Brunch at the saloon, with the grrls: Colette, Jo, Miraj, and myself.

"'My dear woman,' he cried, 'I write from DICtation!' Well, of course, it was all over pretty quickly after that."
Jo's dishing on how she was able to take care of Wynn without chipping a nail.

"Brilliant. And not one shot fired through the whole mess."
"Well, shit, Jo. If I'd known Wynn was gonna be that easy, I would've finished him off myself."
"Carey, dear, I'm not sure that you've got quite the right equipment for that. It wasn't exactly a women's touch that he was looking for..."
"Right, of course."
"No wonder they won't let Jo carry a gun in this town. She's packin enough heat as it is! Ha ha!"
"You would think that any self-identified woman would have the right to defend herself no matter where she goes. Goodness knows she's sure had the need to, ever since the dawn of Homo sapiens. She wasn't nothin but a man's property up until a coupla centuries ago."
"You know why? Cuz that was the only protection a woman had. If there wasn't a man to claim her and fight off the other men, she'd get violated all the fuckin time. There would have been no end to it."
"Women are still violated all the time."
"Yeah, but think about it this way: a man respects another man's property, or he'll risk getting physically hurt. A woman all alone, what kinda chance does she have? How's she gonna defend herself?"
"Do you think that's all because women were perceived as the weaker sex? Cuz you know, technically speaking, there's a wider spectrum of physical strength within male humans than there is between the sexes."
"I think it was partly an evolutionary thing. If women weren't treated as though they were more delicate then perhaps they wouldn't have survived long enough to reproduce and raise their young."
"True. Women had to survive childbirth and breastfeeding in order to raise the next generation. They required more care than men did, even if it was mostly women taking care of women."
"Is that why it took us so long to learn how to fight?"
"Seems like there's a lotta people who still think we're the weaker sex. Right, Carey?"
Everyone's suddenly starin at me but I've lost track of the conversation.
"What? A woman's right to bare arms?"
"Yeah, sleepy head. Are you with us?"
"Of course. Of course! A woman has the right to dress any way that she chooses."
"Even if she chooses to adorn herself with a Model 1 Smith and Wesson?"
"Huh?"
"C'mon, Carey, we're trying to have a discussion. Get with the program."
"The thing is," Jo arches one eyebrow, as nonchalant as ever, "and I'm speaking from a privileged position here, ahem. I think that most male aggression is directly related to his penis. He's angry because he can't get it up. He's angry because it's up and he doesn't know what to do with it. That's why there's so much emphasis placed on a woman's physique. Women have to look sexy so that a man can get it up. If he can't get it up then he can't have sex, and if he can't have sex then what kind of a man is he! See what I mean? Then he's going to blame problems on everything but his own penis. If he can't get it up then it's the woman's fault. If it's up and there's no woman interested in having sex with him then there's obviously something wrong with women in general. And on it goes..."
"The thing is, Joe," I've stopped disassociating, and I'm about to giv'em a lashing, "why should we have to get violent? Dammit. Why can't we be pacifists? We shouldn't be punished because we don't know how to fight. Why should we have to learn? We have every right not to defend ourselves. We have every right not to be attacked in the first place. Why should we have to change our behaviour when we're doing nothing wrong? You see?"