On Election Day in the US, and the many weeks prior, I seemed to get an email (or text) from every person in the world. People I knew and many I didn’t. “Jennifer, it’s Kamala” began one text I frequently received. Opinions, reminders, distractions, memes, rally cries, meditations. Vote for me. Vote at all. We got this. Take a deep breath. On and on.
A thick and vast quilt of words. A myelin sheath of messaging to quell my anxieties.
But none of it could protect me (or any of us) from the violent blow of the election outcome.
The first time my female presidential candidate lost, back in 2015, I was stunned because I really had been so with her. I woke up feeling ill in a NYC hotel room and rode the subway to work, a zombie loser in a lost zombie city. I sat with my zombie coworkers in a big semicircle and cried over delivery pizza.
The second time my female presidential candidate lost, this week, I didn’t cry. I felt…hmmmm what are the words? Not completely dissociated or all together numb, but maybe…pliant. Resigned. Tired. Ready, even though I had been hopeful. God damn hope always sneaking in. Tired. Annoyed. Resigned. On autopilot. Shuddering at thought of what it might feel like to really allow the knowledge of just how much this country hates me, a woman (white and privileged at that) — though more Black women, Trans people, immigrants, and so on — sink in.
Knowing something with your brain is one thing, feeling it with your body is another. So the day after, I took a solo hike for the first time in years. I resolved not to smile at or greet any man I encountered which was petty but I wanted to blame someone. Truth is white women are just as much to blame, if not more so. And the deeper truth is that we just cannot quit our systemic addiction to misogyny and racism. Shit.
I hiked swiftly and with purpose, listening to Brutalities: A Love Story. In this memoir, Margo Steines sifts through the dark richness of her lifelong relationship with violence in its many forms. BDSM. Addiction. Sex work. Shitty relationships. Hard manual labor. Pregnancy and childbirth.
Some of the violence she consented to, or sought out. Some of it she inflicted on others, or was paid for. Still much of the other violence just came her way and she had no choice but to endure.
Violence and love are the two main currencies in which we deal in this world.
Violence as a concept snakes out in all directions, vast and generous, encompassing so much that we encounter in this life. Abortion bans. Lewd cat calls. Grabbing women by the pussy, or even joking about doing so. The thin but undeniable feeling of unsafety in a taxi at night. The hatred in a man’s eyes after you accidentally elbow him to take up space at the bar. On and on.
Steines writes about the practice of “body tempering” in the context of mixed martial arts (MMA) training, no doubt the most violent sport there is. Body tempering is a process of soft tissue mobilization that helps prepare the body for any kind of force. It’s the physical manifestation of anticipation, a corporeal knowing of what is to come.
“A fighter’s body is able to receive blows that would kill a regular person. A fighter can receive many of them, one after another, and remain standing because the cells of the body have been altered. The fighter’s body has been trained, through force, to receive violence.”
“Able to receive”
“…Trained, through force, to receive violence”
I stopped in my tracks. This idea felt so familiar to me that day, the day after my fellow Americans re-elected a man who exudes violence in every form I can think of.
To live in the US as a woman, trans person, Black person, or immigrant is to submit to near-constant training, through force, to receive violence. We are expert, old hat body temperers, so many of us.
“Receiving” suggests a pliancy, a tacit or active welcoming, not a cacophonous collision or explosion. In proactively tempering the body to force, the likelihood of injury lessens while the likelihood of perseverance — survival — grows.
That is part of how we’ve gotten by in a world that doesn’t value or care for us.
As
writes in :“Misogyny isn’t about hating or discriminating against women because they are women and thus attract suspicion and consternation. Misogyny is about exposing women to harm because our gender makes us beneath full consideration. Misogyny is primarily something we face, not something people feel in their hearts. Having to navigate a world where you can’t get a routine D&C after six weeks or obtain care for an ectopic pregnancy or have to carry a fetus to term as a raped ten year-old girl could hardly be one that is more hostile and hateful to women, girls, and indeed anyone who can get pregnant.”
Speaking of reproductive rights — and abortion — specifically, I have, since I was a 22-year-old abortion counselor brushing past spitting protestors, watched access to care snap violently shut while criminalization, stigma, and myriad other forms of reproductive violence have bloomed. The election outcome overlays this trajectory with a thick line.
It is depressing, exhausting, demoralizing, and dehumanizing.
Even if I am not the one to be seeking the abortion care, my “body” — meaning the whole of my existence and the value of my gender — is being tempered to receive harder and harder blows from bigots who will never understand what it feels like.
I hate that, so my small but fierce act of resistance is to continue to affirm, to love, and to hold space for women in their bodily autonomy. Without apology and untempered. My wellspring to offer this feels bottomless and magical, entirely untouchable for the violence around me.
“Watching someone else endure is a two dimensional experience fundamentally unrelated to actually enduring with your own body,” writes Steines.
That day I hiked a route called Inspiration Loop. The trail is meant to finish at the top of a lookout called inspiration point where you can see wide stretches of the California coastline and the shimmering sea. But I climbed there first so I could pause and take it in, gathering space and perspective to fortify me for the remainder of the dusty hike ahead.
While the force of the blow from the election momentarily takes the breath away, because we have been inured to endure such violence, no one is entirely surprised. But, with courageous awareness, with practice, we begin to see the scope of the violence around us. You have to see the system if you ever hope to change it.
In the world of physical training and sports therapy, body tempering is largely seen as a good thing. An injury prevention strategy, and a protection and coping mechanism. But there’s a dubious line between the virtue of injury prevention and the dark resignation that injury — violence — is inevitable.
Why must the violence be inevitable? It does not have to be. That is the work ahead of us. I’m certainly not without hope (I never am) and I hope that you are not either.
If violence and love are the equal currencies of our world, then love is also always at-hand. We keep organizing, we keep loving, said Lama Rod Owens this week. Yes, we do.
The longevity of a thing like violence doesn’t lend any greater validation to its existence. Violence rends the knit of fibers: the fibers of our relationship to self and others; the fibers of our belief in something freer and more beautiful than we have known; the fibers of our fullness and wholeness.
The work is knitting, loving, and cultivating awareness. Reducing harm — going offline, protecting your peace, checking out for some time — is also part of care. Avoiding the magnetic pull of that “second arrow” and the ways in which we deepen our own suffering with the narratives we spin. Just wait. Just take a breath.
As Rebecca Solnit reminds us in Hope in the Dark:
“There is no alternative to persevering, and that does not require you to feel good. You can keep walking whether it's sunny or raining. Take care of yourself and remember that taking care of something else is an important part of taking care of yourself, because you are interwoven with the ten trillion things in this single garment of destiny that has been stained and torn, but is still being woven and mended and washed.”
Take good care of yourself and each other, this week and always.
Thank you for this, Jess. Really helpful to my soul, spirit and mind. <3