In the early 90s, I had the great privilege of seeing Andrea Dworkin speak at a conference. Even at the stupid age of 25 (you only know it’s a stupid age when you’re almost twice that), I knew this was a exceptional moment. I was in the presence of one of the great modern feminist minds. Dworkin, for those of you who don’t know, is not for the faint of heart. She was a ‘radical’ (whatever that means), in your face, intelligent, aggressive (whatever that means), take no prisoners challenger of the patriarchal bullshit. She made me uncomfortable. She made a lot of the people in the room uncomfortable…as she simultaneously open our eyes, our minds to the ‘holy fuck’ of the truth she was telling. We don’t get a lot of that in the nice, sanitized world of a TEDtalk or pecha kucha. 

There was a time when Dworkin would have been burned as a heretic, a witch. Modern society does it differently by making rabble rousing women irrelevant. How? Look at Hillary Clinton…perhaps one of the most powerfully intelligent women in the politics today. When her daughter revealed her pregnancy, media questioned whether Hillary Clinton could “balance” being President AND a grandmother. What. The. Fuck. This is how we make women irrelevant. By attaching them to irrelevant discourse: fashion, hair, body size, etc. It’s simple. And effective.

All this to say, I dipped a toe into the world of rabble rousing today…knowingly. I posted something on Facebook and Twitter that I knew would be controversial to some. The post went thus (It was somewhat shorter on Twitter):

Easter: when Jesus emerged from a cave, saw his shadow & predicted 6 more millennia of us being douche bags to animals and each other. No wonder he hasn’t been seen since.

What inspired the post was a news story on how calves are immobilized for their entire lives in order to get the ‘best’ veal. It’s horrific. It’s not this one story, however, that drove me to fury…it’s been story after story after story. From the abuses at Seaworld from deadbeat hicks torturing cats and dogs. From gang rape in India to dead babies stored in garages, we are living in a cesspool of abuse and horror.

I mentioned Dworkin at the top of this post because she came to the podium at that conference and said, “There’s an emergency.” The emergency was that there were so many news stories about the brutalization of women that she could not remember the women’s names. It was so common place, that she was forgetting to be horrified. It was so every day that she was becoming indifferent to the fact that real people were suffering.

The interesting thing about my post is that, on Facebook, the people who were offended were more offended that I’d made a joke about Jesus (a person who, if he existed at all, has not lived for more than two thousand years) than about the current day atrocities to which I referred. Let me re-state that for effect: they’re more concerned their religious sensibilities have been hurt by a smart aleck post and less concerned with real suffering, real abuse and real atrocities that are happening NOW, TODAY, IN OUR COUNTRIES, IN OUR CITIES,  and ON OUR STREETS.

I don’t give a rat’s ass about your religious sensibilities. Wake up!

I don’t want to mislead you. I’m a lazy person who thinks about things more than I act. I’m the Queen of Tut Tut, Oh My and Isn’t that Awful. But even I’m being horrified out of my inertia. This is exactly what Dworkin was trying to do during that keynote. Wake us up. Remind us to be horrified. Remind us to act. Remind us of the choices within our power.

Finally, I’m horrified enough to act. Enough of this shit.

What’s your threshold?