CIA veteran Gloria Steinem has died.
She helped Langley win the Cold War
while women remain blacksited and broken
raining teeth from bloody mouths
like the reds in Pinochet’s torture camps.
In this CIA civilization
women
slap name tags over baby vomit stains
smiling ear to ear for chortling customers
who shovel cheesecarbs into their faces
while she juggles dishpans and breast pumps
and goes home to collapse in bed
and dream about work,
women
take selfies in IDF uniforms
and do TikTok dances
on the ruins of Gaza
and pilot Girl Power drones
and drop Girl Power bombs
onto mothers clawing at the rubble,
women
stand with sedated eyes
stranded in suburban deserts
spooning cereal into restless children
until hubby comes home
to rape everyone in the house,
women
hate their bodies so much
they remove the fat from their cheeks
so they look like skeletons
and then freeze their faces
trying to look twenty
and it freezes their minds at twenty
and their hearts stay stuck at twenty
and they don’t grow
and they don’t heal
and they don’t know any better
than to call their daughters fat
and stick porcupine quills in their flesh,
women
spend their lives staring
at the side of a man’s head
yearning to be loved
and feeling their light fade
while he stares at a screen
and makes loud noises
to drown out the echoes
of his father’s fists cracking
on the bones of his face,
women
tear strips off each other’s flesh
to win the approval of wolf-mouthed men
who gobble up the carnage
and then choose a favorite slave.
Gloria Steinem was not a girl’s girl.
Gloria Steinem was a pick-me girl.
Pick me, CIA.
Pick me, empire.
I’ll be a good little supplicant for the banker boys.
I will starve feminism of its boobs and belly,
shave it back to into the image of a child,
put a tie on it and call it equal.
I will say to the ladies:
“Get out of the kitchen
and into the Amazon warehouse!
Take off that apron
and put on this efficency tracker!
It monitors your calories, too!
10,000 steps a day for the empire.
Congratulations, you do two jobs now.”
And I will return my magical baby portal
back to sender
unused in my box.
I promise I won’t even peek
at my own life-creating god potential.
I will poo-poo it even, if anyone asks.
Who cares if we can make life?
We can make money!
That’s much more important.
I will civilise us hairy juicy vag goddesses,
sir.
You can count on me.
Gloria Steinem was a pick-me girl,
and boy was she ever picked.
But now she is dead,
and the empire is dying,
and the drumbeats of the wild
are unnerving the boys at Langley.
Something is stirring within us.
Something ancient.
Something forgotten.
Something moves within our wombs
which they tried to paralyze long ago.
The drums are getting louder,
and we are growing increasingly feral.
The time is coming,
and coming up fast,
where we will stand before them,
blood-bladed and hairy-bushed,
the wreckage of Langley beneath our feet,
saying,
I am not civilized,
motherfucker.
I am not fucking civilized.
Reading by Caitlin Johnstone
