By Eric Christenson

Part I: Matches

When we were kids, there was this one time where we were walking home from school and my backpack was this tiny little thing that could hold maybe a sandwich and probably a book and my brother Carl’s could hold like 15 books and 15 sandwiches.  Anyway, one day walking home from school, we found some old cigarette-sized firecrackers on the side of the road, like 6 or 7 of these things all dry and cracked, dusty on the curb.  Some were green and some blue, but they were all pretty much striped.  I was probably 7 at the time and Carl 9.  He picked up all of them and we immediately spun around in our heads trying to figure out a way to light them off without blowing our fingers off — which he’d read about — or having Mom or Dad figure out that there was now some potential that we’d blow our fingers off — which, again, Carl had read about. 

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So there’s this argument out there that women make, on average 77 cents to the dollar compared to men and the reason is because they work fewer hours.  There was this thing on “Meet the Press” where Rachel Maddow made the case for it and perpetual cool dude Alex Castellanos kept saying the reason there’s that gap is because women typically go into different, less-paying jobs than men, who primarily go into engineering and science, I guess.  He even says:

Women, it turns out, want more flexibility in their careers and more time for children and family than men do. Perhaps a better way to understand the data is this: Women work as much or more than men but prefer to do more of their life’s labor outside the business and inside the home.

Such generalization is infuriating.

So the truth is that CNN did a little digging and got Census Bureau data that says that if you have a woman and man with the exact same qualifications and the exact same education and is working the exact same hours, there is still a wage gap. It’s not 77 cents, but it’s 95 cents.  

It’s not as big of a gap, BUT IT’S STILL A GAP.  WHY IS THERE A GAP?  Why are Republicans saying that the “War on Women” (which is a term I don’t really care for) doesn’t exist and that questioning these types is creating “a problem we do not have, and unknowingly fabricating evidence.” 

This is a problem.  It’s a pretty fucking big one.  To repeal Equal Pay legislation is to deny civil rights.  We’re not making this up to spark controversy; IT ALREADY IS A CONTROVERSY and it needs to be.  The evidence is there.

The homeschooled girls that I kind of knew in high school went to France just to be subversive I think. Maybe they were copying each other or someone else, but it was important that they go to France.

Then when I finally decided where to go to college, I didn’t even think about it or them. They were nothing, probably going to marry someone in the army way early just to be committed then divorce in California.

I’m afraid I’ll run into them sometimes when I’m visiting home. Just picking up beers for me and my brother or walking around town picking out the changes. I know they’ve forgotten me.

Maybe someday instead of visiting them, I’ll fly my parents and my brother to France. We can drink the beers there and rest under those pristine bridges, watch the trees grow and the roots split.

And the homeschooled girls, they can fuck themselves.