IWD

when i was a younger woman, maybe in my early 20s, international women's day was a big deal. then, for me, feminism was one of the first ideological spaces i lived inside. the beauty myth had taken the media by storm for a couple of years in the early 90s and, along with some carefully sought out classes at mcgill, kickstarted my reading back to the earlier days of feminism. i went back to walker, to lorde, to millett, to woolf, back even to wollstonecraft. i went forward with butler, with hooks, with trinh. i ate it up, as j. would say, with two forks. feminism was first the explicit, then the implicit, lens through which i read my world.

and as i got older, my world got bigger. other ideologies presented themselves and postcolonialism, deconstruction, socialism, and now, more recently some cherrypicked tenets of buddhism, moved into my house. feminism got mixed in - as i firmly believe it should - with other perspectives that made my world make sense, that helped me build the ethical and moral standards by which i try to live my life. it became less important to fight on any single feminist point, than to attempt to harmonize, to respect the individual, to acknowledge the infinite variation of interpretation out there. in short, that we all see things differently, and as long as nobody is getting physically hurt, we can allow for the validity of other people's positions. sticks and stones, and all that jazz.

of course, i've been fortunate to have a community of friends that espouse many of the same values. by and large, we talk on the same page, rant at similar things, bang our fists on the same tables - or at least in the same restaurant. my social world, small as it is, has become a sort of utopic space.

but every now and then, the scales fall from my eyes, and i realize that that utopia i live inside is... well, utopic. feminism is not a fait accompli, as i so dearly wish it was - and as in many ways, i have been allowing myself to believe. just the other night i was at a psych lecture at the university of toronto, that venerable institution of higher learning, and the prof essentially made the unqualified claim that women wear make-up to make themselves look like they are about to have an orgasm in order to attract the men around them, thereby fulfilling the biological imperative of procreation. that science plainly claims that biology is not destiny does nothing to dissuade such ridiculous proclamations from a man entrusted with the minds of hundreds of 18-year-olds. on the subway coming home from that lecture, the tv screen with the soundbite news put up a little item about the gang rape of an unconscious 16-year-old girl by four young men who videotaped it on a cell phone, and then passed it around the school. it's pretty hard not to connect the ideological dots.

we are not beyond feminism, i remind myself. we cannot be complacent in the name of humanism. and if all we've got are words, then we at least have to speak. and i missed my chance in class the other night. i failed to stand up and find my voice. i sent a carefully worded, and likely too-polite email instead. but man, i'm mad. and it feels surprisingly good.


pj harvey - who the fuck