Eight years ago, I started my first blog when my journalist friend got me and my neighbor B press passes to the Republican National Convention at Madison Square Garden. I thought my new blog might marry sex and punditry, and when I went to the convention, I interviewed young, hot Republicans, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog and the Daily Show’s Samantha Bee about all the sexy sex they were having or not having. It was fun and funny and weird and B and I felt like spies in a funhouse. We ate media hotdogs and drank newspaperman beers and we thought it hysterically funny when we stumbled across the “W stands for Women” signage on the floor. Because what could be more obviously ironic, right?

We watched W win the election on the floor of B’s apartment, in front of his flatscreen (he was the first person I knew who had one), and then we got cripplingly drunk on the keg his roommate, who was a Bud salesmen, kept in the living room. I remember feeling disappointed. I remember B and I making out halfheartedly, I think it was that night. But the feeling that we were having fun never went away. It was too bad, this fucking W business, and we were disappointed, but that’s exactly what it was anyway: business.

This election, well, I’m having a hard time finding the funny. As the GOP continually aligns itself against women’s rights, my memories of those W signs aren’t idiotically ironic, they’re chilling, a harbinger. I can’t even say the words “Republicans” and “sex” in the same breath any more. None of this feels like political business as usual, there for the satirizing. To me, to this W, it feels dangerous and exhausting. Maybe I’m just eight years older. Maybe if I were 27, it would still seem fun and strange and interesting and alien instead of humiliating and frightening.

This Todd Akin rape news is barely even news. It’s just same shit, different day. And I never would have guessed, back when I was asking muscular boys in crewcuts and khakis if they’d figured out how to get blowjobs in Penn Station, that I would someday be too angry to even consider speaking to those boys. But here I am. Angry. Like an old, icky, man-hating feminist should be, I suppose, and I’m wondering what next, everyone? Because this stuff, it’s not fun anymore.