Week 12: Broken Anger
This post is very late. I’ve been trying to write something thought provoking and eloquent - something sensical and factual. But that’s just not where I’m at this week. The discourse around Matthew West’s “Modest is Hottest” song has gotten to me on a level I didn’t anticipate. As a woman who grew up being taught that modesty was of the utmost importance because “men are visual creatures” and I needed to avoid being a “stumbling block”, the supposedly satirical song hits too close to home. It is a reminder of how my life was, and was supposed to still be, centered around accommodating and pleasing men and their desires/needs - something this year of singleness certainly does not do. And so, rather than write a legitimate post, here’s this poem I wrote hunched over the sink in my bathroom this morning after waking up from trauma-related dreams. It’s directed at everything that and everyone who defined my existence in purity culture.
Broken Anger
It’s funny, I tell people you don’t have power over me, but you do.
Every time you come up in my dreams,
Every time I think about seeing you,
Every time anyone reminds me of you,
I start to shake.
My mind withdraws within itself to a place that I myself can’t even reach.
I feel nothing and then everything interchangeably.
I want to scream but can’t find my voice.
You took so much from me -
And the messed up part is that I don’t even remember half of it.
And you still get to exist and go on with your life while I’m curled up in this bathroom corner trying not to cry.
It’s not fair.
It’s not right.
It’s not enough that you broke me once, it’s that you break me every damn day.
It’s enough to drive a woman mad,
Or at the very least make her angry.
A broken anger -
Pinned in the corner,
Ready to fight,
But every punch shatters against the looking glass,
Leaving me in pain,
And you just fine -
A broken anger indeed.
A Final Note: Those who profit off of purity culture have turned shame and condemnation into an enterprise. They accumulate capital - social and economic - by perverting the faithful desires of those trying to draw closer to God, instead drawing them into a purity-based multi-level marketing scheme. The “modest is hottest” enterprise is a table stacked with coins in the temple, and it needs to be flipped.