On the South side of Tucson near the Samsonite factory you’ll see a woman who’s usually naked except for a long T-shirt. Her thighs are sunburnt, her skin is a white girl’s cautionary tale. Stick around and she’ll scream, “Give me something I can handle!” and shake a fist at the cloudless sky. When her cracked lips bleed she wipes the blood off on the back of her arm. You might think she’s out there alone, but she’s not. She stands with Todd Akin.
She’ll make a great mom some day!
***
I met her in Iowa. She wanted a baby.
She was married to a UPS guy, pink as a slab of ham, like a ham sandwich in a wheat-brown uniform. I’d see him out making deliveries. They couldn’t get pregnant—that sperm delivery didn’t hit its mark, I guess, right? She said they had hot sex twice a day, rocking the bed, the couch, the dining room table—a woman does what she has to. She used to like it. Now it was a job.
They put up an inspirational poster in the bathroom: …God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. –Corinthians 10:13
She could bear a baby!
God won’t give you anything you can’t handle. She picked up babies, handled babies until strangers in the mall said, “Give me back my baby now.”
One night her husband whispered, “Maybe God wants us to have hot sex, no kids. It’s His message.”
No, she thought. That was her UPS man letting his own little lazy swimmers off the hook.
She looked for God’s real message. After eight years of child-free fucking—up to three times a day now, sometimes four—one night she was home watching TV and there was Jan Brewer’s face, Governor of Arizona. Jan Brewer had just signed a bill legislating that all women are considered technically and legally pregnant pretty much all the time.
It was like a fertility festival that never ends! That land of pre-emptive global warming and water shortages sounded so welcoming. It was God calling, a better place to be.
She and her UPS guy moved South. He could work anywhere.
They were unpacking in a McMansion when God spoke again. This time his voice came through Todd Akin and the Internet.
“If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”
Legitimate rape? Nobody had taught her the gradations of rape.
She traced Akin’s logic in reverse. Was her body shutting things down? A chilling thought—what if she wasn’t having sex with her husband, but he was raping her? She had started to hate sex, the way it was so goal oriented. But rape?
It was her fault then, not his sperm at all!
The proof was in the outcome.
Her body had ways of shutting that whole thing down…
Damn.
Then it was harder to give in when her husband pulled her close, spread her legs.
But God spoke again, now through the radio and Mike Huckabee. Huckabee’s voice said, “…even from those horrible, horrible tragedies of rape, which are inexcusable and indefensible, life has come…” He talked about Ethel Waters, an old-time crooner whose mom was thirteen when she was raped. That rape gave birth to a singer! Waters herself was raped at thirteen. Like mother, like daughter. So not only rape, but pedophilia was apparently fine! Life has a way of working out.
Paul Ryan’s voice stepped in, saying rape was just another method of conception.
All methods of conception were equal. Good to know! Why was she bothering with fidelity? It wouldn’t be adultery to sleep around. It’d be another method of conception.
Babies from rape were okay, but only illegitimate rape. That was the tricky part. This was the new sex ed.
So she started boozing. Heavily. Then she took off her pants. Her shirt was like a dress, short enough to find trouble. She drove to the South side. She had ideas about poor people being rapists, and there was less money down there.
Huckabee’s God voice said, “This could be a Mount Carmel moment…you bring your gods. We’ll bring ours. We’ll see whose God answers the prayers and brings fire from heaven…”
Gods? So was Huckabee a polytheist? Whatever. She’d bring her boobs, her thighs, to find one teeny tiny gift from God in a cock package. Bring that God sperm on.
For good measure she bought pot from a Mexican teenager and smoked a bowl in the car. If she were high, even if she chickened out and shouted no!, it would still make the rape not rape-rape. It would be her fault. Totally. God would punish her with a baby. Perfect! She wanted that punishment like a swift, hard spanking.
She recited her prayer, “He will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear.”
So that’s where you’ll find her, working her day job as a pre-pregnant lady, half dressed in that T-shirt, wasted, loaded, waving her ass. Her shirt reads, “Go Mitt!” She’ll say she’s not political. She’s definitely not a feminist. Jeez! That’s like being a lesbian, almost.
But her shirt is sun-faded and cracked, and where it once said “Go Mitt!” now it reads more like “VoMit!”
***
Please submit your own funny writing to our Rumpus submission manager powered by Submittable. See first: our Funny Women Submission Guidelines.
To read other Funny Women pieces and interviews, see the archives.
8 responses
I know I should laugh at such a clever skewering of these nut jobs, but instead it just makes me angry and sad. Sigh. Well done, though.
Long time rumpus reader, first time I’ve ever commented. This is gold. Thanks.
So layered and insightful…interesting, artistic and entertaining all at once. I also learned about the words and opinions on rape of quasi religious-political figures. Thanks Monica.
Thank you so much for the kind comments–! I appreciate it. Love, M
Loved this piece. Especially all the competing “God-voices.” Although, you’d hope that God could find a spokesman with at least an eighth-grade grasp of female physiology.
I usually love the Rumpus’ posts, but I can’t believe people think this one is funny. The joke is at the expense of a person whose body and life choices bear the brunt of the state’s anti-woman, pro-rape policies. Instead of showing up Akin, Brewer, Romney et al, it imagines a woman whose life is already curbed and limited by their ideologies, and then piles shame and scorn on top of her. It’s sad, cruel, and bad satire.
I just read this today and was trying to articulate my thoughts and discomfort–and then Katherine Scott Nelson did it for me. Thank you.
First I would say to Katherine-lighten the tight a bit-this is clearly not to be taken literally! The purpose of art and the imagination is to dive into the realms of the irrational and the absurd…Sometimes when art is successful in that way that reaches us in unexpected and uncomfortable ways, or even incites a reactionary response like yours, yes-it can cause unrest and make people uncomfortable. I myself thought this piece transcended success and jumped up to brilliantly edgy, astute and witty!
I loved the descriptive images of this baby wanton woman! The cracked bloody lips, the boozing, the sun-faded GoVomit shirt! It would be a good exaggerated character study for a comedian to take on…since when was a little edgy and off color such a crime? Maybe I will use this character to build on-with your permission of course.
This piece was clearly written to make a point, to paint in socio-politico technicolor, to twist things back and forth, right and left, like taffy-to pull, tug, and illuminate the lunacy of these “quasi religious-political figures” as Leralee referred to them.
This piece was unique and creatively satirical and in the spirit of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” only in this case mocking the values of those who would control women’s bodies by showing the outcome of their logic….
Keep up the interesting and awesome work Monica! Keep that edge sharp and eyes wide open.
Click here to subscribe today and leave your comment.