I Blame The Patriarchy

This is what I’m talking about: an Alabama high school senior, forbidden to participate in graduation , went to the ceremony, called out her own name, and walked across the stage anyway. She was removed, along with her mother and aunt, by police. This girl’s name is Alysha Cosby, and she is my hero.

Why was Alysha banned from graduation? Because she is pregnant, and there are few spectacles as offensive to the delicate white American eye as an unmarried pregnant black teenager. She has shamelessly had teen sex, which is insult enough, but her blackness makes her thoroughly intolerable. She has to be punished.

Thus did Alysha Cosby’s school, which is run by misoygnist Catholic barbarians, reduce Alysha, an honor roll student, to the status of her uterus. They ostrasized her, first by forcing her to switch to homeschooling as soon as they found out about the pregnancy, then by making with the graduation ban, and finally bringing it on home with the crowd-pleasing police intervention. Why stop there, Catholic barbarians? Why not sew a scarlet “A” on her blazer? Or how about tar and feathers? Or you could dust off the good old pillory. Or just stone her to death in the public square!

It is one of our culture’s most cherished pastimes, punishing young women for pregnancy. This is completely insane, given that in our patriarchal state women are, at every turn, denied access to means that would allow them to prevent pregnancy. Women are the sex class. We are the whores and the baby machines. From the cradle we are taught to submit. Sex education is a joke. Birth control offends the Baby Jesus. Current nutbag legislation will make abortions even more difficult for teenagers to obtain.

In a patriarchy, women do not control intercourse. Mandatory female submission to intercourse is the dirty secret of our species. Womens’ reproductive organs are the property of the male supremacist state, which tells us when, how, where, and by whom they can be used. Deviate from protocol and you’ll wish you were dead. Which is why Alysha Cosby’s fuck-the-establishment graduation stroll was nothing short of heroic.

Just as Janet Jackson had to take the heat for Justin Timberlake’s exuberant Superbowl pawing, it goes without saying that the boy who fertilized the egg in question, also a graduating senior, was welcomed at the ceremony with open arms.  Nice.

Thanks Feministing for the link.

UPDATE: For some reason this post has been a magnet for comment spam, so comments are now closed. If you got somthin’ to say about it, email me direckly.

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