Feminasty

When I was ten years old, all I wanted to do was listen to Def Leppard, marry Doogie Howser, and be old enough to smoke cigarettes. We had just moved to Ironton, Ohio, from Texas, and I had no friends. My favorite thing to do was take pictures of my baby dolls in dangerous situations like hanging them by one toe from an elm tree or placing their head under a car wheel. I was a busy child auteur living in my own bubble world, and the last place I wanted to be wasting my creative time was Sunday morning at Catholic church, listening as a priest made the story of a man with incredible powers mind-numbingly boring.

The only exciting thing that ever happened in church was being filled with absolute jealousy at all those braggers who got to take Communion. Not me. I wasn’t in the Cracker of Christ Club. I wanted watered-down grape juice and paperlike crackers (because I was hungry), but I wasn’t allowed bland early St. Lawrence brunch because my mom didn’t let me take catechism classes. We went out of a sense of duty and ritual, but there was something holding my mom back from leaving me there to learn from those people. She is justifiably scarred having gone to Catholic school, along with her ten brothers and sisters, until one of the nuns hit my uncle Freddy and my grandpa pulled them out temporarily. Sister Clematis, known in my family as “Pennywise in a habit,” would take a wooden ruler and slam it on my six-year-old mother’s tiny little lady hands for coloring outside the lines. Chew on a pencil? Get nun-slapped in the back of the head. Be restless in your chair, and she would give you a warm hug and tell you it’s going to be okay. Just kidding, she would sneak up behind you and rattle your chair like a hurricane.

Father Frailey drove a Corvette, which he parked by the children’s playground and then would go ape if their kickballs bounced into his holy muscle car. And I’d be filled with regret if I didn’t mention Monsignor York’s yearly all-boys trip to Myrtle Beach. Just an innocent romp to a beach city Coed.com named the number twelve “trashiest spring break destination” in 2016. But we still went to church, taking all that into consideration and whatever else my family doesn’t talk about, because that’s what you did. My grandmother Norma Bell was a devout Catholic, having converted to marry my grandfather, who was a first-generation Irish Catholic street rat.1 Norma Bell was raised Southern Baptist, and they let it be known with death threats that they didn’t approve of her jumping onto ship Catholic.2 Slowly, over a long period of time, my family stopped putting up with the church bullshit. They woke up from the spell and Kool-Aid Man–ed through the buttressed walls, running backward, middle fingers up. I owe the Catholic Church a lot. If they hadn’t been absolutely terrible to my family, I would have never developed a mafia-like hatred for them. You mess with my family, Pope, you mess with me…an adult woman who is always showing up at birthday parties dressed in the same clothes as the toddlers.

Who I dislike more than the church are the religious posers who take the parables of the Bible and use them as a weapon to hurt and control women. They’re like a Christian mullet—religion in the front, evil in the back.3 Well, I’m not fucking standing for this hypocritical behavior. Not from Christian minister and GOP superstar Mike Huckabee, who went on Fox News and compared women’s health clinic Planned Parenthood to a heroin dealer. I’m not taking it from Wisconsin state assembly GOP rep and Catholic Roger Rivard, who said, “Some girls, they rape so easy.” And I’m definitely not taking it from king religious ding-dong, husband to “Mother,” and analog phone enthusiast Mike Pence. Mike Pence, the forty-eighth vice president4 of the United States, is someone I am very worried might become the most powerful man in the Western world. There’s a lot of pressure to get Donald Trump out of the White House, but the man who would then be president is much worse. Trump can at least be tricked into doing sort of the right thing for a day, but Pence has been applying his steadfast religious anti-women dogma since 1999.

Mike Pence started sharing his moral oppression of females in the late ’90s, tackling one of the biggest threats to his worldview—Disney’s Mulan.5 Maybe you haven’t seen it—because you’re busy searching for pictures of baby animal enemies falling asleep holding each other—so let me explain the plot. The movie’s about a young woman who pretends to be her father in order to enlist in the Chinese army. When they find out she’s a woman, they spare her life even though it’s a crime punishable by death. She later sneaks into the emperor’s palace, disguised as a concubine, and rescues everyone. Mike Pence wasn’t upset about the implied sex slavery or executions. No, he felt the movie would radicalize women into thinking they could serve in combat, which was not permitted at that time.6 Just to be clear, he was so mad after seeing A CARTOON GIRL BECOME A WAR HERO, he opened up Word ’97 and started typing a diatribe that even paper clip helper Clippy was like, “Are you sure you want to type this ridiculous shit?” When he was done, he posted it on the website for his radio show, The Mike Pence Show. Or let’s be real, someone else uploaded it to his website. I believe Mike Pence knows HTML like I believe Johnny Depp volunteers at a women’s shelter. While Pence set out to air his opposition to women serving in combat, he took the opportunity to say that women shouldn’t be in the military at all. He wrote:

An adult man, triggered by a Disney movie.7 This children’s entertainment is a threat to our military system and he’s the only patriot red, white, and blue enough to say it! On the outside he’s a red, white, and blue patriot who thinks women are precious porcelain dolls Jesus gift-wrapped for men to impregnate while we Clorox shower tiles, but on the inside he’s scared of us. And he doesn’t want us to have guns in the Sunni Triangle because we might discover the real enemy is our country. Or he’s scared that little girls might grow up to feel that they are capable of doing anything a man can do. Whatever he’s afraid of, he’s afraid, and he might make you believe this outrage-wrapped fear is justified by referencing in his piece that women are sexually assaulted in the military. He specifically references what he calls the “Tailhook scandal,” which is, according to him, an incident “involving scores of high ranking navy fighter pilots who molested subordinate women.” For the purposes of this chapter, I’d love to use different language that paints a clearer picture of what Tailhook was. I’d like to refer to it as “the Ultimate Gang Rape at Tailhook, a living hellscape where eighty-three women and seven men were sexually assaulted by more than one hundred officers.” Pence is afraid that Mulan will send a message to little girls—you won’t get raped in the American military—and he knows that’s not true. Mike Pence could have used Mulan as a paradigm for what the U.S. military could be, where women are treated with respect and not just reiterated the un-Jesus-like way the military actually treats women (and men). Take rape out of the equation and Mike Pence still thinks women have no business in the military. He type screams:

Don’t you picture him saying this while chugging an A&W root beer on the back of a plugged-in golf cart, parked in the middle of his garage, surrounded by unused tools and his pals, four old white guys wearing varying translations of blue polos. The kind of guys who excuse themselves to fart outside but still cover it up with a too-loud cough just in case.

“Guys, you know how children’s cartoons get you thinking about how sexually explosive eighteen-year-old soldiers are?”

“Uh, yeah, sure, Mike?”

Confused looks all around. Kip Tupper, real estate mogul and prayer buddy, snaps off a bite of celery and swallows it aggressively. This might be a loooong night.

I know Mike Pence because Mike Pence is every dad I grew up around in Texas. My friend Avery’s dad used to drink Natural Light with us in his garage and talk about how women shouldn’t be cops—well, his exact words were “I hate bitch cops”—and then make a hard left turn into some Rain Man–like regurgitation of pages of Scripture. The experience is like enjoying the whimsy of the It’s a Small World ride one second, and then the next you’re in a whiskey barrel about to go over Niagara Falls.

Think Mike Pence is only focused on destroying the lives of men and women “at the height of their physical and sexual potential”? He’s also given your grandma a nice one-two punch in the crotch when he tried to pay for Katrina relief by cutting Medicare. Yes, he cut the budget that assists the old mothers and fathers we should be honoring in order to pay for the blessed poor because the Bible has all those passages about “thou shalt never cut the warmongering budget to help the helpless.” Either group he chooses not to help, he’s hurting the good Christians. Like the best Christian who ever lived, my grandma Norma Bell Thompson. She wore a rosary, prayed before every meal, never missed Mass, and gave money she couldn’t afford to give to the church. She made me biscuits and gravy even when it was clear I was getting fat. She laughed when I cussed. She took in homeless people. And she loved everyone exactly the same. When I was ten, sitting on Grandma’s porch reading Bridge to Terabithia, again, while my cousin Stephanie and her Filipino boyfriend made out, a neighbor walked by and abruptly directed a racial slur toward Stephanie’s boyfriend, and my grandma came flying out the screen door and went HAM on that guy. She was screaming, “Jesus doesn’t discriminate in this house!” Mike Pence could learn a lesson from Norma Thompson! If someone told my grandma they were gay, she would hold them and squeeze them into her DD boobs and tell them they were loved. She wouldn’t do everything in her power to destroy them using the Bible as her weapon. As governor of Indiana, Mike Pence diverted funds from the state’s Ryan White CARE Act—the largest federally funded program to assist people living with HIV/AIDS—and put that money into conversion-therapy facilities.8 At best, conversion therapy is like going to a camp for a week where adults yell at you to force you to be straight; at worst, it’s like going to a camp for a week where adults yell and hit you to force you to be straight. It doesn’t fucking work at changing someone’s sexual orientation, and the American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association both agree it’s awful. Both oppose conversion therapy because it’s attempting to fix something that’s not wrong, oftentimes using psychologically and sometimes physically violent methods.

Only twelve states in the United States ban conversion therapy, and Mike Pence’s state is not one of them. Neither does Louisiana, a state that housed a legal conversion camp that took one of my best friends away. During college, I was working at America’s finest chino retailer, Gap. The floor manager found out very quickly that my perfectionist anxiety was uniquely suited for the fitting room, and that’s where I stayed for two years, stuck in a windowless hallway, repeating the same greetings and folding the reasonably priced separates again. Most of the people who worked with me were high school kids who only had the job because they were bored. They would stand in my three-by-four-foot work box and refuse to put back clothes. But then there was Hope. She was a twenty-five-year-old social worker from a small town in Louisiana who worked at the Gap for extra money. She was loud and sweet and loved to put people in their place. She called everyone “babydoll” and when she came into my glorified closet, it was for jokes and to help. We were inseparable. After work on Saturdays, we’d get drunk at P.F. Chang’s, go to the gay clubs, smoke a ton of cigarettes, then get up on Sunday and watch Meet the Press. One night, she took me out for a non-PFC Chinese dinner and nervously blurted out to me that she was a lesbian. I don’t think she expected me to squeal with joy, and then squeal even louder when she told me she’d been dating our queer hairdresser. I was so excited for both of them! When the three of us would go out, I could feel how happy they both were. And bonus, since Hope was hotter than me, it meant way more dick for me. Everyone wins!!! Then out of nowhere, Hope disappeared. I didn’t know where she was; her girlfriend hadn’t heard from her in days. Neither of us knew her parents, and she never really talked about them much, so we couldn’t call them. Then one day, she emailed to tell us her parents had come to “rescue” her and put her in a place with people who could help her “figure things out.” Her email read like a letter from someone sucked into a cult.

“I’m safe here with the Branch Davidians. David may be a megalomaniac who thinks he’s Jesus, but don’t worry, there are also plenty of guns.”

She said she wasn’t a lesbian anymore, she was never a lesbian, just confused. I never heard from Hope again. I’ve lost her email since I abandoned Adidas69@hotmail.com, an address I hope a Korn fan is putting to good use. Wherever Hope is, I hope she’s okay. These Christian conversion centers are not only dangerous, but also when you’re put there by your family, you have very few options of finding someone to help you escape them, which is why they should be illegal. Because honestly, what’s worse in the eyes of the Lord—bringing a snake to Mardi Gras, which is illegal in Louisiana, or forcing a teenager to watch lesbian porn and then hitting her whenever two women have sex, which is legal in Louisiana?

When he’s not busy voting against the minimum wage, making low-level offenders stay in jail forever, or defunding Syrian refugee rescue groups in his state, Pence is using his impenetrable armor of religion to roll back reproductive rights. He’s tried to redefine rape as “forcible” or “not forcible”; he’s signed laws to shut down abortion clinics; he’s encouraged women with nonviable pregnancies to carry them to term, and, the worst of the worst, he’s forced women to pay for the burial of fetal remains after abortion procedures or after she has a miscarriage.

“And on the seventh day, Christ rose and told a grieving woman to wipe her tears and fork over $1,500 for the burial costs.”

You’re probably thinking, How does Mike Pence find the time to hate so many different kinds of women and keep his skin looking so young? I have it on good authority he ritualistically sneaks into prison births to soak his skin in newborn vernix while watching the mother shackled to her hospital bed. It’s the only thing keeping that turkey neck in check. His nastiness comes directly from the edicts of the Evangelical Church, which he joined in college. According to an election piece the New York Times did on Pence, he was enamored with one of his frat brothers’ gold cross necklaces when his brother said to him, “Remember, Mike, you have got to wear it in your heart before you wear it around your neck.” And then he was at a Christian music festival in Kentucky, which we’ll go ahead and call Godchella, where he “gave [his] life to Jesus Christ.” So, Mike Pence found extreme Christianity because of a shiny necklace and shrooms.

According to a study by the Public Religion Research Institute, white Evangelical Christians, compared to other religious groups, think they are more persecuted than any other sect9, which is supremely delusional considering they are dictating the terms of American politics. Mike Pence makes laws that hurt other people because he feels his faith is under attack. Because in his Christian worldview, the freedom of women and minorities and LGBTQI people is an attack on Christianity, so he has to be a bad Christian to protect his Christian life of being a nice person. If he’s a true Christian, in the purest sense of the idea, he’d downsize from his state-subsidized Tudor-style home filled with silk shantung armchairs into a modest home or at the very least, give his BUTLER, which the state of Indiana pays for, a day off. But the reality is, Mike Pence and his wife Karen’s freedoms aren’t under attack. Their way of life is not threatened. The truth is, they don’t have many problems. Karen has so few problems in her life, she has to make them up. Which is why she invented “That’s My Towel!” towel charm. Karen is concerned with so many things—the death of babies at abortion factories, gay people marrying—but she’s focused much of her time on this absolutely relatable global crisis. On her website, she writes: