Photo courtesy of Denver Post
After the results of the US election were announced and Donald Trump was elected as the 47th President, I am seeing many women’s “survival guides” popping up on my TikTok advising them to stock up on birth control and to renew or get an IUD.
This applies even to younger girls because they need all the years of contraception and protection they can get if they don’t want to unexpectedly go through the following:
Be raped and deal with the irreversible damage that it will do. Be forced to bear the child of the person who raped you. Have that child share your own blood and be reminded every day for the rest of your life that he took away your choice.
Become pregnant and suffer from life threatening medical issues that put you in a position where you are unable to choose according to your own conscience and beliefs. Have to pick between your life or that of your unborn, insentient child.
Have to seek out, spend on and suffer through traveling across state lines miles away from anywhere you know, let alone anybody. Taking time off work, losing disposable income and emotionally suffering for what it is doing to your life, family and partner financially, mentally and physically.
Lose the right to decide what happens to you and to lose the right to save yourself, the right to just take the decision.
That 39 women had the strength, courage and power to tell people what he did to them and how he did it in this society where women are constantly shamed and blamed for everything that they “get themselves into”. Imagine a woman doing all of this, taking on the endless possibilities of how it will come back to bite her. All for the love of her country and her love and respect for other women; a societal protectiveness of the generations to come. Each one of them went through that process.
The fact that he gets elected as the president of the US? Thirty nine women. People believed that there was nobody better for the job. He was best suited to run one of the most powerful economies, militaries and foreign ministries in the world? A man who was guaranteed to be supported by executive appointees, civil servants, Congress and a third of the courts.
The type of man to outright, with no shame at all, belittle and target specific demographics of his choice by going along with the backing of bizarre, dishonest economics. All for personal gain. The type of man with nothing to lose and infinite greed. A father who spews hateful, vulgar, words about women he has interacted with – women in his family, his wife and his daughter, publicly, for the millions who support him to see.
A dangerous influence on the younger generation of men, not yet aware enough of the reality of the world, to use their naivety, upbringing and personal battles to condition them into believing in a societal standard that looks down on women.
A leader of the free world, not believing women’s rights to be equal, and privy to the privileges that men have in this world.
Today’s reality
Women all over the world will now feel the threat of a generationally large push back on their own movements and on their lives because a country even more conservative than the US has been influenced and given the okay. If the US can control women, then it can too.
Women today don’t just need one survival kit, they will need a series to have the courage and belief to be valued and treated with basic humanity and to have the confidence to demand it. It will take much more grit from women who have been persistently fighting throughout the years.
Moving forward, women will be forced to take even more precautions than they already are. Mothers will have to have conversations with their sons, educating and enforcing the importance of them being a voice for the women in their lives. Young girls will have to walk the streets knowing that any of the men around her could uphold the “your body, my choice” mentality. Girls will have to fight for the rights that their grandmothers fought for and won.
It’s a scary reality we live in now – a superpower filled with an uneducated, unethical and rich elite who are in full control of the US.