Thread by @VABVOX

Spent my day & evening interviewing women about their suicide attempts for an upcoming article. All I want to do is cry/rage at the things being done to women--black, white, Latinx, Asian, Native, lesbian, bi, str8, trans, young, middle-aged, older--that make us want to be dead.

I want men--men who never think about how male supremacy benefits them even if they don't active oppress/hurt women--to commit themselves to change the same way I want white people to commit themselves to anti-racism every day.

It's not on oppressed people to fix oppression.

There was not one woman I spoke with who didn't feel tremendous pressure&expectation--either overt or subliminal--to both achieve more than the men around her&be more present to other people. As one black woman said to me, "We're just supposed to prop everyone up, all the time."

Another woman, an white lesbian, said, "I feel like my entire life has been about putting up my hands to hold back the twin forces of homophobia and misogyny and that no one else realizes how much energy that takes on a daily basis. It's exhausting and not a little traumatic."

My takeaway from doing this work is this: We never look at women as people who start every day at a deficit men do not--not because they are less, but because they must always be more. The countervailing principle of not having equality in any aspects of our lives is crushing.

What I thought after talking to all these women today and last week, is how amazed I am that women don't try to kill themselves MORE often. And that perceived privilege--straightness, whiteness, youth--were all irrelevant to pain.

That wasn't something I was prepared for.

Anyway--I just wanted to share this with you EVEN as #TheLastWord is replaying the #AccessHollywood tape and #KimbaWood, a judge with an amazing career, has been called "the love judge" because she had an affair in 1999--and then married that man.
No joke.
"The love judge."

#KimbaWood is in the hot seat for standing against Trump because unlike #Comey, she's following the law.
Oh and in 1966--when she was 21--she worked for a week as a Playboy bunny while in grad school at the London School of Economics.
52 years ago.
Our bodies are our history.

I just wanted to share all this with you, because journalism is an ongoing process and your own history and experience and who you are in the world brings so much to it.

I love this job, but the stories one has to tell are often so, so hard and many of our subjects are victims.

Not so tangential to how women are oppressed and pressured is the economics of work--my latest, which disrupts the narrative that the working class is white men. Not true.

Women Are the Real Working Class
damemagazine.com/2018/04/12/wom…