soft girls in fascist times

My publication is called My Unserious Life, but nothing feels unserious anymore when I watch the same five ugly men ruin our planet in real time. I'm tired, even more enraged, and I know you are too. We’re watching a genocide being livestreamed in real time, while tone-deaf influencers with more reach than news outlets post #ad for whitewashed feminist brands and thirst traps from their European summer. ‘Soft girls in fascist times’, will be the title of the book I write about you bitches, if I survive this impending world war.

I, too, want my 2015 brain back. I, too, am grieving the world we were promised. I, too, am grieving the idea of a future that felt expansive, abundant, maybe even a little naive, but hopeful. I, too, am grieving ease.
The kind of ease where I could just quickly open Instagram on a night out to hype up my bestie’s drunk bathroom selfie edited with the Valencia filter— definitely not the kind where I have to check the app anxiously every two minutes to see the latest horrors those five crusty men are facilitating instead of dragging their asses to one fucking therapy session.

I, too, am grieving the quiet optimism that came with believing things would get better. That progress was linear. That if we just worked hard, stayed kind, and voted, the world would fix itself. I, too, am even grieving grief, because what I’m grieving feels too superficial to even name, when mothers are grieving their dead children. My sadness, too, feels embarrassingly small in comparison, like a luxury emotion, a privileged ache.

We can and we should grieve all of these unfulfilled promises, while not resorting to apathy.

What we are witnessing today is straight up the collapse of a system that always looked good on paper but was built on stolen land, stolen labor, and theories of control disguised as order. You simply cannot promise peace, while waging war. You simply cannot promise prosperity while extracting life from the Global South. You simply cannot promise democracy while upholding the hierarchies of white supremacy and colonialism. It was doomed to fail from the very fucking beginning.

As much as it hurts knowing a system built on the greed and ego of a few old ugly man is costing the life of millions of civilians, it needs to crash. Don’t worry, it won’t be the end of the world, it will be the end of their world. It is okay, fuck even necessary to mourn, as long as we let that mourning sharpen our clarity, not dull it.

Wake up bitches, there’s abso-fucking-lutely no point in staying civil any longer, when being civil means being palatable while fascism rebrands itself as a Tiktok trend (skinnytok & cleangirltok, I’m talking about you!!) There’s abso-fucking-lutely no point in being nice any longer, when being angry is treated like a personality flaw instead of a sign that we’re still awake. To Trump’s statement that Greta Thunberg is a ‘young woman with anger issues’, she replied the world needs more angry women, so may I suggest ditching your soft girl era in favor of entering your crash-the-fuck-out girl era?

It’s no fucking coincidence that I started connecting the dots during my six months of celibacy. We’re all so busy centering our lives around men that most of us never realize: it’s been men, all along, who were so god damn afraid of our power, they had to distract us with the biggest bullshit scams to ever exist. It’s no fucking coincidence that the second I stopped letting men consume my time, my body, my thoughts, I started seeing it all for what it really is. The systems. The distractions. The way we’ve been taught to crave being chosen more than we crave our own liberation.

There’s no difference between a r*pist and the men who currently hold all the power. (plus, some of them are convicted r*pists which is like absolutely no surprise at all). It’s built on the same idea: the belief that domination is a right. That taking what doesn’t belong to you is power. That consent, autonomy, and dignity are optional when you're the one holding the pen, the gavel, the weapon.

It’s about time we start seeing it for what it is: It’s all the same fucking disease. Patriarchy dressed in different uniforms. Courtrooms, boardrooms, war rooms. They violate bodies, borders, and ecosystems with the same entitlement.

The thing is, we almost didn’t notice, many of us never will, because their violence is systemic, polished, made legal. But at the end of the day, it’s still violence. While they kept us busy, feeding us breadcrumbs and giving us just enough rights to shut our lip-glossed mouths, they were out here writing the rules, hoarding the wealth, and destroying the planet. Gaslighting us into believing our worth depended on how desirable we were to them, while they stripped Indigenous communities of resources, bombed countries for profit, and buried accountability under the disguise of progress.

If rage is all I have left, I’ll use it. Fuck, I’ll happily let them choke on it. Apathy is a privilege I don’t want, and honestly, none of us can afford. The world doesn’t need more polite women. It needs more of us fully awake, fully pissed off, and absolutely unwilling to play along. It needs more of us to remember who the fuck we were before they told us we’re here to please them.