By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

What is a woman in 2021? Once upon a time, that was an easy question to answer. Boys had a penis and girls had a vagina and nothing in between existed. Then Western Society collectively woke the fuck up and realized that Victorian Era medicine may not be the best guide to the complexities of gender identity. We realized what our ancestors knew before Christianity made us all morons. That it’s not that fucking simple. But that still poses the question of what is a woman exactly? Seeing as I’ve come to see myself as a woman, in spite of a tiny dick and an untamable five o’clock shadow, I figured I’d give answering this riddle wrapped inside an enigma a shot. In the simplest terms possible, I believe a woman is a mother and in 2021 that mother is a world-class bitch.

All those inflicted with the spirit of femininity are mothers, whether we have or even can have children or not. It is in our nature to nurture and care for life. This includes transwomen and third genders who have traditionally been seen as caregivers and medicine women in the old tribes and continue to be community builders in our new ones. This archetype goes beyond anything scientific and bleeds into that inky realm of the spiritual. Women are also a marginalized class defined by a deep-rooted sense of sisterhood that binds us not only to each other but to notions of tribe and community and the earth itself. And in our modern age, when all of these notions exist under threat of extermination while feminine voices remain constricted, mama has little choice but to interrupt the toxic party of modern civilization and be a fucking bitch.

To be a woman is to be marginalized. To be ignored unless you fit some man’s fetish. Women who refuse to remain silent and complicit are bitches. We are irrational harping killjoys. Shrill, opinionated, bossy, incorrigible, nagging, angry, hormonal, for lack of another thousand adjectives, we’re crazy, and in any truly sick society, crazy is nothing but a social construct designed to delegitimize the inconveniently enlightened. Women have endured generations of savage domestication that has sought to remove us from our natural place as nurturers in our communities and now we’re left to watch these communities annihilate themselves with endless wars, bottomless prisons, and environmental genocide with our tits tied behind our backs, and you really have to wonder why today’s woman’s last defense is to be a bitch? To scream and yell and carry on and piss on the rug like a bad dog? We have to do something, anything, to be fucking heard by a society lurching towards oblivion while we enjoy only token representation anywhere that actually fucking counts. Fuck yes, I’m a fucking bitch, and fuck no, I won’t shut the fuck up, be a ‘lady’, or mind my fucking manners.

READ MORE