?10 Changes From Demon Arms To The PATB Serial

Hey peeps,

I’m hanging out at the hospital. My brother ended up with appendicitis and we’re waiting to see if the antibiotics will be enough, or if he’ll need surgery. So, to avoid having to think of all those worrisome things, I thought I share with you all some of the reasons I went in the direction I did with The Paranormal Academy For Troubled Boys Serial.

Oh, if you missed the preorder for the second episode of PATB Serial, you can snag it here!

Before I get into the changes made in the serial, I picked up a book today that was, like, everything I’ve been missing in my reading lately. In the first chapter alone there was forced-to-fuck, straight to gay, noncon, and unseen alien/demonic entities controlling the action. First chapter. And yeah, there’s plot too. <3 So if you’re interested in a crazy, wild ride of a read—one that’s only $0.99—you should check out the Beast In The Nothing Room.

A lot of amazing books released this week. I’m putting them all here, cuz I’m being wordy today and I don’t want anyone to miss any of the deals.

MM Reads

MF and LGBTQ Reads

10 Things I deliberately changed in PATB (and didn’t)

So, I feel like I should start this off by explaining, a lot of these changes came about because of branding. When I started writing, I wasn’t thinking too much of long term. I was ill, life was happening, and writing was just about whatever felt fun in the moment. But that started to change once I saw my health improving, and I could look at my writing as a business, not just an escape. I had to make some big decisions of how I wanted to brand the Sadie Sins books so that whenever someone picked up one of my books, they would have a fair idea of what to expect about the contents.

If you’ve read episode #1 of the PATB Serial (which hit bestseller in LGBT fantasy last week!!! <3 ) and happened to have read Demon Arms before, you might already have an idea of what direction I’m going for with my branding. But if you haven’t, I’m happy to explain it a bit.

1. More Than Insta Love!

When I was writing the first sequel to Demon Arms, I got to do something I’d never done before. I got to write characters falling in love instead of crashing straight there. I wanted to do that in the Demon Arms story arc too, where it felt like there were reasons Wylie and Dorian end up together, emotional connections and stuff beyond plain old chemistry and a demanding inner dragon. I wanted a space they could grow together, not just magic into love. I write a lot of lust stories—and I love them, don’t get me wrong! XD But I wanted to write a real love story (well, ass real as magic and shifters can get, anyways.)

2. Turning Up The Heat

This was actually one of the choices I struggled with conceptually for a while with this series, partially with how tame I had written Demon Arms. Demon Arms had been confused for YA by a lot of readers, YA with some sex—it just didn’t make much sense, especially when these readers would then see what else I wrote and find a bunch of books that pushed limits they didn’t want pushed. This choice was where the branding direction came in, and I’m sure it is both controversial and loved depending on each reader’s preference.

Here’s the deal, I didn’t want to have to use a new pen name for this series, I didn’t want to build something from scratch, and more importantly, I didn’t want to find myself stuck writing a series I didn’t enjoy writing. So I went in and turned the heat up. For the peeps leaving reviews such as ‘rape and more rape’ yes, that was absolutely by design. Now you know; welcome to a Sadie Sins’s book. For anyone who picks up episode #1 of PATB Serial and enjoys it, they can be happy to discover that my other books contain adult subjects, much of it dark and sexual explicit, and they will not be freaked out by that. For those who can’t handle this first episode, I don’t have to worry about them hating on my other books.

So you’re now all informed. There will be no ‘sweet’ Demon Arms sequels free of kinky sex and aggressive personalities. I’m planning threesomes, sexual slavery, dubcon, scenes of my delicious killer Theo doing what he does best, dark moments, caretakers crossing boundaries with patients, and just all around fun. There’s no point having a power like allure and not using it like a weapon or weakness. This is a world of dark, manipulative magics gained through hunting down and killing shifters; it’s not supposed to be a civilized reflection of reality.

I want a mature audience. I’m not talking like in age (although, to be real, I’ve met more than a few awesome-sauce 80 year old fans.) I’m talking a more mature mentality when it comes to erotic sex, in not thinking fiction is real, in allowing a book to be a book and not demanding it be anything else. I want to have some fucking fun, and I don’t need peeps crying rape about words on a screen. (Go ahead, try to rape words. See how they respond when you shove a dick into text. If pain is felt, it’s not from the damn words.)

This is a tame series, but it’s still a Sadie Sins book. I’m tired of being told erotic sex can’t ever meet amazing plot and strong characterization. I’m tired of people trying to insist that sex ruins the validity and value of a story, and that stories with sex have to be hidden away. I do not subscribe to that kind of discriminatory thinking about my fiction, and I want to draw in readers who don’t either.

3. Show, Not Tell

I started this when I wrote Hellcat, this hint of craft that’s been growing after I spent a few years writing. I has started looking at scripts, started studying movies and tv series and musing on how I could improve the things my writing was lacking. I needed to create a more concrete world. My characters were all in their heads, narrating the events instead of IN the events. I wanted to show the world, but more importantly, show how the characters impacted their environment. What did a gesture do to the scene—a burst of magic, a flare of anger, anxiety? If it were a movie, how would it look, and how would the physical world change in response to the character’s action? I felt the best way to get the characters out of their heads was to put them in the scene.

Now, when Wylie’s hands are shaking because he’s nervous, he tears through a shelf and a bundle of cash so we can SEE he’s nervous. We don’t narrate that men are hollering at Theodore for base, sexual favors but have them shout thinks like “suck my dick, sexy!” In my first draft of Hellcat, I had tried to explain that Sean was a shitty friend to TJ, only to realize it would be way easier to show it by having him jerk off while talking to him on the phone. It that doesn’t say total shit friend, what does, right?

There are some consequences to showing instead of telling. My very first draft of Demon Arms was in first person, and it had a strong narrative voice as a result that shined through even when I changed it to third person for the final draft of the book. Showing a scene instead of letting Wylie tell it stripped a lot of the personality away from his inner voice. I tried to preserve it a bit, ensure that his thoughts or words were heard, but it absolutely changed things. Wylie’s not just telling a story now but is in one, reacting to what’s happening, and at the same time, the environment reacting to him.

I still struggle with it. It’s a new skill I’m learning, not quite a natural habit, but it makes me see my writing in a brand new way, I love that. I love the challenge. I can’t imagine ever settling for the same old thing as a creative. Without the promise of something new to learn, it just gets boring after a while.

4. Beast Voices

This was a last minute decision, but it made this story in a lot of ways. I was doing the final draft and I kept forgetting the motivation of a very important character Wylie was dealing with: his dragon. There’s this voice inside of him that’s been quiet for so long, so quiet that he confused it with his own for the last 10 years. Yet here he is, mid heist, letting his demon arms out for the longest time ever, and he’s starting to realize he’s not that alone in his head. That the shit he thought was annoying about his arms is actually quite deliberate because the beast inside him is a different being who wants different things—for starters, blood.

Wylie was not an ‘out-of-control’ paranormal like the other patients in Demon Arms, he was just a wannabe thug with a bad past that he used to excuse his shitty behavior. But as our intro into the series, I wanted to show what out of control really meant—how a shifter could lose control because they’re battling with a completely different personality inside them. I think Theodore becomes a beautiful example for this. We don’t really know why he’s working for the Academy in this intro, why he is so interested in ensuring the patients are safe, but we know in this first book that he is damn well familiar with what it’s like to be out of control when it comes to his dragon. For the most part, they seem in sync, doing what needs to be done, the goals the same… until the dragon asserts a demand of the moment, and you can see the cascade of compromises Theodore must make to get along with the beast.

Would these compromises be required when things are much calmer, when stress isn’t crashing down around Theodore? Probably not. We get to see the beasts as a stress response, where the more difficult something presses on Theodore psychologically, the more his beast rebels and wants to do things his way. It’s why Wylie’s dragon showed up in that gang initiation—stress. Stress kills, even. XD We don’t see Theodore go out of control, but we do see what happens when his beast is in control, tearing through skinners and full of a rage that comes from being hunted for a lifetime and seeing so many die.

I found that in Demon Arms, the conflict was rather nonexistent or easily diffused when it came to the patients. It wasn’t realistic, and I realized I needed those beast voices—those impulsive, animalistic reactions—to keep tensions up in the more peaceful parts of the story. Otherwise, it’s boring.

5. A Grown Up Perspective

I really wanted some adults to get a pov this time around. Theodore and Michael get love story arcs later in the series that I wanted to easily transition into by giving them stronger parts now. I wanted to head hop, I’ll be real. XD I like head hopping, and apparently I did it well this time cuz no complaints were made (that I saw.) I want readers to meet the characters and care, and I could only do that if they got to really see and feel what it was like to be in their shoes.

But also, Theo and Michael are the first wave of Academy goers—the ones still alive—and they’ve seen up close the world and danger that they’re protecting their paranormal patients from. They’re a bridge in a lot of ways, providing a more worldly view. They don’t get to hide from the world but are forced to navigate it as a form of protection. They understand when direct action is needed and how sometimes good and bad are completely blurred when fighting to live. That those lines are naturally blurred when it comes to killing, and trying to pretend they aren’t is idealistic nonsense that neither of them subscribe to.

Killing to survive is not a heroic act. Murder at all is not some white shining knight BS. Death should not be prettied up or sanitized—to kill a person, there is blood, pain, a line crossed every time. This is not a simple ‘bad guys are evil and therefore they deserve to die’ type of series. That’s 2-Dimensional and unrealistic. Everyone who dies is a character, and I want my characters to be fleshed out, felt, possibly even mourned.

I am not here to write a manual of how to be a good person—the teens in this book; that goal might be important to a lot of them. It’s usually a theme for younger people as they strive to find a place in the world. But Michael and Theodore have experienced a level of life—of war and slaughter and systematic bigotry—that makes them not care about morality the same way. They care about survival; they care about a life well lived; they care about doing what needs to be done with ruthless precision, sometimes preemptively, so that they can wake up and face themselves in the mirror each day because their patients weren’t slaughtered. For every confused question from the teens of if it’s right to do bad to survive, our caretaker adults already have an answer and it’s ‘it doesn’t matter. Just survive.’

6. Not Always Agreeing With The Characters

This was a risk, but at the same time I find the stories I love the most are of complex characters we don’t necessarily like all the time. I don’t think good characters are necessarily supposed to be people that would be your best friend. I think it’s a bit like the funny prankster in a story; that guy is usually a sarcastic, total asshole. People ignore it because they laugh, but the reality is you don’t want to live with Homer Simpson, or Peter Griffin, or with those douche-bags from the big bang nerd show. People in sitcoms are fucking terrible, and I don’t think their behavior should really be a reflection of how people should treat each other. But that doesn’t mean they’re not entertaining.

So, this is not a sitcom. These are people trying to do the right thing, but in situations where right is a compromise to the dark stuff happening around them. It’s the compromise of ‘a little bit better than worst.’ First time around, everyone was best friends in the Academy, except for Leo. Leo is won over pretty easily, and you see this a lot in stories, especially romance troops. It’s like this equalizing of conflict and personalities to get along, just because the characters are all in the same scenes. They lose their independence, they lose their motivation, and they become tools for the author who is failing to notice that these characters are no longer there own personalities.

In that regard, I’m trying to be better this time around (but it is tough.) I’m not saying on making them enemies for the sake of conflict – although there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. It’s more, trying to allow the characters to be true to themselves while not being caught up by my own personal need to make them agreeable to get the plot going. Sometimes characters kick and scream, fighting against the plot, and those are usually the best stories. These big personalities, these alphas, sorcerers, just inner beasts combined with hormonal teens and 20 somethings should not result in everyone getting along. That shouldn’t be automatic; that should be what a lot of the work in the character development is for, teaching them to get along.

7. Villains

I realized we needed villains. Wylie’s gangsters weren’t going to be enough. How could I show that this was a world full of shifter hunters, that shifters were actually in danger, and let it be felt, not just heard in passing? Well, now the police station isn’t full of indifferent professionals who were just trying their best, but some are clearly bigoted against paranormals like Wylie, hating him just because they know at some point he can turn into something they can’t. We can see the bigotry is deep, where even the paramedics, a company created to help people, would put the well-being of others and their own profit aside to ensure their unreasonable hatred makes their decisions.

This is why villains, shifter hunters and skinners, were needed from the very beginning. We need to see what it means to hunt a shifter, what that power looks like that they’re trying to obtain, the type of money that went into it—that armored bus wasn’t cheap—and we got to see that in things like the chameleon coat, and some of the abilities the skinners use against Theodore as they battle. We get to see the hatred, the question of what is really human in the sorcerer who takes over George Snyder’s appearance. Here’s a sorcerer passing as everyone else around him, but his hatred runs far deeper than any strangeness that would be in a shifter hiding in human flesh.

These themes were already there in the first book, but they were just themes, they weren’t really realized in the environment. I think this time around you get to feel the weight of these concepts, see how the world is shaped by them. I’m actually rather excited about it, to be honest. Characters grow the best when in conflict, and stories get more interesting as a result.

8. Increased Word Count and Detail

Okay, this was not particularly planned. Actually, I fought this a lot until I realized just WHY my writing style had changed so drastically. When I realized what was happening, I gave into it. I don’t subscribe to a ‘right’ kind of writing. I think we all have different styles and that’s perfectly fine. But I do know as a content creator, some level of consistency in style is helpful, if not expected, and that was my concern in all this.

Here’s the reality: my brain changed. I had no say in the matter. It started happening once I got my allergies under control. I think the first signs of it were when I was writing Hellcat in the beginning of 2018. That book—believe it or not—was supposed to be a short story. Instead it became a novel over 100,000 words long. I noticed something was happening in my head, how I looked at words, how I started to *see* a scene and not just float around in the dark. Shortly after publishing Hellcat, I was hit with mold that took over my bedroom and living room, and the neurotoxins had me suffering with multiple chemical sensitivity for months. During this really shitty time, my brain got messed up. It’s hard to be an observer to your mind when your brain is the one struggling, but my functionality in my life was impaired. Eventually, after taking a ton of supplements to regrow neurons, support and protect my brain, supplement my flat lined dopamine, remove the neurotoxins, heal the damage, lower the inflammation and stop the immune response, I returned to ‘normal.’ Except normal had changed.

You can see the change when during episode 11 of Demon Bonded in July, 2018. What averaged as 15,000 word episodes became 35,000 just for a handful of scenes, and I was completely unable to stop it. My brain had decided on a new level of ‘done,’ and it wasn’t where the old line used to be.

Have you ever looked at the way someone cleans a kitchen counter top—or a room, or maybe it’s their car, etc—and it’s different from the way you clean? We all have different levels of done. Some people need to wash that counter down, make sure every crumb and speck it swept away, clearing off the surface completely just to neatly arrange things back once it’s all clean: that’s their done. Someone else, they pick up the obviously dirty dishes piled there, toss them in the sink for washing later, and flick a few crumbs away: that’s their done. Another person might glance at the mess on the counter top and decide to go watch tv: that’s their done. We’re all different, yet we still have a line that’s called done. My done line moved, and it feels in a drastic way, much more toward the cleaning every fucking aspect of the counter to then neatly arrange the stuff back on the top. And no, this style is not always relatable to people who wait a week or month to get to cleaning their counter top.

When I started this rewrite, I noticed that a scene suddenly took 3 times the amount of words to write on average. It required more words to describe a scene, to linger and show an action instead of have the character think something unattached to the physical world of the scene. The style was more immersive, more in-depth, more action oriented. And to be real, when I saw this drastic change, I worried. A lot. I had attracted a fan base with my previous style. 100%. And I know the writing game—popular fiction is rarely about wordage or sophisticated vocabulary. And erotica? Yeah, no. Just no. This could absolutely destroy me as a writer if my fanbase hated it. But… my brain couldn’t write any other way.

I had no choice in this. Seriously, it’s not like I’m looking to pad word count, or scam people by making a book so long it needs to be broken into pieces, or anything like that. It broke me for a while— I could see the severe problems with such a big writing style change after years of having put out a different style. It could be career breaking, or at least fan breaking—I don’t even like to read long books, but here I am, everything I write becoming long as fuck! My brain changed and there was nothing I could do about it.

So… I chose to embrace it instead of trying to slice up this new style. I had spent far too long battling with myself, battling my insecurities, and making compromises where I was never allowed to just exist as I am. I accepted there was no going back and forged forward instead. The new style came naturally, meaning I would write faster this way, in flow, as long as I didn’t battle myself. If I set the style in the first book, those who liked it would know the entire series had the same style instead of getting a bad surprise next book. And it is a style thing—style doesn’t mean anything beyond a preference of getting words on a page. I can’t decide what readers like; I can only write to the best of my ability and put my work out there.

I am absolutely certain that I have alienated previous readers with this style, and there is very little I can do about it but keep writing. I’m sorry if you were used to how I wrote before; I really am. I can just hope my brain has settled and sticks with one style—whatever it might be—so fans won’t have to go through such a drastic change again.

9. Serial Instead of Novels

This story was too complex in plot and far too much planned in the future to be able to squish it all into a novel format. Demon Arms was planned as a love story a book, and it just wasn’t going to work. I started Fox and Vincent’s story arc in the sequel and they just couldn’t fit some romance mold. So instead of cutting the story down to fit a norm, I decided to go wild and plan this as a long serial. Each episode plans to be around 80,000 words, give or take.

10. Demon Arms Was Unscathed

I think the greatest reason I was able to break out of the old style was by not touching Demon Arms. This wasn’t a rewrite that was ‘fixing’ the original. I didn’t want to replace it, didn’t want to take it away from the fans. This was probably the final deciding factor in why I pushed to create it as a serial instead of novels; I needed to change the format completely to push away from it getting caught up in the old book.

I was a younger author when I wrote Demon Arms, still swayed by popular demands, still trying to figure out what my style was, what my brand was. I had to think hard about if I wanted to be isolated on Amazon and the romance genre for being dark—dark romance was so damn small, and it was hard to know if it would be allowed to grow when everyone was screaming about requiring HEAs for a book to be a ‘real’ romance, etc. I didn’t want to erase the first book even though I had grown up. When I set out to write the PATB Serial, I knew who I was, and I knew who Sadie Sins was, and I didn’t need to erase that journey.

Sadie Sins does not write young adult. Her endings are happy but there are always compromises, always dark paths to get there, and morality is not the main key. Cleverness, perseverance, character connections; that’s how happy endings are reached. Love in the darkest of moments fuel these characters to never give up, to be their best versions, even if they’re still imperfect and held back by their unique limits. It’s easy to love a diamond for its shine, but far more valuable to love it for its flaws.

?The New Book Is Live! (alive?!!!?)

Hey babes,

All right, it’s official. The first episode of the paranormal Academy for troubled boys is live! Preorder peeps, it should have been delivered to your kindles. For KU readers and those showing up late (well, on time, really >_>) you can go and read it now! Get it, get it, get it!!! <3

Once you’re done reading, I would totally love it if you reviewed. I’m looking for as much feedback as I can get on my new writing style… I’m not nervous at all, totally. @_@

Okay, I’m totally nervous =_=

Why is everything a trial by fire thing with me?!!! Seriously, ugh. I’m so tired of being a crazy person.

So, I didn’t actually realize how nervous I would be to release a new book after all this time. I don’t think it’s even about releasing a new book, if I’m really honest about it all. I think a part of me is afraid to see myself healthy, and even more terrified to see myself successful in the things I do every day. I have been avoiding emails—as freaking wonderful as everyone has been, it’s only triggered this crazy thing in my head all the more. I’ve been very focused on work, and when not that, quietly freaking out in the little corner of my life.

I am very good at facing that which doesn’t allow me to run away. A body that breaks down, suddenly bedbound, random weird shit happening like multiple chemical sensitivity, feeling like my brain is burning, the Parkinson’s. I took those things on because if I didn’t, it felt like death. But for some reason, moving towards being a different person through the success of my writing… also feels like death for me. >_> Yeah. *sigh* I think my brain is wired for PTSD at this point, and as such, I have a responsibility to deal with all these weird psychosis head-on.

I guess fear of success is not uncommon for those who have experienced trauma. I was reading about it all last night while trying not to have a freak out as I saw my preorders hit. This is why I didn’t want to advertise and just focus on writing the next book. I didn’t want to face the things I needed to do to make this book sell and therefore change my life. I can see it now – self-awareness is such a bitch – and yeah, I’m going to have to figure out something. Therapist, very likely. I refuse to be trapped in my life over my own damn brain.

I’m wired for these types of problems. If you notice the new disclaimer in this current book, my ‘sensitivity disclaimer’, it might seem quirky, or even insensitive depending on who’s reading it. But the reality is, that’s something I need to remind myself. Not just with books, but with also movies, art, stories people share about their lives about things not happening that moments. I talk about this particular problem a lot, because it was once how my brain saw things 24-7. I’m not just reminding and reaffirming with people, but also reaffirming my own mind the difference between fantasy and reality. Trauma wired my brain in a messed up way, so when I have a narrative, a story about myself that I share to the world, I don’t always get to know that it’s a narrative, a fiction—that I am more than a bunch of words on a page or the thoughts in my head. It’s important that I remember—that we all remember—that we can be more than how we perceive ourselves to be in a moment of depression or low self-esteem.

I know, this is some heavy shit to be talking about when it should be all happy the new book is out kind of stuff. I have this difficult habit of being far too real. Go read, enjoy, and please review. Reviews are needed for that success aspect of the book, but it also lets me know if people want to see more of something. Oh, and don’t miss out on the books below!

I hope you’re all having a wonderful weekend, and I’ll be hitting you up fairly soon. The second episode is already on preorder and will be released on Valentine’s Day. Yeah I went as cheesy as possible with that, because it’s when we introduce Dorian. XD It’s always good to do Valentine’s Day right with sparking sorcerers and hissing dragon shifters. 😉

Happy reading!

Books worth snagging <3

MM Freebies, KU, and new releases

?Crazy Adorableness?

Hey babes,

So, for starters I saw Brea has her latest book out, and it looks super fucking adorable—crazy adorable! <3 So I’m smacking it at the top here for anyone who needs a sweet pick me up this weekend.

His Bewildered Mate by Brea Alepoú

True mates are found in the most unlikely of places.

Rhy, a weretiger with a heart so big, that when an elderly woman comes in looking for her lost cat, Mr. Fluffkins, Rhy knew he had to help. He had no way of knowing that it would lead him to his true mate.

Dillan (Mr. Fluffkins), has lived his whole life wishing he was more than just a cat. He never felt right walking around on four paws. He tried to be a normal cat; tried to talk to other animals but it wasn’t possible. They couldn’t think in full sentences or communicate. It was more of feeling they had then what they thought. He watched television, so he could studying humans and what they did. He wanted to interact like humans. His owners showed one another so much love and were always doing something together. Dillan ached to have what they have.

Love, loss, and tender moments. A dream to have the one person that completes you.

Warning** Slow burn. This book is shifter Mpreg pregnancy is mentioned in this book. this is the first book of the series. The series will need to be read in order, as new couples will be introduced but old one’s stories will continue. They will be intertwined. This is a HEA.

What’s up?

I have spent the last 2 weeks really chill. Very calm. Even got a tooth infection last week, but I’m doing really well. Just calm, chill, trying to get used to realizing my body has been tense as fuck forever. I put some blue fairy lights up in the porch I’ve been using as a writing room, and it’s like hanging out in sapphire while listening to some great, calming music. I’m obsessed with Metric at the moment, the album “Grow up and Blow Away” usually playing in the background.

I haven’t had a single Parkinson’s symptom since I started this calm down experiment. When I notice my stress levels rising, or that I’m pushing myself too hard, I stop, I relax, I unwind the rock my stomach has turned into, and I’m good.

Amazingly enough, because of this, I’ve stopped thinking of myself as sick. I haven’t been thinking in terms of I have Parkinson’s or mold toxicity or even PTSD. I’ve just been thinking, oh, that feels stressful on my body. Let’s not have all that stress. It’s doing good things for how I think about myself, where I’m not labeling myself with these pretty big, unpleasant illnesses 24-7, and I’m not narrating giant hoops I need to jump through to be allowed to feel okay. It’s just about not stressing.

Learning to write calmly

I updated a couple of fanfics on the website the last two weeks. I also added these really quick to read dates so you can see the last time a story was updated at a glance. What else… I’ve had a few breakthroughs on the writing front. Now that I could see that I was putting so much pressure on my writing, I was able to kind of side step some of that pressure. But only some.

Last night I had a mini epiphany about a big issue with my creativity. I had been digging up these outlines I have of stories I want to make—I love these stories—but I feel so overwhelmed every time I look at them. I don’t know if you peeps remember what happened to me a little while back. Instafreebie had decided to feature Blackthorne and I had a mini freak out. The book wasn’t well put together. In the matter of a week, I made a new cover, and started editing the 100,000 word book, rewriting large chunks of it. And I was killing myself—I was still sick, and here I was breaking myself over something stupid as fuck. And once it was pointed out to me, I stopped. I let it go… and I haven’t looked at editing Blackthorne since.

It was all or nothing.

I have this habit where everything I do is climbing a mountain. It was why I stopped digital painting. I know what it takes to get to the end of a polished, highly realistic painting. I know the steps, I know the hours on hours put in, and I know I can get to that ending and have an amazing product. But I don’t want to do the work because, unlike normal people who can pace themselves and do other things while they create, I’m a fucking psycho who wants to sprint to the finish line right at the beginning of a marathon. I don’t know how to balance my creative endeavors. It’s why they always seemed so rushed—I was rushing to get everything down before I became too exhausted to keep the pace.

I have no idea how to be anything else, partially because this habit was created out of me being stuck in PTSD mode. My body cannot survive that type of creative process. Plain and simple. But my psyche cannot survive a world without creativity either. So I need to figure out how to flow, how to pace myself, how to have fun, how to stop and be able to start up later after doing something else. I have to stop trying to be a writing machine—I’m too organic to be any good at it. XD

Right now, when I look at all the stories I want to write, all I’m seeing are mountains because that’s what I turn each project into. I’m hoping if I can see that each project is just a little bit of calm time spent enjoying myself—you know, a nice walk instead of an exhausting climb—I’ll start looking at creating differently.

I guess we’ll see how it goes… The last few weeks have been amazing. I didn’t even think I could get this far in just relaxing. I feel like a different person, someone I didn’t even know was here, allowed to exist. I thought it was normal to feel super alert all the time. Now, I can see it was just PTSD that I thought was normal. Life the last few weeks has been feeling a bit like being drugged and happy (without the drugs) because I can be alert in the world, in my life, without being tense at the same time. I just never knew it was a possibility until now.

Hope you’re all doing well! ^.^

?Women Matter. Babies Matter. Stop Killing Us.?

Hey babes,

I’ve been reeling a bit. Writing and cleaning up Episode #1 of the PATB Serial. Some random, insignificant health stuff, but nothing worth talking about. There have been a lot of things I just don’t feel like talking about lately. I don’t like drama, I don’t like spreading needless pain. I don’t like having to hear the news and being pissed off and then making others pissed off. But fuck it. Let’s call this cathartic because I gotta talk about this shit.

I want to warn in advance… I’m probably going to say some offensive shit. It may seem like I hate men. I don’t, but I am angry. When you’re trapped in a system where you’re on the side being oppressed, it’s very hard not to yell about the side that’s not being oppressed the same way, the side that appears to have the power to change things if they would only try. I understand all too well that men are allies—I have amazing men, women, and non-binary individuals in my life who are freaking amazing and understand all too well the struggle we are facing.

But I also know not all men are allies. That there are individuals in this fucked up system who are more than happy to crush anyone with a uterus down, and some of those individuals have a uterus too. My anger is directed toward these individuals, but I get it. I cannot speak properly when I’m pissed off. I accept now I will say something wrong, many things, and I apologize to those who think I’m intentionally being insensitive. I am too sensitive right now, I care too much, and I’m being real to that.

I’m going to add some self care links and how to help links at the bottom of this. Check it if you’re not dealing well with the stress or are looking for ways to be proactive during this really shitty time. I feel shitty and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

As for those who are tired of hearing women rant about equal rights because they think everything is ‘perfectly fine:’ too fucking bad. Suck it up, buttercup.

Ready for a long rant?

Anti-women bills

If you haven’t read the details, here’s an article by Vox. (ref #AntiAbortionBillsExplained) It was written the 10th and since then, Alabama’s bill has passed with no exceptions for rape or incest. (ref #UpdatesOnReproductiveRights)

Anti abortion laws are sweeping the US state to state in a planned attack to overturn Roe v. Wade and take away a woman’s right to her body. I knew it was going to happen. We all fucking knew. If you were a women in the US when we watched an alleged serial sexual assaulter get elected into the Supreme Court, you knew this was the next war. And hey, the extreme, religious right knew too and didn’t disappoint.

I mean, if they were coming after our GUNS it would be a different story, right? Every ‘red blooded American’ would be screaming about their constitutional rights being stolen away. We have a right to GUNS! But a women’s constitutional right to own her own body? Crickets. Gas lighting. Bullshit pseudo science. We laugh at flat-earthers being out of touch with reality, but apparently lawmakers still can’t figure out how the hell a uterus works. No, we force our women to leave their jobs and have their bodies change in alarming, dangerous ways (ref #PregnancyChanges) so that they’re punished for having a dick in them. Not only can a man force a dick in a woman, but then she has to be forced to have her entire life and body change because of these bullshit laws.

So here we are with laws in place to imprison a doctor for 99 years if caught giving an abortion. Where the only way you’re allowed to have an abortion is if you don’t know you’re pregnant. Some laws are set to conception as a fetus being ‘alive’ and having a ‘right to live’ over a woman’s right to chose. And the six week mark of a heartbeat (of which it is not an actual heartbeat because a heart has not developed — come on you stupid fucks, open a biology book) is measured not by conception, but through a woman’s last period, so even there, no fairness.

For those who don’t understand basic female anatomy (ref #Ovulation), a woman must be ovulating to become pregnant. Ovulation happens before menstruation, 14 days, approx., meaning if you menstruate after sex, you have no possibility of being pregnant. (Some women experience spotting or a lighter period when first pregnant, meaning they may not even realize they’re pregnant till far later.) But for the majority of women, if she becomes pregnant on the day of ovulation (an egg is only viable 12-24 hours after it leaves the ovary, so the day,) that means she won’t have a period following. She will be measured by her previous period, which was 2 weeks before ovulation and conception. Sometimes women are late on their periods, or lose track of time (cuz hey, busy,) meaning the menstrual cycle she missed is already 4 weeks after her previous cycle. This gives her two weeks to realize she may be pregnant and decide on an abortion before the heartbeat law says she’s out of time.

I don’t know about you, but that’s a pretty short timeline to figure out if you want to have a financial, emotional, physical, and social burden that will last for the next 18 years of your life, or if you want to get an expensive abortion (@$350 – $950 for a first trimester abortion) just because a condom may have been faulty. I had to wait 4 months just to get enough money together to pay for car repairs. That is a lot of pressure on an already stressful situation, especially if you’re not financially stable.

Not a lot of banks giving out loans for abortions. Note: If you need funding in the US for an abortion, check here. It was written in 2016, so a possibly outdated. (ref #AbortionFundingByState)

Forcing a serious decision like starting a family into a matter of days is irresponsible for all parties involved. The US has the highest infant and maternal mortality rate of any developed country. Mothers and born babies need help now, but these anti-abortion bills do nothing to address that. Because women don’t matter to pro-lifers. Babies don’t matter to pro-lifers. They don’t care about human lives. They just care about stealing control of a woman’s body while repeating the same old drone bullshit of ‘right to life.’ (ref #JudgeRulesGasLighting) Actions and where they send their money speak truth, and the ProLife movement has shown they’re only about forcing birth.

The blunt reality of the world is not all babies are wanted. Not all humans are suitable parents. Not all women consent to being impregnated. Nothing is sacred, not even life, and overpopulation during an environmental crisis is a shit show. There is no value to preventing abortion, only economic harm and the dehumanization of women into baby makers. So let’s jump into the consequences and realities.

How are women killed from criminalizing abortions?

Illegal Abortions

Women seek unsafe abortions which can lead to their death. In parts of the world where abortion is illegal, botched abortions still cause about 8 to 11 percent of all maternal deaths, or about 30,000 each year. (ref #IllegalAbortionDeaths)

No Medical Help

Women avoid doctors while they’re pregnant, putting themselves in jeopardy if the pregnancy goes wrong. When you fear being forced to follow through with pregnancy or being imprisoned over a miscarriage, you don’t tell anyone you’re pregnant. Plain and simple logic. Doctors are not an ally, but an informant for the government in such a situation.

In a life and death situation where a woman might be mid miscarriage, perhaps through a fall she had no control over, she won’t seek help because she won’t want to go to jail for a miscarriage. And yes, women have gone to jail in the US for miscarriage. (ref #AntiAbortionJailed)

Women may refuse to seek medical help at all if they have received an abortion in the past or miscarried for the same reason. One of the biggest problems in states that restrict abortion is how they also restrict education and support of women’s health. Without knowledge of what a doctor can tell when examining women, or how much you’re allowed to let them examine you, an uniformed woman will avoid it all to protect herself.

Some are only taught about abstinence and have little idea about their bodies and how they work, how to have sex safely, and how to not get pregnant when having sex. (ref #TeenEducationDrop) Few women even know that they don’t pee out of their vaginas! (ref #ThreeHoles) They are kept ignorant of their own bodies, safety, of STIs which they can spread blindly, and of their power to not be pregnant.

When a doctor is the authority of if you’re going to go to jail, you don’t seek medical help, which is exactly what these bills will result in. (ref #PoliticsAndMiscarriage)

Silencing Victims

Let’s not forget the silence around sexual abuse in families.

There are teenage girls being raped by members of their family, by adults, by men in positions of power over them be it financially or materially. These young girls are already at risk of being harmed or killed by their assailant. Now they have to fear being prosecuted if they seek help if they become pregnant, have had a miscarriage in the past, or are in the process of having a miscarriage because they were harmed while pregnant.

What if in being examined for sexual assault, they’re discovered to have miscarried in the past? No police reports would have been filed, and it’s unlikely any teen would dare name her assailant if it’s a family member and, bluntly, even less likely she would be believed because no one believes women when it comes to sexual assault.

These are at risk women who haven’t even gained enough self awareness to understand their situation, now learning that there are laws in place to help keep them silent about the abuse they’re enduring. After her right to say no is stolen from her, her freedom can be too by being imprisoned for feticide for not seeking proper treatment when pregnant. Because, yes, when they suspect a woman lost a fetus from neglect, they have thrown her in prison in the US. (ref #Feticide) (ref #SuicideInPregnancy) This puts these women in a particularly dangerous situations where suicide is the only option left. (ref #SuicideWithoutAbortion)

How are babies killed from criminalizing abortions?

High Infant Mortality

States with the worst anti-abortion laws have the worst infant mortality rates. (ref #InfantMortality)

So for clarification, we’re talking about babies, not fetuses. What is a baby? For starters, it’s born. Babies cannot exist in the uterus (unless one crawls back in. O_O)
(ref #Infant) Newborn infants are the youngest form of life outside of the womb, and if not for a mammalian mother or replacement, that infant will die from lack of nourishment or protection. Without a mother, a newborn will die without intervention.

Without a mother, a fetus will die. It cannot sustain itself.
(ref #Fetus) Nonviable fetuses cannot live outside the womb, and few viable fetuses are ever intentionally aborted unless to save a mother’s life. (ref #AbortionMyths) Viable fetuses who can survive out of the womb can be as young as 24 weeks, but even then, their survival rate is low even with medical intervention. They cannot seek food, can’t protect themselves; they need intervention to live. Many premature births lead to long term health problems for the resulting baby if they manage to survive. (ref #FetalViability)

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (ref #SIDS) is when an infant suddenly dies without explanation, but not necessarily without natural cause. Not all born infants will pass this stage. We have amazing medical technology, but some life just cannot sustain itself. Not all life lives.

Infanticide

“Infanticide has been practiced on every continent and by people on every level of cultural complexity, from hunter gatherers to high civilizations, including our own ancestors. Rather than being an exception, then, it has been the rule.” (ref #Infanticide)

Women who don’t want to be mothers, and don’t have access to contraceptives or abortions, abandon their newborns. Men who don’t want to be fathers, or family members who don’t want the women to be a mother, may take her baby away and abandon it to prevent social and financial strain. Instead of aborting a fetus, a newborn is left to die.

Child Abandonment

65% of abandoned children (who are recovered) are newborns. (ref #AbandonedKids) We have no idea how many newborns are actually abandoned in the US. The statistics is no better once we started the Safe Haven law because reporting numbers can lead to fear of legislative interference. (ref #AbandonedNewborns)

No one knows how many abandoned babies are unaccounted for. And to put it bluntly, when it’s a crime to have a miscarriage, women are going to stop reporting they’re pregnant at all. They’re going to stop going to doctors to seek help. They’re not going to be abandoning their babies in places where anyone could find out they were pregnant in the first place. Those babies won’t end up in a Safe Haven; they’ll be buried to prevent a woman from having to go to jail.

Babies will not be saved when women are forced to stay pregnant. They will be erased. (ref #ChildAbandonment)

The Cost To Care

Not all families can afford children.

16 million kids in the US are hungry. (ref #ChildHunger) 18 million kids live in single parent households. (ref #SingleParent) This suggests a financial instability that could be obtained with two parents— but not a judgment of if a single parent can raise a kid, just to be clear. Some can and they kick ass at it. Some can’t because of economic and financial realities that can lead to neglect.

Child neglect is a serious problem, one that could be easily avoided if women weren’t forced to have children they don’t want or can’t afford.

What is neglect?

‘Failure to meet a child’s basic needs may take any of the following forms:

• Physical or medical neglect. This is the most common type. It includes failing to seek appropriate and timely medical care for your child, failing to provide adequate nutrition, abandoning your child, and leaving him unsupervised at too young an age.
• Educational neglect. Allowing your child to skip school frequently is another sort of neglect. Also, if you don’t enroll your child in school when he’s reached the mandatory age, or you don’t seek special educational help if your child needs it, this may be considered neglectful.
• Psychological or emotional neglect. Harder to recognize, this type occurs when, for example, parents withhold affection from their children or ignore them. Occasionally, parents withhold affection as a form of discipline, but when indifference and inattention become the norm, over an extended period of time, then it is considered neglect.’ (ref #ChildNeglect)

Are foster care and adoption a solution?

Not really

I’ve been through the foster care system back in the 80’s. I was adopted. To the best of my young, traumatized memory, I was never harmed in foster care. I am very grateful to have been removed from my negligent, abusive biological home where all six of us were abused and starved (you could count the ribs of my brother, who had pulled the majority of his hair out in patches before he was five.) That said, foster care hasn’t really gained much ground.

Funding hasn’t increased to meet the demand of the society, and case workers are overworked and understaffed. Children aren’t being saved, they’re being neglected, tortured, and suffering needlessly. They’re not being removed from unsafe households, and some are dying right under the noses of the case workers. (ref #DhhsReform) Some are placed in dangerous group homes and dying there instead. (ref #FosterDeaths)

The number of foster care cases has increased every year since 2012, a large reason stated being the opioid crisis that has turned parents into addicts. (ref #OpioidCrisis) Most kids with autism will be thrown into the foster care system. (ref #AutismFosters) Same with down syndrome. Up to 80% of kids in foster care have mental health problems. (ref #MentalHealthFosters) 30-40% are in special education or special needs. (ref #SpecialFosters)

I know foster kids who never survived foster care. They died there. I know kids who have never gotten away from their abusive caretakers. Kids go missing from foster care and never found again, sold into sex trafficking or just outright killed. (ref #LostFosterKids) This is not new news; it’s just not talked about.

We like to think there is a net in place, that society has a place for lost children, that people care even if it’s not specifically us. We’re too big. We aren’t villages or families catching those extra mouths to feed. We are a society of millions too large to conceptualize saving everyone.

People may love, but they don’t care

To be painfully blunt, people don’t care. (ref #ApathyInSociety) They don’t care about suffering children. We have children caged at our border, and although we can write a hashtag about it, we don’t act, we don’t do, we don’t care. We have already given up feeling for those we can’t see because we know there is no obvious answer. We are looking at the bystander effect on a society of millions. (ref #BystanderEffect)

We can care about our immediate family, our immediate neighbors and city, but anything more is a stretch on the human psyche. The stress is too much. It’s ugly, but it is real. When we force children to be born to a society that doesn’t care, they will find little empathy or love.

The system is broken, and expecting it to pick up the pieces of shrapnel these anti-abortion bills create is unrealistic. The system can’t support the current population and there is no extra funding/support going into foster care with these bills. These bills don’t care about children, they don’t care about unwanted children, and they don’t care that these kids suffer without love and family and security. They don’t care.

This is not a healthy, caring existence for a human being. It wasn’t until I reached my mid 30’s, crippled with health problems that were exacerbated by the PTSD from my abusive household that I got appropriate therapy and eventual freedom from that child abuse. That’s 30 years of not living but being a creature of fear, reliving a monstrous moment that could have been avoided. As a self aware being now, I enjoy my life, I enjoy being alive, but I can honestly tell you I thought of killing myself many times before healing my PTSD because of that neglect, that lack of love, that failure of my parents to be loving people responsible for the kids they brought into this world.

There was no system in place to catch me, even though I was adopted, one of the ‘lucky’ ones. No psychological healing, no treatment that understood the scope of what was required when the very beginning years of my life were abuse, neglect, and detachment. Even with our knowledge, no system is being built to save and heal children who endured that kind of upbringing.

We are not a compassionate society, and that reality has to be acknowledged when it comes to forcing unwanted pregnancies to term. There is no magic wand to make someone into a good parent, or more, a willing parent. If they don’t want the job, they aren’t going to do it, or they’ll half ass it, leaving children to suffer. This is abuse that can be avoided.

How do women lose their freedom and rights from criminalizing abortions?

Bodily Autonomy

Women lose the right to their bodily autonomy. Their anatomy too, but let’s break it down.

‘Bodily autonomy is defined as the right to self governance over one’s own body without external influence or coercion. It is generally considered to be a fundamental human right.’ (ref #BodilyAutonomy)

When someone — anyone — makes a decision for a person’s body, unless consent is given, that is a breach of bodily autonomy. This goes from rape, to abortion, to forced marriages, to getting a tattoo, piercing, haircut, etc. This is what it means to be free. When you can make choices for yourself, you are free. When the government makes choices over your body, you are not free.

Anti-abortion bills, forced sterilization (ref #Eugenics), rape while under anesthesia in a doctor’s office (ref #DrRape), being imprisoned in asylums for hysteria (ref #Hysteria), forced to marry (ref #ForcedMarriage), date raped where men lie about wearing condoms during intercourse (ref #Stealthing), and child brides being married off to grown men (ref #ChildMarriage) are all ways women have lost their bodily autonomy throughout the years in the US, and this shit is still happening.

It has happened so much throughout our history, we don’t even know where the hell the line is to say THIS BODY IS MINE.

This is a wonderful article (ref #DefenseOfAutonomy) that sums it up well when it comes to bodily autonomy for a mother versus for a fetus. A fetus cannot exist without the host it is being created in. A woman is creating that fetus out of the resources her body takes in, and with pieces of her body. I can’t steal someone’s kidney to live; consent must be given. I can’t hook myself up to another person’s bloodstream to keep me alive; consent must be given. A fetus cannot grow in someone else’s uterus; consent must be given. That fetus is a non entity there on behalf of the woman, and yes, a woman gets to choose if that fetus can stay.

Even dead people have more rights to their body than a woman does when it comes to anti-abortion bills. You can’t legally take the organs of a dead person for transplants, but legislators would give a fetus more rights to a living woman’s uterus than that woman.

Baby Factories

Women are reduced to baby factories by these bills

Women have to have a baby ordered by law once pregnant, and they are penalized if they fail. And once the government has that right, where does it stop? They’re saying a women’s uterus isn’t hers, that someone else gets to decide what happens in her body. Will they outlaw hysterectomies? What about birth control because both will prevent pregnancy? Will they force women to have abortion, because maybe they don’t like the race or the gender of the baby who might to be born? Don’t think for a moment any of these examples haven’t already happened throughout the human race. Once this precedent is set, it opens up all kinds of bodily autonomy violations because a women’s autonomy has been legislated away.

This is the intent of focusing on the ‘right to life’ of a fetus. They are intentionally trying to steal a woman’s right away while pointing in a different direction. While they cry for ‘free speech’ they lie and steal choices away from women. (ref #ProTactics)

This is not about life

This is about restricting women’s rights

‘When Alabama Senator Bobby Singleton, a Democrat, pointed out that Alabama’s new anti-abortion law could punish those who dispose of fertilized eggs at an IVF clinic, Chambliss responded, “The egg in the lab doesn’t apply. It’s not in a woman. She’s not pregnant.”’ (ref #ChamblissIsSexist)

They admitted it themselves; they don’t care about anything like ‘right to life,’ they care about punishing women, controlling their uteruses and forcing them to bear babies. If they cared about fertilized embryos, they’d be trying to protect them. It’s not about life. It’s about control.

When a woman’s legal existence is about her ability to produce children or not, she loses the right to her reproductive organs and to her freedom to not be pregnant. Men aren’t legislated down to their penises, so why should women be treated as walking uteruses? (uteri???) We’re not throwing men in jail for masturbating and ‘wasting’ their semen. They’re not being penalized for having vasectomies because they’re ‘preventing life.’ Who’s to say those little sperms don’t have more rights to stay viable in a man’s body than a man has to not ejaculate? Should we start writing some laws about how masturbation is killing God’s children?

Women are more than a uterus; ask any transwoman, any woman who is sterile, any women who has reached menopause, any women before she hits puberty, any woman with a freaking brain. We Are More.

Gaslighting Women

‘…women’s everyday experiences—and demands that we “prove” these experiences—have shown us the gendered nature of credibility.’ (ref #GasLightingKillsWomen)

Gaslighting is probably the most frustrating part of this situation and our current culture, one that is seen over and over and over and over again when someone who is not a woman thinks they can explain what women really want, what they really mean, what’s good for them, what they feel, how they think, who they are.

This is all the time. Since we have parents who ‘keep girls safe’ by preventing them from living full lives, or making choices, or experimenting and making mistakes, to when we’re adults and we’re still seen as little girls who don’t know how to think. Who need priests or doctors or professors to speak for us. Who can’t walk down a street without a man to protect us. Who can’t get married without daddy’s permission as he gives the bride away, handing her off to another owner. Where the father of the bride pays for the wedding because dowries are passe but we’re still about handing off our women with a price tag to ensure they know they’re a burden on society. We can’t even have sex without someone freaking the fuck out that we’re going to fuck it up somehow. (ref #CulturalSuppressionOfFemaleSexuality)

Why do these people believe women can’t think? Do our vaginas get in the way? For some reason our brains can’t function fully because we have uteruses? The old joke that a guy’s penis ruins his thinking is just that, a joke, while for women, we are legislated around our uteruses.

Women are not being listened to from doctor’s offices to government building to the workplace to the bedroom. And if you’re a woman of color? Forget about. What about a transwoman or lesbian? You already know. We all already know, no matter how much bullshit is said we’re just ‘sensitive’ and ‘imagining things.’ Just walk into an auto body repair shop, ladies. Step into any place where trade is apprenticed to the next generation of men, and you will know 100% that this problem has not gone away. Plumbers, electricians, HVAC, the post office. I have had professional business women looking to throw down money hit a wall the second they stepped into the ‘male’ industry sector.

This shit just doesn’t die. It doesn’t matter how educated we are, how successful, how strong, how supposed ‘equal’ the country has gotten, we are talked down to like foolish little girls who can’t string a sentence together.

Women are talked over and told our opinions don’t matter. That we’re just looking for attention or a payout. That when we’re raped, we don’t matter. That we our the fault of our marginalization because we don’t ‘speak up’ when oppressed, harassed, assaulted, and ignored. And that’s the thing: when the law ignores you, when every seemingly competent, intelligent person ignores you because of your gender in a society used to female marginalization, you don’t speak up. You know it’s a lost cause. Because that’s what being born a woman is. Less than. Nothing. An accessory depending on how pretty your face and body is. We can’t get the same jobs as men, and when we do, we’re paid less for the same (and better) quality of work. Women are still prizes to be won and targets of indignation when we’re not nice, or smiling, or playing mommy for every rando who looks our way.

Women keep having to prove their worth, prove their pain, prove their right to bodily autonomy. No one is asking men to prove rape, but they do of women. I knew a young woman who was told by a cop she wasn’t raped because she let the guy who drugged and raped her into her apartment. The guy was a friend from work who didn’t mention he was going to drug and rape her when he came over, but somehow it was her fault for being in a position where her power was stolen from her. She was supposed to be a mind reader, to assume that every man she knows is going to rape her, to be a victim her entire life because men aren’t held accountable for the things they do with their dicks. She must be accountable because men are never accountable in this society (unless they’re black, then suddenly black men are accountable for the irrational fear in total strangers heads.)

To be a women is to be in a place where you always have to prove your have a right to live. And when you get exhausted, screaming the truth again and again until you’re sobbing at the struggle, you’re called a manipulative bitch for having emotions and showing them.

We shouldn’t have to prove that our bodies are our own, but we do. These laws force us to have to fight to have our own uteruses, while condescending lawmakers shrug about not being doctors while passing bills based on medical lies and bullshit morality.

Being forced to carry a fetus to term is a punishment being placed on women for having sex. In a modern society where contraceptives are prevalent but not covered by insurance, where a male birth control has been made with great success but will likely never make it to the US, the burden is on the woman to not get pregnant, not be raped, not make a mistake with her birth control or have a condom break. And also, when it fails, it’s her burden to ‘be responsible and good’ and have that baby because society says that’s a women’s duty. To sacrifice herself, her body, her future for everyone who has an opinion on how she should live her life. She isn’t allowed to make that choice. No, they literally write laws to take her right to choose away.

You want to know about the power of the uterus?

A story that could easily be reality

So here’s a somewhat wild, totally empowering, absolutely chilling story of possibility. A power only those with a uterus have. What is the quickest, easiest solution women can take everywhere to solve this gender oppression problem? Stop bearing males. Yeah, you heard me. It’s not the close your legs and stop enjoying sex spiel. It’s stop giving birth to boys.

If even half the population stopped birthing males for 20 years, women won’t have to fight to vote for anything. One, because men would get the point by then, and two because there won’t be enough men to stop women in the upcoming generation. It would have no negative effect on future birthrate or our ability to have a stable economy because women can do the same jobs men can. Seriously, name a job only a man can do.

Pee standing up? There’s a tool for that. (ref #GoGirl) Grueling manual labor? Robots already do it better. (ref #DisplacedJobs) Marginalize women and mansplain? AI bots do it better. (ref #TrollBotArmy) Think? Ha. Good try. Really, you wish. Women’s brains are evolutionarily superior to lead. (ref #WebThinking)

And if this seems crazy extreme… eh. It’s a woman’s right to choose. Literally, it’s her uterus. It is her right to decide if she wants to make things ‘fair,’ by continuing a population of oppression where her voice is drowned out by a bunch of out of touch men who are legislating to take away control of her body. Or she could choose a change and see what happens in a women majority world. In a world where women exercise their right to choose, and they choose women first.

This is the power of having a uterus. Without a uterus, an army cannot be created. Without a uterus, population numbers can’t be grown so that states get representation in the government. An economy fails when there aren’t enough bodies to support it. Religions disappear when there is no one to throw money in the coffers— Oh, you were confused as to why religions hate contraceptives and abortion? This is why. Religion ceases to exist if they can’t force women to have kids. They need numbers because indoctrination is easiest when someone is born into it.

Women are essential to the balance of power because women have the power to create humans. With 1000 women and 1 sperm bank, you could have an army, but 1 women and 1000 men is a pathetic birth rate. You need a womb to have a baby, and more importantly, you need eggs. We can clone women, not men. Out of the two, eggs have the power. Something a woman doesn’t ever have to give away in the case of an artificial womb. (ref #ArtificialWomb)

Women have the power, and men don’t, and that’s why they keep trying to convince women to be weak, silent, marginalized, because that’s the only way a man can get any power. They have to crush women down so they forget their uteruses were how men came to exist in the first place.

It doesn’t even have to be bloody

The gene called TDF, aka SRY, is required to have a male human. It’s found on the Y chromosome in Y chromosome carrying sperm. (ref #TDF)

We already know the answer to prevent the birth of males without abortion or murder or anything quite so ugly. It’s basic selective breeding in choice of sperm. That’s it. XY males produce sperm that either have the X chromosome or the Y. Don’t impregnate with the Y chromosome carrying sperm, and you have no fear of having a male child. (ref #ChromosomalSex) Although, to the best of my knowledge, science has yet to be able to identify with much accuracy either type of sperm, I’m sure we’re not far behind on it. All it would take is identifying one male on the planet whose sperm fails to have the TDF on their Y chromosome sperm, and it’s game over.

Welcome to the modern world (or soon to be) of genetic manipulation and selective breeding. The natural genetic mutation already exists; it’s just a matter of if someone is willing to exploit it. Our technology is already here. The question will be how desperate women become when their bodies are taken away from them.

This probably sounds crazy

But isn’t it also just brilliantly delightful? Just a little thrilling? Girls, have you ever honestly realized how powerful your uterus is? We literally have the power to decide if the human race will continue on or stop in extinction. Just with our choices. You wouldn’t need war, wouldn’t need to nod your head at another fucking stupid thing some dumb as fuck old man says about ‘knowing your place.’ The female gender can continue on forever through basic cloning, and men could be left in the evolutionary dumpster because they refused to get their shit together.

This looks like a story of ignoring human morality to choose a gender. Except humans aren’t moral; they are irrational animals like every other mammalian species, and they do things all the time in self serving ways that are just as, if not far more, barbaric. You know why the stop bearing males solution is a wonderfully terrifying option? Because we tried it before in reverse.

China killed all their baby girls and is now at the brink of economic collapse. They now have too many men who have no opportunity to ever find love or have a traditional household. China is importing women in as brides, not caring if these women are willingly there or not, to try to keep from the economic cliff they’re heading for. China’s population when those men die — that big army and workforce they’re so proud of — is going to drop from the face of the planet with no one to replace them. But not before bankrupting the next generation as they age and their health care weighs on China’s economy of far fewer numbers. They better win the AI race, cuz they’re going to need robots to take care of all their elderly.

Men can’t create life — Poof. No power. Game over. Bigotry towards women led China right to that cliff, then pushed them over it because they didn’t respect the value of the uterus. (ref #ChinaFemaleInfantcide)

How to live in an unfair world without getting rid of all the men

Maybe we compromise and learn

If you’re not a fan of deciding which gender should be born, or you’re an individual who doesn’t have a viable uterus or are uninterested in birthing, a less drastic measure would be to vote. Vote for candidates who support women equality and reproductive rights. Protest. Be a voice that is heard until someone listens. Know your line, your body, and don’t let anyone cross it, and speak up when you see someone cross someone else’s.

This goes for everyone. We should all understand bodily autonomy and state our boundaries, that way there is no confusion of who has a right to your body. This oppression has been a part of society just as much as focused on gender. Children are raised extensions of parents, not being allowed to set their boundaries, not being allowed to make choices that reflect them instead of their parents. When a child is crying from being tickled, that’s an infringement of their bodily autonomy, the same as when they’re screaming and kicking to be placed down. (ref #MyBodyMyDecision)

At the earliest stages of life, we are already ignoring that everyone is an individual, and it’s one of the most obvious reasons our society then grows to think a woman is forever a daughter/wife/mother instead of an individual. Men face this same problem, forced into gender roles, expectation of financial success and appearance, all because we fail to see each individual and place nonsense societal standards on people. And everyone in between? Society tries to erase them. You can’t be disabled or elderly without someone somewhere thinking it’s perfectly fine to take away your bodily autonomy. It is not, and we as a society need to address this already.

This is a problem with every person, even if not every person is to blame for how we got here. This is a lesson we as a society are struggling to learn, but it is so important! We are all impacted by others not acknowledging bodily autonomy. When women demand to be treated as equals, it’s a demand that everyone is treated as an equal no matter their gender, social status, race, sexual orientation, ability, religion, culture, etc. This is about everyone even when the focus is on women.

Be genuine, loudly

No one thinks twice about women’s rights when women are silent. And how obnoxious people are in how they try to silence women when we speak up. Telling us our anger is unsightly, that we’re hysterical for caring about the rights to our bodies. How our emotions don’t matter, or are a weakness, or a weapon. Their discomfort in how a woman reacts is their way of shaming us into repressing our natural selves to fit their expectations that we’re supposed to be silent robots who just take abuse. They want us to be meek and polite and ask permission for the rights of our own bodies.

And the gas lighting! The gas lighting bs of how we don’t understand that every human life is precious while our lives are completely disregarded and trampled over and over is infuriating. How they tell us we should listen to those imbecilic tyrants who are trying to steal our rights away—Oh, yeah, I had a man tell me that recently. That I was supposed to listen to a total stranger about who should have rights to my uterus. That I should listen because men are the gatekeepers to work and I can’t make money without making sure I’m likable to men. Seriously, FUCK OFF!

Everybody owns their body. This is no different for women. No legislation has a right to own us, to turn us into slaves of the government and religious extremists who think their religion should be forced onto women’s bodies. (ref #ReligionOnAbortion) This ideology being sold as pseudo science, twisted to pull on your heartstrings, is all about religious based gender oppression forced on our bodies. Church and State are supposed to be separated. Bodily autonomy doesn’t bend to religious ideology, yet here we are seeing legislation being written to do just that. We have a right to be free of religious doctrine— a right to be free! —while they are writing laws oppressing women with someone else’s religion.

An interesting Jewish perspective of a woman who sees her religious freedom infringed by these bills. (ref #AntiJewishWomenBill) A pro-choice, choose-life Christian view, compassionate and educated. (ref #MoreHarmThanGood) Plus an absolutely in depth look at abortion rights in the US. (ref #HistoryProLife) When women had the right to abortion up to 1840, then had the rights taken away, only to have them restored with Roe v Wade in 1973. Then the Catholic led charge ever since to take those rights away, including their strategies to twist science and focus on the fetus’s rights while ignoring the women. How they created a movement of hate that made pregnant women into villains who were slacking their ‘responsibilities’ for daring to have sex, and nurses/doctors were turned into targets of threats and violence and death. Also, so much gas lighting. Telling women they were ‘traumatized’ from having an abortion and didn’t know their own minds, their own will, their own choices. Always, they speak for us while ignoring what we say.

Also, a long, extensive list of all the ways women are treated like imbeciles, and laws are subverted so someone else can tell a woman how to use her body. (ref #23Ways) This shit is so frustrating.

What is reality, and what is the story of reality?

A reality check

This is the main problem with this fight, one that is ignored or exaggerated by those trying to steal rights away from women. This is the problem with pretty much every aspect of the human world. People place concepts of reality over actual reality. Worse, they create ideologies and then twist scientific data to ‘prove’ those ideologies.

‘This can have a particularly pernicious effect when the ideologies that make their way into the science are then claimed to be results derived from the science. Those ideologies, now “naturalized,” have sometimes been granted added credibility because of their supposedly scientific derivation.’ (ref #ScienceAndIdeology)

Some people don’t understand evolution. Some people think we are designed instead of evolved. They force ideas like meaning onto our existence. They think women exist to have babies and to give life. They think women should give up their bodily autonomy to serve this supposed created purpose. They think humans exist to raise families, and that sex exists only to bring forth children. The big fight against LGBTQ(QIAAP) is because some people think our bodies are here to have sex for the purpose to create life, and that anything that goes against that story is an abomination.

This narrative is a fallacy, a fiction, a dream from an imaginative mind that conceptualized reality after observing a pattern and told a story of it. It is not real, and we have to stop making laws based off of these lies.

Human beings are killed every single day because of these backward, painful ideologies that look at a perfectly healthy individual and tell them they are a sin, that they’re destined to burn in Hell, that their very existence means some god in the sky hates them or they’re a crime against nature, and their only way to solve it is to die or never act the very way their bodies were evolved to act. Women are oppressed, marginalized, enslaved in abusive marriages, and castrated because some psycho told the men of their culture that women existed to give them pleasure, bear their children, and serve them on this earth.

This insanity has to stop. When lies take away human freedom, they need to be called out for the harm they cause and our laws need to step in and protect the citizens.

Humans are real, beliefs are not

Humans need to be protected from irrational belief.

We exist because we exist. We have sex because we find it pleasurable. If we didn’t find it pleasurable, we wouldn’t do it. Ask anyone who is asexual— when you don’t enjoy sex, you don’t have it, and it’s perfectly natural. (It you don’t enjoy it, it is fucking NATURAL not to do it! Duh, world. Really.)

Why should an asexual women have to give up the right to her uterus over someone’s belief that she’s supposed to be pregnant and bear children? Why should an asexual man or a gay man breed with a woman because someone said they’re supposed to raise a family? Why should any free thinking woman or man do anything they don’t want to do with their bodies?

We have babies because fertile men and women who have sex together either don’t have birth control, or make a choice to have kids, or aren’t being as safe as they thought and mistakes happened and abortions weren’t available. Or a woman went to a sperm bank, or entered into an agreement for in-vitro insemination. Just because our bodies can be joined to create life does not mean in any way we are obligated to do so.

It is a fantasy to see a uterus and assume it must produce a baby at some point in its existence. Just because an embryo can attach to the uterine wall and eventually develop into a fetus that may or may not turn into a viable infant does not mean a woman is obligated to see that process through. It doesn’t matter if a total stranger who is not that woman has a different opinion; it’s none of their business. That is that woman’s body, her uterus, her egg, her embryo, her fetus, and it’s her choice.

We are headed for an environmental nightmare

In a conscious, self aware society we are painfully failing to reach even in 2019, it makes more sense to not have children as we head toward an environmental crisis that will potentially lead to the extinction of the human race, if not many of the current species on the planet. (ref #It’sHot!) The amount of suffering humanity is headed toward with no stop in sight is so devastating, it would be irresponsible to bring more life into this mess until we clean it up first.

It is only through the advancement and equality of women that the human race can see a stabilization of population in the future as we work to repair the damage humanity has done to the planet. (ref #WomenAndClimate) If we can’t stop overpopulation, there will just be more people to starve, suffer, and die during the ecological nightmare that’s going to hit.

The unborn feel no pain; they do not suffer. It’s a different reality for those who live and gain self awareness. This idea of counting ‘potential’ life while ignoring actual life is offensive to those who have to navigate the trials of existence. No one is obligated/designed/required to create life. No one is even obligated to breathe! We do so because our bodies automatically do, but many have suffocated to death when they have taken means to stop it. Within the lie that we are designed to give life—the story that all life has a right to usurp a woman’s— our freedoms are stolen away to fit the ideologies of those who refuse to see reality.

I don’t bow to someone else’s irrational view of the world. No one should. I’m so tired of dumb, irrational people trying to tell me how to live my life when they can’t even see how much they’re messing up their own.

I’m angry and I’m tired, but I’m not silent

The thing about laws is they only work if society agrees. Society doesn’t agree on this (ref #AbortionPolls) and we won’t be silenced. It’s sickening enough the atrocities happening with the Trump administration and partisanship eroding our democracy at every turn. We’re in the middle of an ethnic cleansing in the US while people squabble over a border wall next to children in cages (because we care so much about life that we cage it and watch it die.) But if we lose the rights to our bodies, it’s game over for freedom.

Women aren’t going back. We have spent centuries being demoralized, fighting for a vote, a wage, for financial independence, to be seen as a person and not a wife or a daughter or an economic burden—for our voices to be heard. There is no going back, not when women all over this globe haven’t gained the rights we are losing now.

We’re done being grabbed, marginalized, and legislated by our pussies. While the zealot Republicans think they have a win, we have corporations who are run by women, who hire women, who survive off the money women spend on products. Events that require celebrity (many who are women) to bring in tourism. (ref #CorporationsReproductiveRights) This can be an economic war as well as a war on women. This can be a population war if it comes to that where women refuse to continue the human race if the human race refuses to treat women as equals.

This is the power of creating life; we don’t have to provide the bodies for another self destructive war. We don’t have to do anything. A sit in for peace can = a sex off for humanity. (I don’t know how to break it to you all but masturbation is awesome. Multiple orgasms without waiting for your partner to figure it all out is super nice. Women don’t need dick to enjoy sex.)

We have a choice no matter what any unconstitutional law states, and I choose to not be silent. Not now, not ever. This country is for all of us, not just an extremist few who would put us back in the dark ages with their draconian, oppressive laws. There is no love of life in these bills, only punishment of women and the babies who are born into a society who can’t see the consequences of their actions, be it in family planning or environmental stewardship.

I get it. Women have evolved to just grin and bear every horrendous atrocity committed against them, to put society first, to make everyone ‘feel good’ about how shitty women are treated. We have been told to utilize the power of our uterus is immoral, unkind, unloving (unless a man tells us to do it. Then it’s ‘God’s will.’) While we can be raped and silenced, we’re taught that fighting back is ‘wrong.’

I’m am sick and tired of being told society must come before my needs when I am part of over 50% of society whose needs are forever ignored. We still can’t get equal pay! How many years do we have to fight just to get an equal paycheck? Fucking seriously, it’s 2019! We are going to be seeing our jobs replaced by automation before we get equal fucking pay between genders.

Fuck society. Fuck being ‘fair.’ Fuck making everyone happy while women have to take a back seat once again. Fuck it all. Until society can see women as equal, women need to put women first. No one else will.

Self care when in a society that doesn’t care enough

Practicing Compassion

For those who are freaking out and need something to do instead of just vent at how fucking stupid the world is, I have a few links you may find useful. I have pointed out some seemingly grim, really terrible things about the world, but I need you all to remember, this too is just a story, a narrative made up of my fear, my anger as I take in information and let my mind and emotions respond.

As much as there is an apathy in humanity, there is a brimming of compassion as well. For as many Pro-Lifers who want to restrict and oppress women, there are those who truly, genuinely love the very first spark of life in a womb and they want to honor and protect it above all else. For those who weaponize their religion against others, there are far more who use their belief to bring their communities together. These are all truths, and as such, there is both so much beauty and pain in these human experiences as a result.

It can be hard to look past our emotions—as someone who had PTSD for 30 years, it can feel completely impossible. But it’s essential if we are going to make important decisions and be the best, intentioned people we can be. To look past, we must first embrace all the feelings that well inside us, every contradiction, every irrationality, every cry and kick of ego.

There is so much pain here, so much oppression. When you see what it is to be a woman, to be a woman of color, to be a woman born with a Y chromosome, to love a woman and to feel her pain and know there is nothing you can do alone to change this unfair world: there is pain. This anger and outrage and fear would not be here if not for all the pain these laws have weighed us down with.

Mindfulness

My way of dealing with pain and anxiety is through mindfulness. It was the bridge that stepped me out of a PTSD narrative and into reality. I truly don’t know any better tool a person can use to help get past huge emotional and psychological pain, and stop the fight or flight stress response.

‘Mindfulness allows us to interrupt automatic, reflexive fight, flight, or freeze reactions—reactions that can lead to anxiety, fear, foreboding, and worry.’ (ref #10Mindful)

(ref #MindfulnessForStress)

‘The essential cause of our suffering and anxiety is ignorance of the nature of reality.’ (ref #HowToCopeWithFear)

Steps you can take to help

For those who want to help, these are recent blogs I found with links to protests and funding sites.

(ref #HelpProtestAbortionBans)

(ref #HelpWomenInStatesBanningAbortion)

I don’t have links for this last one, but my fuck, I gotta mention it. Foster care. Seriously, these kids need help. I don’t have enough knowledge to know what is a reputable funding site at this time—honestly, I’m not even sure if funding is the problem. The whole system is messed up.

All I can say is listen to kids. Help them understand and acknowledge their pain by listening. You may never truly understand what it is like to be discarded for not being whatever ideal of perfect your parents wanted, but you can listen and show that even flawed human beings are worth everything.

My adoptive dad had this cute poster in the garage when he was alive. It was this little saying, and I remember every time I read it how totally wrong the grammar was. (Yeah, my nerdness started early. XD)

This poster wasn’t there for me and my brother, the foster kids in the house. It was there long before us, yellowed and aged, a poster for my dad. My dad wasn’t a foster kid, although my adoptive mom was until she aged out, and she was horribly abused during that time. When you grow up in a society that throws away people like they do trash, it can be hard to find self esteem in all that. My dad knew it personally because he was dyslexic, tormented and abused by the nuns because of it (it was not a compassionate time for learning disabilities,) and didn’t learn to read until late in life through comic books.

Society decides if people are ‘junk’ or not through their disregard and irrational ideas of what a person is supposed to be. We have to be better. In accepting our flaws, we accept us as whole, and it gives us a chance to move forward better, with compassion (and hopefully some wisdom.

There’s hope

A bill in Congress was introduced on the 23rd of May. I’m afraid I can’t trust the government to follow through, but I still hope.

‘The Women’s Health Protection Act: Equal Abortion Access, Everywhere’ (ref #ReproductiveRights)

As insane and intense as this all seems, it’s the same old story we’ve been dealing with since humanity dawned. We seek balance while others seek power. We seek freedom while others seek to use us. Nothing has changed. It doesn’t matter how much our numbers grow or our technology advances; we are still just manifestations of our biology and experiences. Until we can truly break free, the tide of power will keep pushing back and forth, or our lack of foresight will wipe us from the planet completely.

Still, as long as we can tell a story of the future that is worth working toward, there is always hope.