Hip Idolatry from The Panopticon by Melissa Finn

When they publicly shame
The resisting woman ‘criminal’
For her lack of submissiveness
To the flame of social violence
They apportion blame
Re-distribute this frame
Throw it everywhere to create an ideology of shame
Women’s weight needs to be tamed!

From watched to watcher, they twist reality
Throw principles out the window
Expecting lavishness, excess, and debauchery
Encircle the hips from every angle, hip idolatry

Like when the police officer with a howitzer
Sees a DWB – Driving While Black
Or a LWI – Living While Indigenous
Stir
Compulsively searches him for a non-existent hip revolver
Patrol that feels victim
Before every B-boy and I-boy encounter
Trigger fingers pulsating with fear
Living and breathing Black and Indigenous youth
Women
Are people to everyday domineer


The thread falls
From one bigger thread
In a web of life
Our Spirit is aware
Of the purposes, the many circumstances
In which its threads find themselves

A social misogynistic culture
Inflicts claims on women
That have been inflicted upon men
By the state
Where men make their own
Discipline and punishment
A new watchtower
To be idolized


In this state of affairs
Men’s vulnerabilities are exacted on women’s measureables
Women are classified as property, wares

Women in the culture panopticon
Face
Confinement, forced labor, penal servitude
Controls on movement, deportation
Caused by dulled social imagination
The belief that the world should be governed by limitation

The thread falls
From one bigger thread
In a web of life
Our Spirit is aware
Of the purposes, the many circumstances
In which its threads find themselves

• Spoken Word
• philosophical
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