When we post, and repost, reinterpret and remix a joke, we aren’t just spreading it. We are actively creating a culture around that joke.

I laughed the first time I say “Shit Girls Say” with guilty pleasure. Hey, I’ve said a bunch of that shit. Still do. And it gets exhausting to always listen to one’s inner feminista. You know, that small voice inside that is clearing its voice to kick everyone out of the party, to mention the sexism codified in the viral videos. Because once you admit you feel offended, you stop laughing. And when you stop laughing, it becomes much easier to realize they are laughing at you.

These days, my mantra is “don’t take yourself too seriously”. The creed of self-importance and holier-than-thou politics does more harm than good, in my opinion. One person spending three minutes laughing at “Shit Girls Say” is not the problem. But that is not what we are speaking about. A combined 15,000,000 views of this message within thirty days, combined with follow-ups like “Shit Black Girls Say” and “Shit Asian Girls Say” is a radical normalization of the “Woman Are Dumb” discourse, topped up with spin-offs that directly attack intersectionalities of gender and race. What’s that? Oh, right, while also reinforcing gender binaries and employing “gay voice” and non-gender confirming clothing as comedic technique. This is a loot bag from an overrated party tied up in a pretty red ribbon to distract us from the fact that it is filled with chauvinist crap.

Saying this risks me (re)receiving the “overly-politically correct” badge I have been offered by uncomfortable people since 1996 and yes, that still makes my breath shallow. After being a loud-mouth 12 year old, I became a teenager who rarely used the word ‘no’. It has taken me 15 years to return to the uncensored boldness of that voice. They said Fag. I said Don’t say Fag. They said You’re a Fag. That was enough to shut up any closeted girl in grade seven. And it did, for a long time.

Realizing our place within machines of oppression means waking up to our responsibility to act different. No we didn’t build patriarchy. We didn’t manufacture racism, or conceive of ableism. But when we are not working to dismantle these buildings (and even then, for many of us) we are actively upholding these systems. It might seem redundant here to mention, but the responsibility for deconstructing structures of oppression falls with the oppressor, not solely with the oppressed.

For example: As a white woman is it my responsibility to look at my relationship to white privilege and build meaningful allyship in the deconstruction of racism and colonialism. And no, I am not going to add “in my opinion”, or “I believe” to this statement. In my opinion, I believe this statement should be made without any qualifiers.

There have been a slew of “Shit ____ Says” spin-offs that do invert these highly problematic power dynamics of the original set, using the form to call out the issues and ironies of common-talk. unsurprisingly, these haven’t lit up screens with the same speed. There is a pre-existing discourse of dumb blonde-ginger-brunette jokes that gives “Shit Girls Say” a skeleton key into social media psyches, a big production budget and Juliette Mo’Fo Lewis. And in the extension of these spin-offs, many of which are bringing up bold necessary talk, we are collectively creating daily newsfeeds full of videos which depict Women Being Stupid. We, us. Not big cameras and Juliette. Us who press play and hit share. We are creating, growing and maintaining the culture of this joke.

I do not belong to many of the communities who have been portrayed or chosen to create spin-offs. Straight up, it is not my place (or my desire) to deconstruct or judge the need for a dialogue that emerges from a reality I do not face. Just as I would not want such feedback should I choose to launch a “Shit People Say to Bi-Poly-Femme Cis-Gendered Womyn Once Labeled Disabled” video (a title which would confuse a lot of people anyway, and therefore get few views). But as the joke seems to be shifting to movement status, it seems relevant that we remember Media Doesn’t Operate in a Vacuum. Social media, indie media. If it is in our hands to control, they we’ve got am ASAP responsibility to recognize the themes our DIY video is bringing to the forefront. And right now, it’s the message that women speak with the intelligence of confused domestic pets.

Bella, Punta, Jezebel.

I was your sister in revolution’s

long skirt. My wedding veil

a balaclava, hiking citadels

with child at breast and still

they called me for my sex.

Asked for drinks of water,

that I might build shelters

for their armies with my soft

brown eyes. Said our beauty

was attic, steamer trunk

and our legs the cattle crawl.

This is not why we marched, Trotsky.

We who are the means

of production. We who have carried

Marxist bibles in our knitting needles

for century, teaching daughters the machine

of silence. We who have watched

you unmake your homes like a civilization

trapped in the belly of a whale, illuminated by

a single candle, Jonah.

They burned our grandmothers

in church pyres. Unwrote her story

so completely they forgot it is us

they still worship, Mother Mary

have mercy. They still plant flower

at your feet and call you immaculate.

Virgin. While I impudent Jezebel

lay dispossessed princess of tangled meaning

I married the King of Isreal

and became synunum for shameless

they have been calling us sluts for six

hundred years though we have tucked

our own scarlet letters like love notes

into each other’s jeans and braided romance

in this heresy. Hear me now, America.

Your shelters are the refugee camps of our hearts

and there are paper cranes in our mouths waiting

for fossil fuel extinction. This is our flight plan.

We who have learned the machine of silence

like the blind understand darkness.

We who hold chakras of revolution

as rain cellars for our daughters.

We have always been ready.

And we are reminding ourselves, now.

We spent July on Sketch Corner.

Us now vegans, with serotonin

supply vacuums and electrified synapses.

We were hatchlings growing ecstatic

in the awning of corporate coffee shops.

Needle dispensers and no service policies.

We just wanted to use the bathroom.

Record ourselves on Speakers Corner

and remember something about grade nine

that fit in an Irving Welsh novel.

Cobain was barely four years cold

everyone wanted to know if Love did it.

It was harder to buy beer than cocaine

and fun fur was high fashion.

There is no wax poetic. My nostalgia

is a poppy on a sharp silver pin.

I wear it like a battle wound in November.

Some raved in peyote forests swallowing fireflies.

Our roundhouses held young men on meth and

pixie dust pre-teens between a few clean dancers.

At least that’s what I remember. I don’t remember much.

Peace, Love, Unity and Paramedics.

The corner of Queen and John was once exposed

in Maclean’s Magazine by a man in his thirties

who mistook party names for music genres.

We stood taring the glossy covers to confetti

while the sun opened her jaws on the concrete.

Some mothers sitting like gargoyles in bed

our names their spouts of water.

In the galaxy’s heart at Sketch Corner

under a rain of Maclean’s flash and glitter,

pupils big as heavenly bodies.

We smoked morning cigarettes like track horses,

compassion just a word we knew.

No one had told us about the glue factory.

We were making

our collective broken heart

famous.

Survival looks like this, sometimes.

A dancing millipede on the city’s centrifuge. Disobedience

just obedience to a new father. Children

hanging up their names like winter coats. A few deaths,

legislation. Two few listening to the choir

paint arias of accusations. We need change now.

They swallow disreality like vitamins.

Hi. It’s late. This piece is rough cut and it cuts rough. So a gentle warning. It is speaking to s. violence and calling out the problems with a lot of dialogues that I see happen. I have not been able to call these out in person and this poem will develop into a more harnessed and clear vision. But this is where today is at for me. While writing this  I also came across this video posted. PLEASE watch it. Clearly she is quoting in parts, but this is what I MEAN. A 13 yr old girl talking about slut shaming: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXH2K7OC37s&feature=youtu.be

_____ Ask Your Brother Why

I know it’s not all of you, my brothers
but there are still those who ask questions like

why don’t you women raise your standards
why do you think everyone wants your sex
why do you permit this treatment in the bedroom

I don’t see them
asking their kinsmen

what they are doing to prevent rape

We are a culture that has taught men to walk
on their fists and woman to speak
like they are eating glass.

We are stronger and gentler
than three am would have us believe.

Not everybody’s drunk with biceps,
estrogen is not a synonym for victim.

All us people on the clothesline
strung between tenement apartments
trying to map out home. I get it.

Our bodies are peg and the thin wire, not
the living room. We are the connect-the-dots
leaping between tall buildings.

But it is not our responsibility
to play gate keeper
us of the same sky and iron, same laughter
one constellations in these bodies that lights
from the inside

when you decide to break into a home
you are the criminal. This is obvious.

Is it obvious? Are we overcomplicating it
like a magician might throw a rabbit

in your face while he finds the right card to placate you.
And the court choir sing shame like a quiet
holiday greeting. Obvious gives Apathy a French braid
and then we all get quiet. Mouths cut glass knowing

tomorrow will be easier quiet.

Walking home through brick crescent, sheets flying in midnight wind
all the windows in the street are punched through.

Everyone on the block has been robbed.

But they still ask you why you are nervous.

I know this is not all of you, brothers. I have seen the
grace of so many one-day fathers admit there is no

way for them to understand
without adding the word “But.”

While others debate about the relevance of feminism then accidently Speak for the Speechless. Maybe offer Advice on

Strategies for Preventing Sexual Assault like Learn to Identify Danger Better.

But I still don’t see them                              asking their kinsmen

what they are doing to prevent rape.

When my hands are knotted arbutus
and my spine wind swept from this
long life spent on the edge of island cliffs

dig up the little graves I will have planted
at my feet, and read me the regrets I treasured

there. I will be blind and white. No red skin left.

You will have to place the parcels
in my crooks, up to my mouth
until I recognize the cologne. I won’t know

the names, granddaughter. Making love
in a canoe, Ontario bright as a sand dollar.
Wild horses, red electric guitar. We stirred
sugar in our cheap red wine. Two of us on
his bicycle, Montreal wet and steep and the
breaks snapping like April ice.

But I will remember the smell of their hands.

Birch, arbutus; our beauty is palimpsest.
Fugitive. We bend slowly and slowly forget.

Fever like drunks who bury empty bottles
at their feet. It is a mason’s church down there,

daughter. Sand, green glass and want. Roots
graceless as kelp and a collection of gestures.

The constant graze of palm over
widow’s peak. Laughter held like a thimble
at crest of his tongue, one tooth missing.
Hand like a starfish on the back of my heart.

Read to me like a harpy calling
the glass orchestra of these bottles
to my branches.

When I have forgotten, sister.
Call me Memphis oak
and string this evidence to my
twigs. How light refracts.

How I chime hollow, the gulls stirring.

It is Galileo.
It is Mercy.

The choir of each loss singing.