As A Sexually Active Woman, It's WAR Starting January 20th

As of January 20, 2017, Donald Trump’s war on women will officially begin. Granted, his own personal war on women — in the way he’s disrespected them, sexually harassed and assaulted them, and even seen his own daughter as a chunk of meat of which he’d like to get a piece — has been going on probably since he hit puberty.

And when he takes office this war will infiltrate laws that will affect my life, your life, and the lives of every woman out there.

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Granted, Trump isn’t alone in his war on women. Republican men, for the most part, have an aching desire to control women and their reproductive rights. I’m not sure how an old man from Arkansas thinks he knows what’s best for my body, but he seems to think he does, as do many of his fellow congressmen.

For them, it’s about throwing around their weight, asserting their power so they can sleep at night. For us, it’s war.

In March, when Donald Trump had the audacity to say that women should receive “some form of punishment” for getting an abortion, it was another telling component in the whole hatred Trump has for women. We are talking about a man, after all, who has claimed that his wife, Melania, doesn’t poop or fart, as if she’s a Barbie doll with no anus.

While this absurdity on his part does invoke straight-up belly laughs (something I’m sure he’d also say Melania never does), it’s just further proof Trump doesn’t see women as human. And when you don’t see something as human, it’s easy to take things away from it.

After eight years of progress, in so many ways, the Republicans are more than excited to set the country back at least 50 years when Trump takes office. One of the many things on the docket is defunding Planned Parenthood, which has been a lifesaver for millions of women (and men) in regards to access to birth control, sexual health education, and, yes, abortion.

However, abortion makes up only three percent of the services that Planned Parenthood provides. In fact, you can’t even get an abortion at many of their offices! Instead, they send you to the nearest Planned Parenthood that does provide them.

To defund Planned Parenthood would be catastrophic. No matter how you feel about abortion — although what a woman chooses to do with her body is none of your f*cking business — consider the fact that the majority of PP’s services entail STD testing and contraception and admit: this is not a good thing.

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To take these services away from people who couldn’t afford them otherwise is literally marching them directly into STDs and unwanted pregnancies. Unwanted pregnancies that, if Trump and his cronies have it their way, will have to be carried to term because abortion won’t be an option.

To force a woman into motherhood when she isn’t ready (and to force a child to be born into such a situation) is setting them both up to fail. But Trump, in not seeing women as human, doesn’t see this. Even if he did, he wouldn’t care. Why? It doesn't affect him. And, as we've learned through his epic display of egotism, Trump is only looking out for Trump.

I believe abortion should always be an option; the right to choose shouldn’t be a battlefield. It should be fact.

I’m a sexually active woman who’s about to live under the fascist regime of a woman-hating, ill-equipped, unqualified, illegitimate president. This scares the f*ck out of me.

I’m not just scared for myself, should something happen in my life where I will be in need of low-cost birth control or an abortion, but I’m scared for every woman out there.

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It’s terrifying to not be seen as human, especially by the people who have decided that they have the right to dictate what we can and can’t do with our bodies. It’s heartbreaking that such a landmark case like Roe vs. Wade could be overthrown by men who have no stake in what becomes of my life or your life should we be denied the right to autonomy.

It is a level of devastation, for which I have no words, to realize that hope and progress are about to be thrown to the wolves and swallowed whole. It is a tragedy that the United States is comfortable in joining the ranks of third-world countries that suppress and repress with zero regard to its effect on its inhabitants.

As we get closer to January 20, I feel like we’re walking toward a dark hole of which there will be little to no escape. Those of us who will never accept the presidency of Trump as a legitimate one will have to do what we can to fight the war on women, in any way possible, to defend and protect the rights that the incoming Republican administration will surely delight in trying to take away from us.

It will be a tough battle, but one that we must join.

As a woman, I have every right to be scared of what is to come when this woman-hater takes office. You have every right to be scared, too. But as long as we have the right to protest (and we do), we should take our fear and turn it into strength.

As Jeffrey Wright tweeted back in November, “May the election of Trump bring forth the fiercest, smartest, toughest generation of ass-kicking women this country could possibly imagine.” And it will.

But these ass-kicking women have space in their consciousness to be scared, too.

It's a perfectly normal response to what's about to unfold. It's also called being human: A fact I'm worried Trump refuses to acknowledge when it comes to women.