#35 Let Women Be Many

This morning I caught myself circling a hard, simple truth: a lot of the talk around women is a smokescreen. Under it sits fear—many men fear women.

That fear rarely says its own name. It shows up as folklore: we “belong” in kitchens, we’re “built” for babies, marriage will “protect” us, our highest calling is to decorate and caretake. If women stay small, no one has to ask men who they are without being the center.

Here’s the unromantic reality. Women are fully human. We want what people want: the dignity of our own choices, the freedom to be ourselves without apology. Some of us invent, travel alone, run crews, argue for sport, take hard shots under pressure, and sleep just fine the night before a risk. Some of us want kitchens and children and the slow beauty of domestic life. Freedom means both doors stay open without shame.

What grinds the gears isn’t women choosing the home; it’s the rule that the home must choose all women. That rule comes dressed as concern. It tells a girl, long before she can answer back, where to put her eyes, how to hold her head, which colors “flatter,” what fabrics soften her, what to eat to stay “pretty,” how to speak so she pleases without threatening. It trains her to be looked at before it ever teaches her to look back. The message lands early and it sticks: your body is a public project; your choices are community property.

Men have their own tightrope, and it cuts. No tears, no tenderness, no hand on a shoulder too long. In plenty of places, a man risks a label for ordinary affection. But the rules on girls start sooner and swallow more of the day: the outfit is evidence; the smile is required; the no is negotiable. When “being pleasant” becomes a safety plan, that isn’t manners—it’s management.

Here’s the crux: women don’t want to be men. Men are simply allowed to be themselves. We want that same license. Not a costume, not a cosign—just the room to be as complicated, gifted, ordinary, moody, ambitious, nurturing, or disinterested as we truly are. Small ask. Big implications.

Take the panic about women in hard places—ER nights, welding shops, high office, freight yards, combat units. The panic pretends to be protective: What if she gets hurt? What if we feel things?Protection without permission is control with flowers on it. If a woman weighs the stakes and says yes, your discomfort isn’t the governor of her life. Respect her consent the way you’d respect a man’s.

And if your joy is home: bless it. Raise children with the seriousness of an art. Build a kitchen that holds your talent and your peace. Just don’t turn your calling into our cage. The most provincial habit on earth is mistaking a personal preference for a public rule.

I’ll name myself here. I’ve been both the woman in boots on a deadline and the woman in lipstick at brunch—and I’m the same person in both outfits. I’ve also watched women police one another: the eye-roll for the “too ambitious” colleague, the purity test for mothers, the suspicion of women whose beauty is a door they won’t open for you. Internalized rules feel like conscience; they’re only custom. When we police each other, we volunteer for a system that was never designed to serve us. We make the border guards redundant by working the night shift for free.

What would a saner order ask of us?

• Retire the job of being decoration. A woman’s face isn’t public infrastructure. Some days hair is just hair and clothes are just clothes.

• Treat female ambition as ordinary, not provocative. No one calls a man “intimidating” for wanting scope.

• Call care work what it is—skill, not fate. If she chooses it, honor the mastery; if she doesn’t, spare her the sermon.

I’m not naïve about how fear defends itself. It will dress as concern, hire statistics like lawyers, point to tradition as if time could baptize a habit into justice. But fear is a bad architect. It builds rooms without oxygen and asks women to smile through the dizziness.

The sharper truth—the one I trust—is simple enough to cut glass: women are not a problem to manage; we are a plurality to meet. Let some of us break trail and some of us keep the hearth. Let some of us be beloved for softness and some for steel. Let us choose. That’s the whole project. Everything else is choreography to distract from the door.

If this sounds like a threat, ask what’s at risk. If your center can’t stand when women stand beside you, it isn’t a center; it’s a pedestal. Pedestals are for statues, not partners.

The call is not complicated. Stop confusing protection with control. Stop outsourcing your anxieties to our wardrobes. Stop treating our choices like referendums on yours. Start honoring consent as the only weather that matters. Start unlearning the reflex to rank women’s lives by how well they decorate yours. Start—finally—by letting women be many.

That’s it. That’s the essay. That’s the life.

—Catherine Fraser

___________________

Citations

• Bartky, Sandra Lee. “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power.” Feminism and Foucault (1988).

• Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex (1949).

• Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble (1990).

• Connell, R. W. Masculinities (1995).

• Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.” University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989).

• Hochschild, Arlie Russell. The Second Shift (1989).

• hooks, bell. Feminism Is for Everybody (2000).

• Young, Iris Marion. “Throwing Like a Girl.” Human Studies 3, no. 2 (1980).

#108

As Summer Dies

Late summer loosens gold into the soft dusk,

his breath of heat unbuttons the cool wind now;

Green listens, is starting to bleed

into the red of leaving time—

The summer’s dying.

A raven taps my window like a bell once,

when autumn pours in marigold and cinder;

The orchard hems the dusk with thread,

two crows begin the seam of night—

feathers and omen.

You stain my mouth with smoke and clove—rain falling—

our breath in a cup of persimmon wine drunk;

Leaves loosen into flame and song,

curling their burning vows to ash—

all falling to ember.

At Mabon, golden scales lean into night, soft,

we bind doors with candles, wheat, and sweet roses;

We call our dead by name with light,

and lay them bread and wine to rest—

the veil so thin now.

See branches die like antlers dipped in incense?

Cathedral ribs comb winter into music;

At Samhain, ravens write our names

in rime across our skin of stars—

Love lives through winter.

— Marni Fraser

0827.2025

Image by Marni Fraser • Indiana 2025

An Ode

Homeward (Ode To)

When the room empties of voices

and gratitude steadies my breath,

you begin again—soft as a thread

slipping through the eye of the day—

you stay where my heart keeps secrets,

and lower still,

where my body’s gate remembers you.

Your trace follows me

down the street, a perfume-shadow,

guiding me to the house of your arms—

wide doors closing around me—

your eyes—rooms I step into—

and your laughter,

a ribbon circling my ribs

and fastening its bright knot to my heart.

Your mouth finds mine; the latch unclasps.

Un hálito se alza entre nosotros,

the hush turning warm and tidal,

and your body, patient engine, rows

the dark river we made of light.

You are the single brown bee;

I, the unruly bloom.

Your tongue maps my hidden roads,

your hands sew your shadow to my skin,

and the night—once pitch—

flares open like an effortless match.

Your kiss falls like a waterfall,

washing me into brightness.

At my opening the petals take courage,

unfurling their secret grammar;

your finger hums—small lightning—

finding the sweet kept only for you.

I could be a thousand women, or one—

all my pleasure lives where yours begins,

and calls your name

as if the word were home.

Marni Fraser

0826.2025

Ghost Wings

0426.2025

The sun sings me awake

with its voice of salt and gold—

it folds sorrow into the sea,

drowning it beneath the oldest bones.

I’ve unstitched every thread,

its pride wearing me

like rusted armor—

its cruelty coming

in too many kind voices.

It’s killed my desire for breath,

to taste life’s honey,

to try, and…

I’ve released the thread—

the thread of a ghost-winged dove

sent soundlessly

through the hush of my tears.

I recall the spell hope can cast.

I watch the look of its leaving.

I hear the wind moan behind its face.

They say breaking apart of things,

was all mine—

but the fracture,

like the blade,

was always in their hands.

❦

m.c.f.

Marni Fraser • 2025

Excerpt from: #32 The Case for Complaining (Without Becoming a Complainer)

II. Contexts and Power

Power is not an ornament here; it is a condition. The more power I carry, the louder my complaint registers, often regardless of merit. The less power I carry, the more “tone,” “timing,” and “style” are used as gates against me. This is not paranoia. It is an old fact with fresh platform polish. Women are framed as emotional. Poor people are framed as jealous. Immigrants are framed as confused. Accent becomes a stand-in for intelligence. Grammar gets treated like a moral test. The fix is not to beg for a different bias. The fix is receipts. Facts are not a charm against prejudice, but they anchor the conversation when people try to drag it toward tone. (Audre Lorde’s line—“your silence will not protect you”—is hers, and I agree with the claim about speech as survival. I am making a narrower claim about complaint as a structured case within that speech.)[^1]

So why do people stay quiet? Because quite often buys safety. Because they grew up being punished for factual sentences. Because they learned that keeping everyone else comfortable was the price of belonging. Because vagueness—maybe I’m overreacting—feels safer than conviction when conviction gets you labeled “difficult.” Because DARVO (deny–attack–reverse victim and offender) trains you to doubt your own eyes. Because gendered norms script women as agreeable and cast men who complain as authoritative, not dramatic. Because the bystander effect makes each of us wait for the other to stand first. Because sunk costs make us guard our investments even when they’re bleeding us out. Because perfectionism tells us that if the complaint isn’t irrefutable in every detail, better not to speak at all. Silence has private payoffs—peace, belonging, paychecks, sometimes literal survival. I won’t shame the quiet. I will say the bill comes due.

What does complaint give the speaker when it’s used with core? Agency returns. The body stops carrying the whole case in the jaw and the gut. Hidden information surfaces; you discover you were not the only one. Boundaries get set and sometimes respected. Stress leaves the body in sentences instead of in ulcers. Allies find you. Patterns get documented. Power rebalances: one voice is a spark; ten are a signal; a thousand is policy. Inside small rooms, complaint normalizes dissent so that improvement becomes custom, not scandal. Products, services, classrooms, clinics—all of them sharpen when customers, students, and patients refuse to be flattered into silence. Sometimes a complaint is a lesson for the recipient: you are being trusted with the truth; act like it.

Costs exist, and not only reputational ones. In some countries and contexts, the cost of complaint is retaliation, loss of livelihood, violence. Even where life and limb aren’t threatened, mis-timed or poorly scoped complaints can rupture relationships beyond repair. Chronic complaint without a path corrodes attention; gratitude shrivels; identity collapses into “the one who always has a problem.” After an unskillful complaint comes the emotional hangover: fatigue, embarrassment, powerlessness. None of this is an argument for silence. It is an argument for the right tool and the right aim.

There’s a cultural layer here that deserves honesty, not insult. Communication styles differ. In some cultures, meaning rides on implication and relationship; in others, it rides on explicit words and public accountability. When those styles collide, complaints can seem like betrayal to one side and evasion to the other. I live in the cross-current. My position: learn both grammars. Directness without empathy bruises; implication without clarity confuses. A functioning civic culture needs clear words that care. Newcomers and natives alike benefit from orientation to that standard. It is not about replacing one culture with another. It is about a shared civic practice that lets harm be named and fixed.

What happens on the recipient’s side is not trivial. When handled well, a complaint creates psychological safety: I spoke, you listened, something genuine moved. It invites repair: apology that isn’t cosmetic, change that isn’t performative. When handled poorly, it triggers defensiveness—old shame, ego threat, the fear that competence is on trial. Attachment histories matter. Secure people can tolerate the heat and stay present. Anxious ones escalate to re-secure closeness. Avoidant ones shut down to preserve autonomy. Disorganized ones ping-pong. This isn’t therapy; it’s logistics. If I know the nervous system across from me, I can decide if a private complaint can land at all or if I need a third party or a formal channel.

Specificity is the difference between a case and a vibe. Behavior, dates, impact, request—if I can’t supply these, I’m probably not ready to deliver the complaint, or what I have is disappointment, not a claim. Apologies and visible repair shorten the cycle: “You’re right; here’s what we’re changing this week.” On the other end, compassion fatigue is real; recipients tasked with absorbing endless complaints without resources or authority burn out and get cynical. That cynicism is dangerous; it converts real harms into “just another ticket.” If a system is structured so that most complaints are unsolvable at the level of the recipient, that system invites either revolt or numbness. Neither is an argument against the truth. They are an argument for putting power where the harms actually live.

Because we pretend structure is boring, harms get personalized. We blame the clerk for the policy, the teacher for the district, the nurse for the system, the moderator for the platform. Sometimes they are complicit; sometimes they are the last human buffer between a bad design and a livid public. Systemic complaint is a different animal. It requires patience, coalition, pattern recognition, and the skepticism to resist simple villain stories. A single complaint can expose a seam in that fabric, but the mending takes more than a single thread.

— Transition. With stakes and power on the table, the final movement turns to practice—how complaint travels through channels, how to keep it ethical, and how to end well.

c.f.

_____

Notes

[^1]: Audre Lorde, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” first delivered 1977; collected in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press)

Begin Again

Every work begins as a murmur, or an image in the corner of the eye. Sometimes it starts as a sentence that won’t leave, or a silence that insists on being named, or seen. This blog will hold some of those murmurs.

Here, I’ll share excerpts that reach further than the fragments on social media: poems that do not belong in the books but still want to be read, brief notes from the studio, glimpses of paintings and photographs as they form and change. Stories how these all have come to be.

I want this space to feel like conversation across a threshold—sometimes intimate, sometimes oblique. Not polished like press, but something closer to a letter: unfinished, alive, imperfect in a way that keeps its life.

Art is, for me, a way of asking without needing to resolve. I’ll be writing here in that same spirit.

m.c.f.