I feel like I’ve been shackled to this soapbox since surpassing Lacan’s dreaded mirror stage. So, I might as well speak on a logical fallacy of conservative ideology.
    (Oh the orchestrated ideals of man’s messy making! 
    Revere the modern muse—modeling GLP-1 and less than a portion of passion.) 
Here’s a contradiction of the red’s ruling culture I contend with: one cannot set an archetypal standard of motherhood while also maintaining an aesthetic standard of thinness. Those two conditions of being, for a woman’s body, are diametrically opposed. 
    Thinness, as in the modesty and morality of taking up less space; anorexic trends returning from Tumblr; the panopticon of femininity policing every ounce of fat; enough autonomy for off-brand Ozempic but not abortion;  
    Motherhood, as in the traditional assignment of women to the home; eugenic ethnostates (win a prize for procreating six times!); delivering your own deformed desires; Madonna and Christ; I learned to make pasta from scratch during that summer I stayed in North Carolina. My neighbors showed me. They would invite me over for dinner a lot—it was nice. They had this old blue farmhouse and a garden out back. Their son was four, I think, and he had this toy lawn-mower that he would run up and down the yard all day. His mom was so kind to me, and I loved helping her cook these big, elaborate meals that we’d all eat on the back porch together. You know, one day when we were pitting cherries I had a moment where—I don’t know—that late orangey glow of dusk was coming in through the window, and we were listening to a song from their wedding, and her husband was playing with their son outside—I just… for a second I just felt it. I felt like I could be really happy with a life like their’s. With a kid and a loving husband and a little porch swing, you know? Like, there’s so much serenity there. I don’t know why people always call it “the simple life,” there’s nothing simple about it. It was like a microcosm of all the human kindness in the world.
How much care for another person do you have to possess in order to pit cherries for an hour in the kitchen? Just so they don’t have to spit the seed out? You know who does that? A mother.    
 I will never be one to tell women what meaning they should birth from their own beings— their own bodies.
But beware the beauty of bone (That sounds archaic—I guess it is, Eve’s undoing was also a type of hunger)! I’ve starved myself into societal salvation, left the page for a pretty purgatory.   
That size 00 will suck the soul right out of you, warp the womb into a wasteland, diminish every desire except dinner—leave you swaying, struggling to stand on your soapbox.