So It Begins
Absolute Refusal & Total Solidarity
All I can really offer is this: The MAGAlarchy have come to eat the world. They must be made to fail.
Medusa Rising is an intergenerational project, and our sister elders have done all the work any could ask. Their wisdom is recorded, and their guidance a holy gift. It's to us take up the mantel, the assignment, and it is daunting. Our youngest sisters don't personally remember 9-11 and the eager chill that came with it, or the early days of the Iraq invasion and the refracting bullshit and manipulation, nevermind any history farther back .... And this is not their fault. They were just born more recently. And yet, here we are, even our youngest, standing in the face of the mature form of the beast that was until now only larval, only embryonic, only testing the fence it has now broken through.
All I have is a little starter pack for getting beyond the protest march and the political selfie (as necessary as those are!!), beyond any performativity to the gritty, embodied, messy, loving, care-centered, world buildling that is the only antidote to this re-energized patriarchal threat.
Sisters, we may soon, again, find we have to put our bodies between these gangsters and our neighbors. [Addendum - I just listened to the audio, OK, whew. Listen, many (not all, but many) suscribers to this site are white women in the US. Please do not pull any White Savior Bullshit like you are greatest gift Gaia ever evolved (unless someone actually needs physically saving right by you). Just use your privileges as you find them. That may be the cops are little less likely to assault you on camera. These could be kinetic times. That may be doing the administrivia for a minority led organization to free up staff and leadership to do the public work. These are always unevenly free times. That may be giving your extra money if you have it. These are always underfunded times.] We may soon find we have to shift our priorities toward direct mutual support, to life preservation and saving. Sounds dire, but it is already true in many parts of the US, and it is written all over these men that they have come for ... all of us.
We have lights to follow in this foggy time.
The Janes who built an abortion underground in Chicago. It was an imperfect, but always adapting group who placed women's needs above ego and politics. Women have always tended to life and death, we are the physical portals to this world.
They worked locally, and so will women now. It's the only way to be small, but effective enough. I've been soaking up our best current thinkers of anti-tyrrany, and here's what I've gleaned.
Andrea Chalupa – Expert in Soviet and Ukrainian history, and author of Dictatorship: It’s Easier Than You Think (it's a graphic essay, basically if you can make a comic book out of political theory, you are my goals!!!), Andrea on Politics Girl give us a massive info share on how not to become what Russia is now. Interestingly, much of her advice boils down to: Do Not Put Your Head Down, turn your volume up.
Indivisible is a great practical source for direct political involvement. Their guide to preserving democracy in "blue states" is actionable. Take action. Action is the antidote to anxiety. Be a pain the ass for the issues that are a pain in your ass!!! Leah Greenberg of Indivisble (also on Politics Girl, she got it going on these days!!) has some real savoir faire.
Freedom is practice of creating the conditions of freedom for each other, generationally, communally. Timothy Snyder is worth getting to know as he, like Andrea Chalupa, is a historian of how Europe dragged itself through cycles of authoritarianism and rebellion like the one we are entering now. It focuses the mind to know that our closest historical analogues now are all the early days of regimes that murdered and disappeared thousands of their people.
Today they're aiming at Liz Cheney for following the law. Missouri is offering bounties for info on "illegals" like Texas has done around abortion. It's long been many of us but its gonna be all of us very soon. But, there really are more of us. We really can care for and carry each other.
All the advice comes down to this: freedom is a set of practices, practice them. Consumerism is not a freedom practice. Pull away from anything that pulls you out of your immediate community (yes, socials and newsletters, too). Dig into your communities in new ways, or deepen connections you have. Act where you can and how you can. Sure, you have to buy things, so maybe that's just to buy local, eat local, especially from women and minoritized people. Make your own fun rather than consume entertainment. Maybe that's to build local – build a tool and skill sharing library. Join a charity or a group trying to save a historical site, park, wetland. Meet people over everything that is not politics but that makes more of what you want. Be human together. Run. For. Office. Help someone you believe in run for office.
Whatever your thing is, your dream, your contribution, your assignment – do it now as hard as possible. Whatever you have, or have left, turn it up to 11! Medusa Rising, with these women, this is my 11. They will want you daunted, isolating, overwhelmed. Stay too feral for to put your head down.
I know it sounds too little, but it is what most of us can do to weather unholy storm of chaos and selling-for-parts about to descend on the US and then echo in all kind of wierd warped ways around the world. Project 2025 will weaken international agreements and bolster relgious fundamentalism — these are a recipe for increased suffering for women and girls.
People all around us everyday need care. Care for them. Our sisters living in precarious times, with disabilities, in poverty, in danger — this adminstration is going to intensify all that. And all they have to do is withdraw support. In creating the civic webs of support we can be building the next world in our RadMatFem image of care and partnership.
If you find you live in US regions where there are no networks for the support women in trouble, find women who can build those networks and do it. If you find you have services, but they all depend on state and federal funding, build some new independent ones. We can bet there will be no funding for VAWA programs.
Yes, the fog is dark and getting darker.
We do not have the ERA. Biden failed, and fuck you, sir, very much for that. The Dems failed for decades completely to do the one thing they could for women to throw sand in the MAGA gears. And fuck y'all very much for that, too. See, Medusa Rising is not an activist organization, it's not a lobbying group, we don't have to be polite and diplomatic when leaders blow it. A phone call. That's it. And because y'all have about as much imagination and ingenuity as most CEOs, who can't seem to work out to adapt to a globe that will ends us all on their economic models, you can't figure out how you would get women to vote for you unless you're dangling our constitutional goddamn rights out the window to get us to chase the car. You are too small for your work.
ADDENDUM: Biden's 'declaration' the the ERA is the law of the land doesn't mean diddly dick. And without it, women don't get a whole bunch of very in-the-weeds legal protections that we need (strict scrutiny, sex preserved as an immutable characteristic), but mostly we are left open to all the predations of Project 2025. I'm mad about Trump, but Florida Man didn't promise and reneg on Women's Constituitonal Rights over and over again. When Wendy Murphy proposes an Alice Paul style Women's Party, I'm starting to listen pretty hard.
And you women who voted MAGA because "they know what a woman is," you obstructionists. He's already 'not that interested in bathrooms' so you'll get your tea in a minute.
Everything for women is vulnerable. Our little patchwork of rights, tenuously threaded to the 14th Amendment, has left us dependent on the kindness of legislators and magnaminity of judges forever. Without the ERA, these kitchy new dicktators will unthread as much as they can. All talk of a Household Vote is talk of denying women the vote.
Staying single might be the smartest move a generation of women ever made. We will see!!
We know what we still and always know as feminists: We have to get through this patriarchal epoch to build a world where "liberty" and "dignity" and "well-being" and "pursuit of happiness" have any real meaning especially for the female sex. That world is not a patriarchy. That world is not rapacious captialist extraction. That world is not deportations and genocides and territorial invasion. And that world is not a game of Shoots and Ladders played by billionaire children.
But, but, but!!! Liberal Democracy is the only mechanism we have on hand that will get us there. You might be tempted to sit back and let this coalition of billionaire-corporate-christo-nationalists run their game out because it has to fail on its own madness (right?). Don't. The world is not trending in a matriarchal or gylanic or partnership direction. Not even a little. All we can get on the other side of chaos now is some harsher form of patriarchy.
As feminists we can bring more RadMatFem values the center of these renewed efforts. That is the opening before us now.
