17 Real-Life Would-You-Rathers I, a Woman, Have Had to Ask Myself

1. Would you rather have a career or a family?

2. Would you rather be perceived as likable or competent?

3. Would you rather be told to smile or to calm down?

4. Would you rather be called “Sweetie” or “Ma’am”?

5. Would you rather have a strange man lightly touch your knee or the small of your back?

6. Would you rather spend the rest of your life explaining why you don’t want kids or why you don’t want his dick pic?

7. Would you rather be “shrill” but finish your sentence or polite but interrupted by your male colleague?

8. Would you rather shoot literal botulism into your face or look your real age, you hag?

9. Would you rather breastfeed your child in public like a whore or feed your child toxic commercial formula like a terrible mother?

10. Would you rather be groped in a bus or groped in a bar, and also what were you wearing, you filthy skank?

11. Would you rather be blamed for your partner’s affair because you’re frigid and have too little sex or blamed for your sexual assault because you’re slutty and have too much sex?

12. Would you rather accept societal messaging that tells women they have to compete against each other for men, jobs, and who wore it better, or reject that messaging and support women, you ugly man-hating feminist?

13. Would you rather get your period, which is dirty and shameful and gross and must be hidden at all costs, or not get your period, which means you are not a “real” woman, whether that’s because you’re postmenopausal or you’re trans or you have a medical condition, you bloodless, barren, good-for-nothing crone?

14. Would you rather be vilified for your choice to have an abortion, you selfish, godless baby-killer, or become a mother in America, the only developed nation without paid maternity leave and one of only thirteen countries in the world where maternal mortality rates are rising, especially for black women, who are almost four times more likely than white women to die of pregnancy-related causes, but shut up about health care already, you entitled, hysterical, overemotional, elitist shrew?

15. Would you rather try to take out a loan for your small business, even though female-owned businesses get 4% of all money given out in small business loans and male-owned businesses get the other 96%, or try to take out a loan for your college education, which will probably need to be bigger than the average man’s loan because your family is statistically less likely to have saved money for your lady-education, and which you’ll have more trouble paying back than men do because you’re making 80 cents on his dollar — 54 cents if you are Latina — which means you can’t pay off the loan as fast, which means you accrue more and more interest, which means more and more debt, which means more and more trouble paying it off, which means more and more trouble accumulating wealth over your lifetime, which means a bigger and bigger gender wealth gap, but why do you women hold 2/3 of all outstanding student loan debt, you dumb, ditzy, irrational, hormonal bimbos?

16. Would you rather realize you’ve spent way too much time writing a list of Catch-22s women face in 21st-century America, but you could still keep going because sexism is all around you all the time always any time you step outside, or realize you honestly don’t even know where your own internalized sexism ends because this patriarchal society is the only one you’ve ever known and what if someday everyone of every gender and color was equal but also is that even possible given the entrenched forces of capitalism and the inherent selfishness of human nature and let’s be real right now it’s hard to imagine what that utopian egalitarian feminist society would even look like and you’re just so so tired, you frumpy, melodramatic, PMS-ing, bossy, ball-busting bitch?

17. Would you rather blow Matt B. or Matt C.?