Everyone has different methods to help make sense of their new shelter-in-place lifestyle, and 25-year-old Brooklyn resident Saskia Phillips has some thought-provoking theories of her own.
“This whole thing is sort of like being in prison,” says Saskia while simultaneously eating some yogurt in bed and not being denied the right to vote in elections.
“You know, I’m just like reading, stretching in my room. It’s like solitary confinement!” adds the woman who went to the grocery store this morning and paid for food that she chose herself with money she earns at her work-from-home job, at a rate much higher than the 16-65 cents per hour given to incarcerated laborers.
According to sources close to the story, Saskia has frequently remarked that being partially confined to her apartment is like jail: A term she uses interchangeably with prison since she doesn’t really give a shit about what either of them actually is.
“This apartment building has become like the Bushwick penitentiary,” quips Saskia, whose new building is, in fact, a part of the systemic gentrification effort that both causes and utilizes incarceration as a means of population replacement and community disruption.
While some friends have cautioned that Saskia’s comparison is pretty ignorant and offensive, she insists her current situation of complete privacy and freedom within her home is a lot like prison, where people are stripped of all bodily autonomy from the freedom of movement to the right to consensual intimacy, legally kidnapped and displaced from their families and communities, terrorized by fear and disproportionate risk of sexual assault, and denied the basic right to participate in democracy both during and often after their sentences.
“It definitely sucks,” says Saskia. “But at least now I can workout more and get that prison body!”
Wow. We can all agree that Saskia should shut up for the rest of her life.
Enjoy the yogurt!
