- Losing My Perspicacity
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- Losing My Perspicacity September 18, 2024
Good morning and Happy Wednesday.
So here’s the thing: I’ve been spitting mad all day about a couple of things, and I thought long and hard about how to do this newsletter. On top of that, my FitBit band broke, and now I have no idea what my “daily readiness” score is. So rather than talk about sports and mindless social media memes today, I’m going to talk about something that is dearly important to me. hope is important to you, too.
Here we go.
Start believing women you assholes
Back around 2015, I came across this piece at The Root, written by Damon Young. It addressed, head-on, a feeling I had but couldn’t quite put my finger on until he said the quiet part out loud. The title of the piece is “Men Just Don’t Trust Women. And This is a Problem.” Young goes on to reflect on how often he doubts his wife, or considers her feelings to be “overreacting.” Then he says this:
I'm speaking of my own relationship, but I know I'm not alone. The theme that women's feelings aren't really to be trusted by men drives (an estimated) 72.81% of the sitcoms we watch, 31.2% of the books we read, and 98.9% of the conversations men have with other men about the women in their lives. Basically, women are crazy, and we are not. Although many women seem to be very annoyed by it, it's generally depicted as one of those cute and innocuous differences between the sexes.
And perhaps it would be, if it were limited to feelings about the dishes or taking out the garbage. But, this distrust can be pervasive, spreading to a general skepticism about the truthfulness of their own accounts of their own experiences. If women's feelings aren't really to be trusted, then naturally their recollections of certain things that have happened to them aren't really to be trusted either.
This is part of the reason why it took an entire high school football team full of women for some of us to finally just consider that Bill Cosby might not be Cliff Huxtable. It's how, despite hearing complaints about it from girlfriends, homegirls, cousins, wives, and classmates, so many of us refused to believe how serious street harassment can be until we saw it with our own eyes. It's why we needed to see actual video evidence before believing the things women had been saying for years about R. Kelly.
At the time I read this, I was working in sports talk radio and feeling like I was doing a lot more pushing back than I should have had to do when it came to explaining to men, for example, why giving Michael Irvin 15 uninterrupted minutes to drag the women accusing him of assault on the radio was a bad idea (if you know, you know).
It’s been nearly 10 years since Young wrote that piece, but it was at the forefront of my thoughts all day today, first as Pro Publica published the first definitive proof that the overturning of Roe is leading to the preventable deaths of women, and again as I saw men defending Diddy, who was arraigned in federal court today on charges of sex trafficking, kidnapping, and racketeering and denied bail, on social media.
Before I say anything else, I am begging you to suffer through the commercial to watch this segment on Deadline White House today, where Nicole Wallace talked to an editor from Pro Publica, a reproductive rights activist, and a doctor about the GOP rolling their eyes over women suffering serious medical complications as the result of abortion bans and accusing women of “fear-mongering” over it. I promise it’s worth your time.
I actually saw McEntee’s post on TikTok when it first went up, thanks to a woman who stitched it to bravely share her story. I left TikTok several months back because of the outrageous number of trolls there, but I created an account just to go in and get this video. I think it’s that important.
@geekynerdbitchcarmen #stitch with @Date Right Stuff
And according to Mother Jones, the woman in the video, Carmen Broedser, was far from the only one who hit back at McEntee with her own experience.
“I was told when I had a possible ectopic pregnancy that I would have to ‘wait until it made me septic’ to get the surgery to save my life,” one commenter said.
“My daughter. Nearly lost her life after she miscarried triplets that didn’t expel her body & 3 hospitals wouldn’t remove them,” another replied.
“I’ve been anemic on and off since my weeks-long miscarriage,” wrote yet another commenter. “Three hospitals refused to give me a DNC or pill protocol. Unimaginable pain and distress.”
And so it goes, on and on, for more than 19,000 comments as of Saturday.
This, of course, is exactly what women said was going to happen when Roe fell, but, per usual, the old white men who make the laws, most of whom can’t tell a uterus from a fallopian tube and think women pee out of their vaginas, brushed us all off as hysterical.
While Wallace lays the blame squarely at the feet of Donald Trump for intentionally nominating three judges who he knew would vote to overturn Roe to the Supreme Court, it’s worth remembering that the effort to overturn Roe has been going on for more than 50 years. I say that not because I am defending Donald Trump, but because solely blaming Trump lets an awful lot of other shitty people off the hook.
In case you didn’t watch the MSNBC video above, here’s a small part of the Pro Publica story on Amber Thurman: may she rest in power; may we never forget her name.
In her final hours, Amber Nicole Thurman suffered from a grave infection that her suburban Atlanta hospital was well-equipped to treat.
She’d taken abortion pills and encountered a rare complication; she had not expelled all of the fetal tissue from her body. She showed up at Piedmont Henry Hospital in need of a routine procedure to clear it from her uterus, called a dilation and curettage, or D&C.
But just that summer, her state had made performing the procedure a felony, with few exceptions. Any doctor who violated the new Georgia law could be prosecuted and face up to a decade in prison.
Thurman waited in pain in a hospital bed, worried about what would happen to her 6-year-old son, as doctors monitored her infection spreading, her blood pressure sinking and her organs beginning to fail.
It took 20 hours for doctors to finally operate. By then, it was too late.
The otherwise healthy 28-year-old medical assistant, who had her sights set on nursing school, should not have died, an official state committee recently concluded.
Amber Thurman lived in Georgia but attempted to travel to North Carolina for a surgical abortion. When traffic kept her from making her appointment at the clinic (they couldn’t hold her spot due to the women streaming over the border for abortion care), she opted to use abortion pills. Like most women who have abortions, Thurman was already a mother; she had a six-year-old son and wanted to start nursing school. That child is now an orphan. All because men in power value the potential of life over the life of a living, breathing woman, and because they didn’t believe the women (including medical professionals) who told them this kind of thing was going to happen. Amber Thurman is the name we knew first, but I guarantee there are many, many more women this is happening to.
Later in the day, I was reading about Diddy’s arraignment, and I got mad all over again, thinking of all the rumors about Diddy that everyone heard for years. The women who were shouted down and ostracized from the entertainment world because no one believed their stories of sexual assault and abuse. I saw a lot of men voraciously defending Diddy on social media, right up until the video of him chasing Cassie down a hallway showed up, and even then, some of them tried to explain it away. Same for Bill Cosby. Over 60 women have come forward, and men like still don’t believe it. Eighty-seven women accused Harvey Weinstein. Twenty-six women have accused Donald Trump. Journalist Julie K. Brown identified 80 girls abused by Jeffrey Epstein. And on and on and on.
Why does it always take so many before the public starts to believe? It’s like women’s stories and experiences mean nothing on their own; they only matter when combined with others to make up a credible narrative.
Imagine the harm we could avoid, all the victims we could spare if people believed the first woman who came forward. Imagine a world where women feel like they can come forward. Imagine a world where what women say actually matters; a world where men don’t role their eyes and call us “hysterical.”
Tonight, I am angry. And I hope you are, too.
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