Fury.

 There was a post, on a friends facebook, it included a link pertaining to an upcoming election in a country which isn't this one which advised feminists and people who respect women alike that one of the candidates had potentially damaging views regarding reproductive rights.  There was a reply from someone I don't know suggesting that the real problem was that abortion was available at all.  I tried not to reply, I really did.  I went away from the page TWICE.

I got drawn into an argument where the commenter actually engaged with what I was saying and responded to my points - unexpected in itself - but in each of his successive points revealed more and more abhorrent opinions.  The friend on whose wall this was taking place contributed once and then, after a particularly odious comment which I managed to reply to with the one line I could type out through the red mist of rage and shaking hands ("Rape is not about "permissive attitude to sex" it is about power and it is about violence"), she deleted it.  A fair choice because I would have gone all night against that ignorant hate.

Anyway, I'm a little shell shocked to come across someone like that on home turf, as it were, and now have a stiff rum and coke and a desire to articulate something resembling a mantra - in the hope it somehow cleanses my brain of the hateful bilge I have read tonight.

• You will not make me ashamed of my body, my sexuality, my sex and my desires
  
• You will not succeed if you try and convince me that sexuality and it's expression has any kind of inherent moral value
  
• Your ignorance about the reality of sexual violence and the continued abuse and oppression of women (and men) both in the home and out of it will not prevail against the voices of those who suffer and the actions to end it of those people who are well informed and open minded to the reality of oppression.
  
• I know that the multiplicity of family forms, relationships and love which are expressed in thousands of homes across the country and millions across the world will grow in visibility and strength and year on year we will show, merely by continuing to exist, that our worth is just the same as the monolithic representation of family you blindly recognise as 'viable'
  
• I will articulate, encourage others to articulate their sexuality without shame or fear. 
  
• These are our bodies, our choices are ours to make and ours alone.  You will not succeed in inscribing your narrow notions of morality upon my skin and my flesh or that of my brothers and sisters.
  
• You, and your victim blaming, misogynistic, sex-shaming opinions will not triumph against the voracity and volume with which we speak and share the truth.