Don’t let them fool you when they tell you they care about women. Don’t let them fool you when they smile and insist they’re very modern feminists. Female flesh is the ultimate inconvenience. These people want to see no embryo left unborn.

The root of this ideology- like a mouldy molar; is infected with views on women that display a wholesale contempt for our autonomy. It displays an erasure of trans people, it sits perfectly with a hegemony that leaves the majority of us out of its discourse. When they tell you they care about women they only care about us insofar as we are fleshy incubators. They reveal what they believe our purpose on this earth is for.

We are wives, or we are whores. Our flesh is not our own. They map out their contempt for us on the crevices on our skin. It imprints us and stains.  We’re sluts in short skirts hobbling in high heels on high streets, drinking as much as men, you can see our legs so we must be up for it, because if you think someone might find us sexually attractive then that’s all we’re good for. That’s all we’re aiming for. We’re self-sacrificing mothers with holes in our shoes, going hungry for the kids, wearing three jumpers because we can’t pay for the heating. Having babies we don’t want, can’t afford, can’t care for, because at some point the poison seeped in far enough to convince us that as soon as sperm hits egg we relinquish all control of our bodies. It’s the illusion that in the division of our being is where our divinity lies. It’s the tale of a thousand age old books. Good women, bad women.  Women exist for men’s pleasure, for carrying to term, for the nurture of children- everything we want to live for should be second place.

Let’s talk about when life begins. Or rather, when life stops being yours. These people never believed our bodies were ours in the first place. It’s amplified in the corridors of power by the people who insist we can’t be trusted with our lives and our aims and our goals, not least our reproductive systems. The same people who insist that we should be deeply ashamed of the offensiveness of our flesh when we’re sexually in control of it. They blame us for our rapes and sexual assaults, and punish and patronise us when we try to organise and take a stand. Everything else is more important than the state of being a woman- the existence of embryos, men’s needs, anti-imperialism, Julian fucking Assange. The main cause. The common cause. Everything else is just divisive. Know your place. Step aside.