What Raising Our Daughters Can Teach Us About Fighting Rape Culture

Elizabeth Acevedo: It almost curdles my womb dry, these stories. Girl parties in Steubenville, watch her drink, watch her pass out, watch them grab wrist and ankles. She is now a rope they jump. Three girls—no, women now—ten years chained in a Cleveland basement. Did each one give thanks when he skipped her? When he visited that one? When he got her full of stillborn baby. Baby girl in Gretna, Louisiana stuffed into a garbage bag. Show me her mother, how she clenches her fists.

It seems we women must practice how to lose our daughters because I know the boys who will help me carry grocery bags, and they will whistle, will whisper, will crook fingers in my daughter’s direction. And she may flip her hair, she may buck her hip, she may accept their invitation to chill behind paint-chipped staircases. The cheap vodka may burn her throat, but not how they will, later, when they become more thrust than thought, and you can’t tell me that they don’t know that her “No!” is not a moan.

When she wakes me, her bed puddled in piss, I will scrub these hands raw. I will tremble at what they could not prevent. I have to hold every smile of my future daughter tipped up to the milk of this promise. She will not walk hunched, fingers playing with one another as if she can create prayers from the sweat between her palms. She will not be a girl forced to turn herself into a corner, taught that her body is a place to huddle, hide. I won’t raise her to be nice, to give her laugh away, to smile polite as men plot and plan and turn her body into a weapon of war – and if they try, she will know how to wield herself.

Don’t tell me it’s wrong to want to raise a child in this kind of fear. Because I know for every finger that we loosen, another knuckle grows back crooked, another knuckle is looking to crack into my daughter’s skin. And I can’t trust this world to teach their sons how to treat my daughter. So I will raise her to be a sword, a spear, a shield. To turn clasped hands into heated hatchet so it raises between her teeth, took her own kind of advances with the sharpest eyes, to hold all of this together with leather or lace to be chiseled, prepared for rebellions against her flesh. My daughter will be carved from hard rock. Sharpened, sharp, no, a spear! Her whole body ready to fling itself and arrow the hand of the first man who tries to cover her mouth.

Speaker 2: Give it up for Beltway, New Orleans!