to us? And we didn’t sleep with *him* so.... Kinda blows that theory right out of the water. It’s not seen that way though. All across media platforms the guy gets the girl. The hero gets his babe. The hook up always happens. In books. In television. In movies. Women are objects to be pursued not persons to be respected and certainly not people with whom to be platonic friends. Ultimately, we will come around, right, guys? We’ll jump on that dick before the end of the movie if you just push and push and push until we see the error of our ways. No means negotiate. “Let’s be friends” is a death sentence, and when it happens, it’s a reason to be angered and prove your manhood through namecalling and threats or through actual violence.

Or if you’re like my stalker, just keep on texting and tracking a girl down for going on 12 years even though she consistently ignores you. She’s bound to come around at some point.

Rejection sucks. It never feels great. There’s always a sting to it. But, the difference in feeling rejected and what Elliot Rodgers’ and many, many other men feel and believe is the idea that they’re somehow owed a woman’s affections--that the world owes it to them to bestow upon them the woman they want no matter how that particular woman feels about them. Rejection then turns into injustice and that attitude becomes wholly dangerous as we saw this past week and have seen numerous times before unfortunately.

The strong urge I have to add a not all men disclaimer in this piece to avoid the same bullshit I’ve experienced while talking about this on Facebook just goes to show how bad it’s gotten, too. We’re living in this world where women are consistently objectified and seen as conquests, where men feel justified in lashing out when a woman is not interested in being their plaything, and where seemingly decent guys feel the need to put their defenses up and scream and shout “not me” every time a woman attempts to share her experiences.

It has to stop. Women need to be heard so we can finally start addressing the misogynistic culture that

shapes people like Elliot Rodgers into murderers. We shouldn’t have to sleep with a man out of fear of being slaughtered or raped for saying no. We shouldn’t have to be afraid to go on a date or be approached by a man in a fucking parking lot. We shouldn’t have men trying to shut us up when we want to share what we’ve gone through and what other women go through. I was told before I wrote this that men don’t have it easy and that blaming certain actions on culture doesn’t address that. But, no one has an easy life. If you’re doing it right, it’s going to be a series of challenges and obstacles that help you grow. The problem right now is that we live in a culture where on top of the experiences we all have in life that challenge us to be stronger, women of all races and ages and sexual orientations face these unique-to-us situations that make life harder and scarier than it has to be and, at every turn, bringing about awareness on this issue gets shut down.

And that’s fine. I’ll just get louder.

Who’s with me?

This has been part of Sunday Confessions with More Than Cheese and Beer. The prompt was rejection. Check out hers and the rest of the contributors' posts! It's always fun to see how each person takes and interprets their posts.