women are taught from childhood
keep your clothes on
keep your clothes decent
don't follow strangers
keep the doors locked
keep the lights on
go straight home
be careful of men
be wary of men
beware
men

it's a big, bad, scary world
for a girl
who's just a girl
and thinks that
the word "just"
as an adjective
is just
and fair

we are born and raised in fear
we drink fear in
and it poisons us
in the name of safety

one fourth of us
will be raped
within her lifetime
more than that
will have gotten close
many of us
will know the one that did it

most of us
will remain silent

one in eight movies
made in holy
Hollywood
depict a rape scene

one in eight

watch the people writhe
as they fight against
being turned on
by
violence
made erotic
on celluloid

it makes me sad to know
that many of us
will never put our full name
in the phone book
because we don't want someone to know
we live alone

we live under the shadow
of rape
and it devours us
like plague

we are not free
to walk the streets at night
and yet instead
of banding together
we grow apart
as a community of women
afraid women
now scared and alone


sexuality
is a weapon used against us
by our society
we are not allowed
to express desire
for the fear of a bad reputation
or that someone
will take advantage of us

our own
self blame
and guilt
becomes our suicide blow

and then
we tell those
in countries
that practice genital mutilation
that we will help them
we will save them from such horrors
but here
we pay our money
our hard earned money
to change our bodies
into something men want
we mutilate and poison ourselves
to recreate the image of some
media Madonna
and then we hide that creation
for fear the result will work too well






and
we call this progress?


(just thinking about statistics... and to think, too, may i add, that we laugh about prison rape, which is brutal and horrible, and that so many, many men go raped and silent, without any support... it's just sad. my gut aches today.)