X remembered the days with the goat faced man, when she got to know the duckling, a young, beautiful, strong, intelligent, and well brought up femme. The duckling stood at the top of her steps and firmly applied feminist rhetoric to correct the unfettered misogyny of the goat faced man.
This was one of the first memories X held where she could begin to trace the ways in which the feminist movement had become gatekept and wielded using inaccessible literacy expectations, akin to those of the patriarchy they made hollow claims to smash.
Both X and the goat faced man stood below, both considerably more marginalized and more in need of equity than the duckling, being belittled and lectured by someone barely out of their teens for what they did not know, and would not have been privileged enough to advocate for in such a way if they did know – that which they had never been positioned to be able to learn, although they had lived much more confronted with the cold realities of the subject matter. She raged about wage gaps while always well paid, she was exactly as educated and confident and taken care of as she’d been set up to be by the socioeconomic setting she’d been born into, but she bragged down to them like every bit had been hard won against the evils she read about online. It had silenced the goat faced man, but taught him nothing but to hide better, which naturally made him worse. This kind of condescending lecturing never teaches what it claims to mean to, the true purpose seems to lie in superiority politics. The duckling hadn’t truly earned her perspective, hadn’t lived it, she wrapped herself in fancy words and stolen stories to bolster a starving imposter ego. X began to delve into the logical spiral, where she began to see a kind of literacy expectations she was contrarily lording over the words and actions of the young duckling, who also clearly did not know better, but a dominating position made her seem more ripe for the ripping, perhaps. X herself was no stranger to unknowingly wielding false literacy, and struggled to integrate all the sameness in the differences.
Years later, when X was being corralled by human traffickers, the ducklings feminist rhetoric twisted to turn her away and treat her like the new virtue signal villain. The ducklings spoiled speculation on morality and ethics, learned from the safety of her light box in her Juliet, would not even condescend to the more marginalized women whom she claimed to advocate for when on the stage.
The first memory was about a tampon in Mexico. X’s father was red in the face demanding that the girls get out the door, and it invoked an ancient terror in her. X went to the bathroom to fearfully hurry her friend, the coyote. The coyote asked X to fetch her a tampon and X asked if she couldn’t just use toilet paper until they got to the restaurant. This request found the Coyote deeply disrespected, betrayed by a sister over a sacred matter. The coyote was used to being allowed to have expectations, X was used to being expected. The coyote was allowed to stand up for her standards, X was not. The coyote could expect a father to be reasonably patient, X could not. The coyote felt safe, X knew they were not. X hurried the coyote to protect them both from her fathers fury, the coyote would not hear it, would not believe it, would not consider that experience outside of her own, of a woman under intense paternal control, who lived in terror, isolated between contrary contentions. Later the coyote began to argue with X’s father and snapped at X for impeding on her free speech when she tried to pull her away. She didn’t think, didn’t care, that she was poking a bear that was more dangerous than the kind they had where she was from, and that it would be X who would be torn to shreds.
The times that theoretical feminists would use the rhetoric of ethics to serve their own fallacies, that would maintain many other isms, including sexism, in their misdirected charge against sexism (as it pertained to them), were as numerous and scathing as the occasions that she would be rationalized out of the true context of her humanity by basic misogynists. Each opposing side, in effect, seemed in action to be working towards the same ends of isolation, opposition, degradation, and confusion, although their languages claimed them to be diametrically opposed.
X had taken refuge from the gender based violence of her upbringing in the alt feminist movement for a time, until a mob formed against her and committed violence at least as horrific as the atrocities she had sought respite from in the first place. In fairness, they’d had their perceptions manipulated, but, then, who hasn’t? Nobody takes on false beliefs to such an extent without a little convincing. The dogma of each group presented threats relateable to the crusades. Their beliefs were their gods – they converted, complied, and condemned anyone who dared to contradict their dogma. Their religious like beliefs could be used, as religious beliefs typically are, to mobilize them in just about any manner.
X wandered the festival grounds, reminded that the more she grew into living truthfully, the less she belonged anywhere. Any group expected a certain level of unquestioning adherence, a fair amount of blind faith, which X could seldom afford to offer to people she could not know well enough to trust, for how her adherence and faith had been used against her so much more often than not. Wherever she went, viral vicious rumours of her villainy often followed, so that eyes upon her usually included at least a slight concentration of blind hate against her, which blasted her radar and stole her focus and memory for the threat it posed, as she struggled, crippled by chronic contradiction, to be able to socialize again, after a historical sentence of social torture. She knew if they could see what they were attacking, they mostly wouldn’t, but all they saw was what they thought, with apparently no shortage of outside influence.
Proverbial tomatoes flew, X made a better heel than she ever wanted to.
She recalled being at VGH where she was constantly harassed to take drugs by doctors and patients alike. Her refusal to partake in the illicit forms stimulated paranoia and antagonism in those who had been trying mightily to get her to do so and they began to hover outside her room, following her and watching her wherever she went, which, for a victim of surveillance, is akin to a rape victim being regularly groped. Eventually she dared to tell on them. She couldn’t risk her safety, sobriety and freedom for short term escapism, and they were relentless with their pressures to escape. Having had her medical records falsified, she was held on the most dangerous floor over the doctored reputation for things she hadn’t done, but unable to prove it, saying so only fit this produced profile althemore. So, when, she told the staff about the drugs and harassment she faced, and they failed to protect her, the death threats began. She was now a locked in target, and the more she tried to tell an authority about being followed everywhere she went and threatened daily, the more danger she faced from both sides, the staff presumed her more paranoid the more she complained of things she couldn’t prove, and would add it to “her” file, the patients who had been demonstrating the connections between drug and human trafficking, grew more determined to get revenge.
“I don’t fit anywhere. Upper class folk think I’m too crass and dirty, lower class folk think I think I’m better than them. I’m too educated for the uneducated, I’m too uneducated for the educated. I’m too radical for normal folk, I’m too accommodating for the radicals. I’m outcast and unprotected in a place where I’m forcibly confined for unsubstantiated claims of my protection. I told you guys about the drugs because I was scared and all you did was make it more dangerous, and if you’re not willing to look at that, which I can presume by now you are not, you’re actually just going to make things more dangerous for me for me telling you that I’m in danger, which makes my talking to you at all, let alone so openly, a contender for one of the craziest things about me. You’ve got the most dangerous person, who threatens, harasses and tries to fight me regularly for telling you guys he was regularly supplying drugs to the most vulnerable patients roomed right next to me, and you treat me like danger is just a personal feeling and pathology.”
“Wow. That sounds really hard.”, the doctor replied a memorized script, on cue without really hearing a word said.
“*Sigh* Yeah. Thanks. It’s hard. Can I go now?“
The leading threat called he a fucking rat every time he passed, which was countless times a day, and she was transported to where she’d first experienced this phenomenon, her childhood home, and her entire life after it. Her brothers forcing her to stand in that parking lot, repeatedly reading graffiti’d “rat” aloud as she wept at 5 years old for talking to a grown up who asked why she’d been left alone so long.
“No, I’m the fucking Rat King. I make all the little baby rats come out to play. Tk. Tk. Tk. Tk.”, that Rutland trash talk could always be goaded from her by anyone who pushed far enough, and it usually was the point that caught bystander attention, making her look like an equal participant, if not an instigator. The bullies tended to whisper, she tended respond out loud, she knew it bit her in the ass all too often, but she was wary not to take to their tactics, nor to fall completely silent.
She never wanted to be a Rat, but she could live with it better than being the kind of person who says and does nothing in the face of harm or injustice. Unfortunately, this is how this regime treats whistleblowers who lack group protection, and how it severs us from that group protection, by turning groups into intolerant cults that wear blinders with superior pride like religious articles. Her biggest failing, in this case, had been to hope that one drug pushing, terrorizing cult would have been better or safer than the others. She simply had to accept that she was the only chance at a safe person she could hope to find for her there, or anywhere, and unless she could find that in herself, would never be able to determine it in others. This relationship was not merely a matter of personal strength to develop, it had been stolen from her before she could ever get to know it, and had to be reclaimed in step with finding a way to access physical external safety, with seemingly insurmountable odds against it, she tried anyways, for a forced lack of anything else worth doing.
When your feminist friends join the witch hunt and call in armed forces to have you lobotomized for hysteria, while preaching against this as a history, you stop having feminist friends, even as you may be, in an esoteric sense, one. Her misogynistic friends seemed to have a better sense of how violent it is to do such a thing, somehow, in this sense, better feminists. Perhaps their lower rates of kool-aid consumption has something to do with it, but X could only go as far as speculation, for her lenses skewed to whoever was around for survivals sake, and having had to flee to Alberta, a hotbed of exploitation, she would be safe enough from the dangers of feminist rhetoric to start to miss it, indicative of a kind of trauma bond of its own, which seemed to be the only kinds of bonds she had left.
Solve for x 
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