Essay: Dear Gladis
Photo: Firmm
Dear Gladis Blanca,
Thank you for ramming into my silence and pushing me into a head-on collision with the rudder of enough.
As in the revolutionary energy of “Enough.”
As in plenty.
As in this must stop.
As in fuck that shit.
As in am I doing enough.
As in do I have enough.
As in what is enough.
As in for a revolution, do you need more or enough.
Why the fuck did those so-called experts choose the generic name “Gladis” for you and your pod when your scientific name Orca gladiator so magnificently captures the ferocity of killer whales ramming yachts off the coast of Spain?
You’re an apex predator not a Sally Field character.
And I know, I know, Sally Field characters are notoriously underestimated to everyone’s detriment . It’s not their weakness that I resent, but that so often they try so hard to be liked. Who wants to be liked when we can, instead, be free?
Girls and older women are not seen as dangerous. And yet here they are, I thought, ramming yachts.
Us humans understand what a gladiator is and we understand what calling one “Gladis” does. There are all six of you! Which is why, you magnificent gladiator, what I’m about to say is going to sound at once a contradiction and a vindication. But enough of silence.
Hold on, before I continue, I should clarify: I hadn’t taken a vow of silence or anything like that. Good luck getting me to shut up. But I felt I’d ran out of words.
As in I’ve said everything there is to say.
As in what more could I say.
As in I’m fucking tired of saying the same thing
As in I need more words.
As in I had a heart full of old words and needed to bleed dry
As in the words ran out of my mouth and somersaulted into my heart.
As in I’m on a trampoline playing with the words and they somersaulted from my heart and onto the page
I was convinced you were postmenopausal. Granted, my menopause transition has me seeing menopause everywhere.
From Everything Everywhere All At Once, to every time I see someone with a hand-held fan, and especially if it’s an elaborate one, I think “Ah, menopausal!” You and I belong to species that are among the few that go through the menopause transition and wow does it turn you into a magnificent gladiator.
As in one who is fucking done.
As in one who knows to go for the guts, and to tear them to shreds.
As in fuck this shit, this must stop.
I knew I was fully into my menopause transition when I began looking men in the eye, seizing their gaze with my fury until their fear told me they understood not to fuck with me. As in I beat my assaulter and I fucking loved it.
And that’s what I saw in all the stories of Orcas attacking yachts–magnificent gladiators who were fucking done. The research says that after menopause, killer whales become pod leaders who take on new roles as wise survival guides. And I thought “Killer guides too! Teach those killer whale cubs to destroy the billionaire's rudders!”
I was thrilled that a female elder was teaching the kids danger!
As in Who You Calling a Little Old Lady
As in who has the privilege to be dangerous
As in who has the privilege to be safe
As in why are women and children below deck, in the hold, the bottom of a boat crammed full of migrants that sank not too far from the yachts where billionaires roam freely
I love the upending of the way we look at safety and who is or isn’t dangerous. Girls and older women are not seen as dangerous. And yet here they are, I thought, ramming yachts.
I was convinced you were postmenopausal. I know that rage–targeted and determined rage, to be precise. I knew I was about to cross over from peri- to postmenopause when I began to harness my rage like that. I knew I was fully into my menopause transition when I began looking men in the eye, seizing their gaze with my fury until their fear told me they understood not to fuck with me.
As in I beat my assaulter and I fucking loved it.
I was ready to eat their liver, White Gladis. I hear you do that to seals and sharks alike. You know. And did you know also that according to ancient Chinese medicine, the liver is where anger lives?
And then I read that you were pregnant when you started ramming the rudders and it was one of those moments when the vinyl comes to a screeching halt.
As in fucking hell what.
As in a dangerous pregnant female.
And even better: it is you, your mum, two sisters, and two daughters all together ramming those billionaire rudders. It has spread to more Orcas, but you were the originators.
As in a pregnant gladiator, along with her mum and sisters, teaching her daughters to disrupt,
As in that is even more thrilling than you being postmenopausal.
Image of Gladis Blanca and her family via Atlantic Orca Working Group
Gladis Blanca, up here, on land, pregnancy is one of the most dangerous times in women’s lives. Homicide is the leading cause of maternal death here in the United States. Women in the U.S. are more likely to be murdered during pregnancy or postpartum than to die of common obstetric causes such as high blood pressure, hemorrhage or sepsis. They are also at higher risk of homicide than women who are not pregnant.
All this in a country that is banning abortions with zeal. When the State has such little regard for bodily autonomy in a country where rates of maternal death are shamefully high, why would anyone else hold sacred the life of a pregnant woman?
As in “pro-life” my fucking ass.
As in “sanctity of life” the fucking hypocrisy of it all.
The experts who call you and your comrades Gladis because Gladiator is too scary think that you began to ram into the yacht rudders and to teach your daughters the power of being dangerous after a boat hit you or a fishing net entangled you.
Here you are modeling dangerous pregnancy; dangerously pregnant.
Gladis Blanca, imagine if pregnant women who were hurt by intimate partners, or by anyone really, became as dangerous as you. Imagine if along with their mothers and sisters, they taught their daughters to rampage. I’m not victim blaming here, I know you know that. I’m testing the waters (allow me the pun).
As in who is allowed to be dangerous.
As in who is socialized to own danger.
As in who is entitled to danger.
As in us humans recognize and respect danger in the female of the species only when that species is not our own.
As in is there anything more dangerous than a woman who is ready for a reckoning with the rudder of patriarchy?
Gladis Blanca, when I was younger I never thought I’d live to be 50 years old. And now that I’m in my fifties, I’m writing my obituary in my head for the first time. The line “Egyptian–American feminist Mona Eltahawy has died at…” keeps recurring in my head and I don’t know what that means.
They say when you dream of dying it symbolises a new lease of life. What does it mean when you’re writing your own obituary? Is this a new iteration of me, about to be born, after the old iteration has died. I think of that too, Gladis. And here I am about to turn 56, is this the birth of a new iteration of me?
As in pregnant with myself?
As in dangerously pregnant.
As in dangerous postmenopausal woman ready for the reckoning—your mum will understand.
As in is there anything more dangerous than a woman who is ready for a reckoning with the rudder of patriarchy?
Other than a pregnant killer whale who is dangerously pregnant, of course.
As in is there anything more dangerous than three generations of women seeking retribution.
In the words of Assata Shakur:
“We are pregnant with freedom.
We are a conspiracy.”
Keep grabbing at the rudder of enough!
Love and dangerous solidarity,
Mona
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Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. She is editing an anthology on menopause called Bloody Hell! And Other Stories: Adventures in Menopause from Across the Personal and Political Spectrum. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.
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Mona,
Thank you for this. I'm an old, white man; so, while I can't truly empathize with what you have been going through, and I certainly can't imagine how your brain works, what I can empathize with is the issue of aging that you start to raise here.
I'm a little more than a decade older than you are; so, I want to warn you that while aging does allow one some amount of freedom from constraint, it also renders one invisible eventually. which in this society is dangerous to one's continued existence.
I have been well aware of how much privilege my sex grants me for most of my life. I was subjected to abuse by my privileged, white male father when I was a boy; so I got that once I reached maturity, for no good reason, I would be granted enormous power in my culture, usually while entertaining murderous thoughts towards that man.
And seeing the way my father and mother related to their parents, I was also made aware that after I passed my "prime," as defined buy a society that maintains a timeline of relevancy for all of us, I would very quickly loose that power unless I had accomplished cementing myself into some setting that allowed me to fend off my younger competitors for supremacy.
Being a queer man and a product of the 1960's, that pursuit of supremacy just seemed empty and exhausting to me. I was are though that in our "market" economy, power is required in order to ensure one's existence, and that loss of power is dangerous for one, because in this society that means that one is left vulnerable to being exploited or discarded by those who do hold power.
Patriarchy is murderous at its core.
I know that you are already well aware of this truth, and I am not writing to cast a pall on what you write here; but I do want to urge you to stick it out with us. We need you to continue to poke your finger in the eyes of the ruling patriarchs. It's hard work. I am grateful that you are doing it. Please, keep on with it. Those beautiful orcas attacking yachts in the ocean would be dead already were it not for laws and treaties that protect them. Those laws and treaties would not exist without people like you who were willing to poke fingers in the eyes of the patriarchs running the show back when. We need people like you to continue the fight into your old age, because we old people live very close to annihilation. We are old and considered without value according to today's patriarchy.
I love this essay! I have been so impressed by the story of these orcas, but this spin on it is brilliant!
Thank you.