Isabella Ramirez – Skating (But Only Around the Perversions of Men) [Video]

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Transcript provided by YouTube (unedited)

0:03
– So I’m at the roller rink, it’s 2017,
0:05
and “Boom Boom Pow” by The Black Eyed Peas
0:07
beats beneath polyurethane wheels
0:09
as my four and seven year old cousins
0:12
get their skates laced up by my aunt
0:14
who brags about her past as a derby girl
0:16
and how she’ll skate laps around us, literally.
0:19
We’ve left our brothers and fathers at home
0:22
because it is girls only up in here
0:25
and this is our ladies night.
0:27
I don’t know how to skate very well
0:29
but I reserve my aunt’s handholding for my cousins
0:32
and stay alone near the rink’s ledge
0:34
until a 15 year old boy mistakes me for the wall.
0:37
When he comes up behind me and grabs me by the breast.
0:40
He doesn’t let go until I’m falling to the ground
0:43
from trying to break his grip.
0:46
By the time I’ve realized what’s happened,
0:48
my aunt’s arguing with a police officer
0:50
while I’m holding my cousin, shaking.
0:52
I’m only 13 years old and all I can think,
0:56
even in this moment, when I want to boil my body
0:58
to relieve the phantom feeling of his hands on my chest
1:01
is how grateful I am that it was me,
1:04
that it wasn’t them,
1:05
that my cousins get to live another day as children.
1:09
They’re four and seven years old,
1:11
and I feel guilty I’ve made them leave.
1:15
That night, my youngest cousin learned
1:18
what sexual assault meant before she learned how to read.
1:22
The thing about being a woman surrounded by rape culture.
1:25
It’s that, it’s not a matter of if, but when.
1:28
I’m 17 years old now, and I’ve been catcalled,
1:31
followed, honked at, touched, violated.
1:33
The men in my family love to say “not all men”
1:37
but why is it all women then?
1:39
Why do we insist on sending our daughters to college
1:42
with pepper spray and a rape whistle?
1:44
Why do we pass around sexual assault like a family heirloom?
1:48
From our grandmothers, to our mothers,
1:50
to our aunts, to our sisters, to me, to me.
1:52
Please do not make me pass this to my cousins
1:55
but it’s too late.
1:57
My aunt sends me screenshots of messages from a boy
2:00
in my cousin’s third grade class calling her baby,
2:03
saying I love you, asking if he can smell her underwear.
2:07
When can we stop teaching our eight year old girls
2:10
to cope with the fact that men will talk to them this way
2:13
for the rest of their lives?
2:15
That day, I resented the fact that my cousin
2:18
had ever learned to read.
2:20
And the fact that there are girls who will never learn,
2:23
baby girls who babble through teething and swollen gums
2:26
and have death become their nursery rhyme.
2:28
Like 10 month old Zara Scruggs
2:30
who could barely mouth the word dad
2:32
before she was fatally raped by her father,
2:35
who was everything a baby girl should be,
2:38
happy and curious and beautiful and innocent.
2:41
Baby girls shouldn’t die on hospital beds
2:45
in blood soaked diapers, yet Zara did.
2:47
And I still somehow don’t know
2:50
if she would’ve been better off if she had survived.
2:54
I don’t need to be at a roller rink to know
2:57
being a woman means I am constantly skating around
3:00
the perversions of men.
3:03
My cousins now know this too.
3:06
I can only hope they’ll never feel what it’s like
3:08
to be too young to fight back
3:10
but be told a boy’s too young to be charged
3:13
because that day, I’ll take my cousin’s
3:17
roller skating again.
3:19
Thank you.
3:20
(audience cheering)

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This post was previously published on YouTube.

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