On Being a Woman Today

Processing Trump's Win

Disclaimer: This is not about food.

Today, America chose to put Donald J. Trump back into power. After 34 felony counts, after at least 26 public sexual assault allegations and a guilty verdict for assaulting E. Jean Carroll… After the first attempted coup in US history, after pardoning several war criminals and after whispers of a too-close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. We, the country, chose him again. 

Now I know my thing is food; I write about food, I think about food, and I share my food with you all, but at the end of the day, I do this because it is what makes me feel good, and I like to share what makes me feel good with the people who support me, my people. I started cooking because I am loved, I started writing because I am supported, and I started to share it because I am uplifted. Today, women everywhere feel at a loss for all of those feelings. How could I not try to put it into words? So I word vomit onto this Google doc because that is what I do. Bear with me. 

Last night, I layed in bed with three of my best friends as we contemplated a detrimental election, drank sparkling wine and ate a Mcdonalds while distracting ourselves with the first season of Pretty Little Liars. We laughed and gossiped like you would in any sleepover in girlhood (sleepovers that I have been cherishing these days), and I assumed that there was simply no way. I couldn’t feel that the earth was shaking ever so slightly.

Now, nearly 24 hours later, I am sitting here to say that I am scared and that today is scary. It is scary that he was chosen and that we have to face those consequences. And because he was chosen, because people around me chose him - backed him - I could be flattened as collateral. My sister, my mom, my cousins, my friends, and women everywhere, women who I love, could be flattened. I think of the state I spent my most formative years in (Texas) letting Nevaeh Crain die from sepsis last week in a case that was preventable but illegal to intervene in. I think of pregnant women dying over 50% more often in Texas since Roe was lifted. I feel scared of death, and I feel scared of the women around me dying or doing what they can not to die. I think about this reversal of health care rights, rights we’ve been used to and entitled to since 1973. I think about the idea that my body is now up for surveillance. That the women in the street, any single one of them, lead a life where their bodies are surveilled and watched. 

The energy of the country is going to shift. How do I know this? Because I was an American teenager in 2016, walking the halls of a 2000+ student public school. When Trump took the stage for the first time, I could hear my heartbeat in my ears, my first taste of conscious panic. At 14, I could sense what felt like a cultural earthquake under my feet. Them versus us. When Trump was elected, I turned into a kid who fought. I was impassioned in general, but I looked around and saw a bunch of white teenage boys who were now being told that they could grab me and get away with it. They could force it. They could use slurs. They could treat me as lesser because the most powerful man in the world led by example, and he said that it was okay. I got in the faces of those asses in school who spat on my anti-gun violence posters, the boyfriends who thought it fine to call me a c*unt in front of their friends, the ones who called me a libtard for going to the first Women’s March on Washington, and the others, who took it way too far. I did what I could to bark back… respectfully. I won’t stop doing that. Just like I know my cousin, a first year at St Andrews, won’t stop doing that, or her sister in Texas won’t, or their mother in government won’t, or my Mom in South Carolina won’t, or my sister, or my Grandmother, my Godmother, all of them, they won’t stop barking back. I hope you won’t either. 

Today, that thing I didn’t believe could happen last night happened, and I believe it. After my big fat American cry over what feels like my country's fleeting democracy, my girls and I walked to Chinatown and got lunch at my favourite place. Over spare ribs, soup dumplings, kung po chicken and the works, we behaved as we should: as unabashed, brazen, annoyingly wonderful women.

Here’s the message I've arrived at: as a woman, I am scared, but then again, I am a woman. Generations of resilience have bred me and us to endure violence, repression, and objectification. But throughout all of it, we have been women together, and we hold each other and walk through the firing line like my Grandmother and mother have done for me, and like we will have to do for our daughters and granddaughters from this day forward. 

Hold the women in your life close, hold the people you love close, and recognize that this is the next phase of the fight. Grieve the loss, then mobilize. 

Drawing of Girls at a Sleepover. Art by Cassie Legg (a woman)