On June 24, I was going to go to the Westwood Federal building but going down Topanga Canyon Blvd., there where hundreds of cars inching Northbound on the highway, so I turned around and pulled up at Pine Tree Circle (stolen indigenous burial ground, another story). I ran into Topanga Homegrown and asked if they had a metal hanger but they only had wooden ones (maybe a previous sign of the times that metal hangers had become obsolete. Sigh). A woman in the store made a sign instead, which I accepted as her participation in activism for that day.
(Gotta pull people in where you can!). She owned it.
I ended up going down to the Topanga Creek Center across the Boulevard to the cleaners that looked more like a 1960s used clothing boutique. It was also hard for the owner to find metal hangers, too, but she had a few with the paper on to give me. “You know you have to teach them about natural herbal birth control. They shouldn’t just get pregnant,” she said. The sole shopper, a woman, nodded her head in agreement. I felt chills of anger creep into me. “ Not everyone gets that choice or access to that,” I replied. The shopper did concur about it being a woman’s right.
Back up on the Boulevard, I hung my hanger below my sign by punching a little hole. Many folks honked or waved. Too many looked the other way. Then there were three different white males that gave me the finger.
One gave it sideways and the other two gave it to me straight up. I’ll tell you, I had such an invasive experience of sexual assault with the two straight ups. It was a horrifyingly visceral message of patriarchal oppression. This is what the gutting of Roe vs. Wade truly is. Putting us back in our places.
