Is Feminism Obsolete?

In this video forwarded to me by my friend Rebecca Rod, republican strategist, Mary Matalin can't even say "feminism," she stalls every time before she utters the words, which doesn't surprise me, even though she says the feminism she once fought for in the 60s has been perverted over the years. Perverted? By whom? By what?

While I stand behind Palin defending her daughters (what mother wouldn't defend their daughters from nationally broadcast comment like that), I also balked at her for saying that it's a matter women's rights. Pft. Whatever Palin... Like women's rights are on the forefront of your mind. Whatever bus you want to ride...

But I eat my words...Like Jessica Valenti at feministing.com, a philosophy of feminism professor once told me that a feminist is someone who designates themselves as one, or someone else who designates another as one. So is it any surprise that the word "feminism" is convoluted, and doesn't have the same meaning as it did in the 60s or 70s? Because, as feminists, we have so many issues that matter to us, we have so many agendas, that it only seems the word is "obsolete."

But it's not. It wasn't lost in 2004 when The March for Women's Lives drew over a million people. I believe that today feminists are more widely spread. From the people who are returning to more domesticated ways of living and staying home with their families, to the people on campuses programming and bringing awareness to student communities, to separatists who are still working the land and maintaining women's communes, to queers working on trans issues, to people of all genders continuing to work on abortion rights, to women seeking equality in the military, to the men and gender benders who stand behind our cause and walk with us at marches...

Feminism isn't "obsolete," unless you are only paying attention to national media..

But if Tina Brown thinks Hillary Clinton is real female power and Naomi Wolf thinks Angelina Jolie is the "embodiment of female power and liberation," I wonder what other public figures we can point to that demonstrate the diversity of feminist activist who continue to demonstrate "real" female power. Why not bell hooks? Isn't she still writing, still speaking out, still working for the cause? What about Gloria Steinem? Is she not longer relevant because she of her age, or her married status? What about the men who work for the feminist agenda, wouldn't Cornell West consider himself a feminist? And one of my favorite people to reflect on, Phillis Schlafly, I might even point to and call a feminist even though she would never call herself one, and was nearly the antithesis of feminism in the 60s and 70s. But wouldn't she fall in line with some of our feminists today?

I care about being a feminist, but I wonder if we should consider the questions posed by CNN reporter, Carol Costello. Why care about being a feminist anymore? If everyone has their own definition of feminism, why even use the word?

And finally, has feminism really become an exclusive club?

A Controlled Burn

The hardest part of negotiating a relationship with my other mother is determining whether or not she is of sound enough mind to maintain contact.

We haven't spoken to one another since before Christmas when I decided that her schizophrenia combined with drug and alcohol usage was effecting her ability to have coherent conversations with me. Also, after several phone calls that pursued the same line of questioning about my mother I felt as if her intentions for remaining in touch with me were not so much about our relationship, but with the desire maintain a thin line of contact with my mother. Just in case. And maybe that is her reason for remaining in touch with me - I am the last thread that connects her to a life she cannot recover, the one life in which she felt she really lived.

And maybe I keep in touch with her for my own reasons. She is a part of my connection to an identity: daughter of lesbians. And I keep in touch with her because I worry that she has no one, or few people, in her life that support her and love her unconditionally. Though, I am not even sure I love her unconditionally anymore. My psychological and emotional state is valuable to me and cannot afford to teeter any closer to the line where I could potentially break down and give into confusion. I've already been there and know what it takes to get out. I don't have time.

I also keep in touch with her out of guilt. I am her daughter. Her only daughter, as her biological daughter with whom she adopted out at birth, fled the relationship after meeting her in person for the first time, and has not kept in touch with her after seeing her physical and mental state several Christmases ago. Maybe she too closely saw what she could turn into and ran for her life. Sometimes I wonder if I should also run.

She called me few days ago after receiving the news that my grandfather passed through her brother whom my mother emailed to relay the message, and her voice mail plead for a phone call if it was in fact true. I considered it for days and finally called today to confirm her suspicion. Our conversation was short, she told me to give her condolences to my grandmother and my mother, and she told me that demons chased her from her apartment and I understood how that could happen, and she told me that she should write down her history so that I could write about - that there was so much to talk about, and she said that she had taken up painting again and this was a surprise to me because the only art I'd seen her do was during her times of institutionalization. But she laughed, she didn't mean she was using paint - she meant she had been smearing her own feces on the walls.

"Ew" I said instinctively and without thinking. And I had already said it when I realized there was a more appropriate response that should've come from my mouth. I could only ask about her meds, if she had been to the doctor lately, if she was ok.

She rarely tells me that she's anything but ok.
She's not ok.
She hasn't been for a long time.

Sometimes the mind snaps and the mind deteriorates before your eyes, as out of control as a brush fire in August. And sometimes the deterioration of the mind is slow and steady as a controlled burn, ever square inch of the minds land charred. Both fires have the capacity to spread flames onto the lands around them, and I often find myself fighting a fire which I allowed to ignite.

I rarely tell anyone I am anything but ok.
I'm also not ok.
I haven't been for a long time.

But I still have my mind.

The Rising Tide of White

Every morning I look in the mirror and find a razor-gray stripes highlighting my round face. They are prolific little buggers and I've given up trying to control them. It wasn't that I was trying to control them really, what I was trying to control was the red-ended grow out that is the last twenties years of my hair dying experimentation. My reasons for attempting to modify my dye-crazy behavior and let the gray grow out is due, in part, to watching my mother's hair grow, dye, and be cut. The two of us have been dying our hair a nice rusty auburn color for so long that people assume we are natural reddish-heads. Because of this, we've been unable to see the slow transition of our dark-ash-brown crowns turning to sterling. Catch my mother in a lull between dye-jobs and you'll find she has a white halo around her face and down her skull that spreads a few inches, as if Moses himself was parting the supermarket Red-Sea. By gauging the clone-like similarities between my mother and I, the decision was made to grow out the dye now and face aging head on (or at least on my head).

At 51, if you eek a peek under the red cloak, at the base of my mother's roots, you will see that her hair is a shiny white with a few stray brown survivors holding on for their lives. My hair, now down to my waist, is a result of nearly eight years of growing my hair out. From the skull, the first 5-6 inches is my natural color, the rest is curly, over-processed, reddish-brownish, what stylists without the right descriptive words call "ethnic-like" hair. Since we all have an ethnic heritage, I guess it's safe to assume that I got this hair from the smattering of god-knows-what European heritages with which I am composed. People more familiar with Irish folk will tell me that is where my curly coarse hair comes from. And the like for the Italian side of me. But there is that long lost branch of my heritage which remains a mystery. All I have is picture of the man who would've been my biological grandfather had he not passed in a plane crash when my mother was four, and a hazy memory of my great grandparents Zefa and Jesse Jones, both of who were blazing white-haired folk who passed long before I could ask them questions about that side of the family. All I knew is that Zefa made her way to Oregon on a wagon-train. The memory of sitting at her feet while she rocked in a chair telling me the story, is something I believe I made up. Maybe after my mom relayed the story to me herself.

Without knowing the heritage of that branch of my family, I am also not privy a great deal of additional knowledge. I know there are some Jones family in the SF are, but my curiosity hasn't compelled me to go dig through public records to find out more about this, as of now, fictitious family. Particularly since I've heard that a certain woman was brazen enough to say "Oh, bullshit" at a funeral my mother attended for her late uncle when the read the list of survivors and included her a a niece. Maybe I don't need to get to know the Jones family after all...

And I look at my grandmother, a Sparks, and see that it took here a long time to grow in the gray. And I look at my Dad who's 52 and see that he's just starting to brighten up a bit above the brow. His parents went gray - but not until much later - so I am sure that I am more Jones than I can ever imagine, though I can only look into the eyes of my mother and see her father's and see his mother's eyes and realize that not only do my eyes droop in the corners as they do, but that my hair might be one of the only living Jones histories with which I am able to have tactile contact.

In the mornings is when I touch it, feel it, get close to the mirror and examine the prism of light that passes through the hair and wonder how long it will take me to rid myself of the awful red-dyed ends hanging from my head, or how quickly I will turn platinum like my mother, my great-grand-mother, and if I will coil my hair in a bun as she did, or if I will find my way back to the dye and try to reclaim my youth for 11.59 in the beauty products aisle. Or maybe I will just love the hell out of this hair, all these stray grays that my ex individually points out while saying her name. And though they say that we don't go gray because of stress, even though we now know it's a chemical reaction that comes from the inside and works it's way out, these gray hairs are all bricks through the pathway that is my life.

So I'm gonna let them grow. Because although it's been a crazy ride, and a helluva journey, I'm ready (for now) to recognize that it's all been worth the slow rising tide of white upon my head.

Many Means of Expression

On a day like this, how can one not have something to say?

There are many political goings-on that have moved me to tears over the past eight years:

• My family called from Canada the night before I voted. They left messages on my voice mail saying, "We are just calling to remind you to vote for Gore." But, President George W. Bush's election in 2000 was not one of the events that caused me tears; quite the contrary, I was infuriated. But at that point, I was still too young and far too self consumed too think much of his election other than a halfhearted, "Well, it's the end of the world" or "it's certain we'll go to war with him in the White House."

• There were tears of unhinged fear upon seeing the World Trade Center's twin towers fall along with so many people. There was a voice mail from a friend in Brooklyn with whom I had spent a long evening under the towers, just three days earlier. He said, "Chelsia. Oh mah gawd. I'm fine, but I am standing on Carol Street and there are pencils falling from the sky." And the line went dead.
  

• March 20th, 2003. 12 a.m. PST. In bed, beside my girlfriend. We held each other, crying, talking, fearful that our president was keeping his promise and dropping bombs on villages in Afghanistan. We asked each other, "Do you really think he'll do it?" We looked at the walls of her basement and imagined Children asleep in houses made of clay, thousands of miles away. We fell asleep with our eyes wet and when we woke the next morning we protested with 30-thousand others in the streets of Portland.

• Then, the "mis-election" of President George W. Bush defeated me in 2004 and put me to bed early. My tears, that day, were for my the failure of my state (Oregon) to support equal rights for GLBT families when they decidedly passed of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. I had worked so hard that year for equal rights for my family of origin and for my relationship and those of my chosen family and community. And o top it all of, my country reelected a man I was sure would bring down not only our country, but many others.

• April 24th, 2004. Tears again. When I walked onto the National Mall and saw 1.5 million other people present in defense of women's rights to privacy and choice. I cried at the magnitude of people who showed up in D.C. at what was called the largest march on Washington for women's rights, ever. And that I was so privileged to attend with the gracious support from the students and faculty from my community college to get me there. It was there that I heard Senator Hillary Clinton speak. It was that march that, I believe, caused Dick Cheney to withdraw his request for the medical records of women in the US who had had abortions. It was a small victory, but an important one.
  

Today and last night, off and on, I've released a few tears, mostly of joy, for the achievements of the incoming administration and the men and women of our country who fought for so long prior to this moment; for those who died, who wrote and sang and marched in the streets so that our country could elect a President of color. And on this day, (I hate to use such a cliche' campaign slogan but...) I am filled with such hope that gains will be made for equality in all of the spectrum of community in this country; be it that of race, nationality, religion, socio-economic status, political affiliation, sexual orientation, gender, ability, age, and any other identity included. I feel as if opportunity has broadened for many and that a new spirit may prevail, if we allow it so. I believe that spirit is that of Love.

I can't help but think of my sisters on a day like this. One 13 and the other 11. Although this may be somewhat only interesting to them, I hope they someday understand the importance of this day in the history of this nation. I hope that our world and that the people of this nation demonstrate the recognition, accountability, and responsibility President Barack Obama asked us to dutifully undertake for the sake of future generations.

When I was in Jr. High School, there was a blip in time where I became aware of international politics. My mothers recorded the news that broadcast the firing of artillery through night vision. Little green dots flew through the air in all directions and explosions erupted on the horizon as the newscasters detailed what was happening to a entranced audience. Although we didn't know the ins and outs of Desert Storm, we knew war was wrong and therefore, protested by walking out of school and having a sit-in on the grassy field at Rowe Jr. High School. We sat for a while and then the administrators pulled us back in. Unfortunately, I didn't become aware of politics again, or the impact of national politics, until long after I left high school.

I was awakened by the Seattle WTO protests and Y2K. It was then that I realized how much each of us is woven into the power of the larger systems this country and this world. It was then that I realized I couldn't afford to not pay attention.

But I haven't been paying much attention and I haven't been working for the last three years. I've been disheartened, angry, self-involved, unable to look, and I simply turned the channel. I can afford to do work and maybe I should have been doing work all along. But I believe that change occurs no matter how small of a change you make or no matter how few hear your voice.

Today President Obama said, "...your people will judge you on what you can build, and not what you destroy." And although he directed this remark to the leaders of countries in conflict, I believe it is a message we should all hear. No matter how small you think your impact is, lets build instead of destroy, love instead of hate, have hope instead of fear, and go forward in the spirit of building a better world and community that will sustain for many generations to come.

Does My Hair Make My Ass Look Big?

Weight: 155 / BMI: 26% / Height: 5'6" / Target Weight: 137-145

This is what the internet tells me as I click through site after site of weigh loss advice.
Oh, there is no lack of information on the web for how to get your skinny on.
The problem, no one is getting skinnier by sitting on their ass at the keyboard.
Some people want to get slimmer, some people want to gain weight, and a very few and select special people love their body just the way it is.
That's right, they are the special ones.
Realistically, I know there isn't any reason for me to lose weight except for my own desire to get in shape and trim up or whatever my newest body ambition turns out to be.
At this point, I am relatively comfortable with my body.
80% comfortable. That's a pretty good number.

But I believe most women aren't happy with their body (I'll not be sexist and say that a majority of men aren't satisfied as well). But this is about women in particular. At one time or another most every woman with which I've had a conversation talks about their weight. Some in a very direct way, "Oh, I've gotten fat since...(insert minor traumatic or life changing experience here)" or "I've lost so much weight since...(insert minor traumatic or life changing experience here)." Some ladies go about it in a very round-about way, "I've stopped eating wheat and sugar, and drinking. And I feel great!" (An apology for my composite characterization of a few select friends). Some in a very understated way, "I just don't feel like myself anymore." I like to think I avoid conversations about weight with my people because it's a conversation that has become as casual as, "How's the weather out there." It's a conversation that doesn't necessarily need to happen. I really want to know about you as a person, not the size of your ass or your muffin top.

So, I try (and I emphasize try) to avoid the weight conversation because I think we women obsess and ultimately damage our confidence and self-esteem when we talk about our weight. There are far too many people in the world with eating disorders that are so consuming they become life threatening. Once upon a time (earlier this year), I teetered on the edge of Bulimia when I found myself eating so much my stomach would ache - so I would purge afterward and found it was the best possible solution to ease the bloating. For those of you who haven't engaged in repeititve self-induced puking, I am here to tell you that after a while of forcing yourself to puke, it gets real easy to do it over again despite the fact that you consider the acidity taking the enamel right off your teeth and a myriad of other health issues associated with the process as you tickle the back of your throat and proceed to fill up the porcelain bowl.
I'm beyond this stint at this point in my life, likely because these days I am happier.

Anyway, I am far less concerned with the weight of other people than I am my own. The women in my family, at least the generation ahead of me, are always on diets and because of this I am always worried my ass is going to get big and I will have no control over it. About once a week I say to myself, "I want to start running now that I've quit smoking (almost 5 months now)," usually after I eat dinner and desert and watch The Biggest Loser. I say to myself, "If only I had a trainer like Jillian to yell at me, or a treadmill in my living room, or the ability to put my laptop in the book holder of the elliptical machine at the gym, or if I had better shoes, or an Ipod holder, and some Mace, and if the sun didn't go down so early, then I would run."

Boy... Turns out it takes a lot for me to get my ass up and exercise.

This is what I've found in my life-long search for the right exercise program:

1. I hate: Yoga (what kind of liberal hates Yoga: the new-age spiritual exercise of choice).
2. I can run but it takes a while to do a mile without stopping. When I finally reach that goal I go back to letting my imagination run instead of my feet.
3. The pool is the best place for me to exercise and meditate at once. I don't care that my ass looks bigger in a bathing suit. The problem: it does nothing for the slimming of my ass-tree-trunk-kankle-legs.
   
4. I have to do the elliptical in the student rec. center - usually within eye-shot of a student who is gliding away, all 105 lbs of them, as I push buttons frantically trying to figure out how to start a program.
   

Now there are other methods for losing weight that don't involve exercise and this is what I've learned from those excursions:

1. Meth or any form of amphetamine is a quick way to drop the pounds. But like the commercials depict, you will pick every pore on your body, be gross, have awesome (in the not so awesome sense) Kate Moss like black circles under your eyes, and your new found community will likely take more away from you than your weight.
2. Break ups and divorces. Nothing is better for my figure than heartache, loneliness, and a general dislike of myself. I lose my appetite, drink more, stay up late, and go out too often, all in effort to keep myself busy and all the while the deep pit in my stomach helps me to get my skinny on.
   
3. I love dancing. Throughout my life, my commitment to shaking my ass on the dance floor has been in flux. I spent my late teens at the underage night club and various all night Raves. My early twenties in the bars and a few clubs, my mid-twenties at queer nights and then came my late twenties and thirties - and I lost all my enthusiasm for second-hand smoke and hangovers.
   

With all this in mind, I believe the time has come for me to get in shape again. I am going to fore go all the methods of weight loss that don't involve exercise and try to go to the gym and do it the hard way. But I would like to make a couple of suggestions to the community at large in order to help us all be a little more in shape and a little less concerned with our bodies.

1. Can we bring the portion sizes down a tid-bit. Christ people, no one needs to eat that much.
   
2. I wanna see more "fat" girls in advertisements. You know, women that reflect my own body type so I can be reminded that I'm not, god forbid (cyber-sarcasm here), a "big girl" (all 5'6" / 155 lbs of me - a whole twenty pounds heavier than I was in Jr. High School (and last year for a few weeks, but lets not go there again)).
3. And can we make exercise "fun" and cool again? For instance, Jazzercise sounds like so much fun - but no one has been brave enough to resurrect this lost exercise program of the 80s. Boy, it's really too bad. I have my leotard ready and everything. Besides, when the current fad passes, it will be a great way to put those leg warmers to good use.

For now, I am going to put my laptop to rest and shut off the light and hope that tomorrow I get up in time to go to school, change, and with my Ipod recharged and my tennis shoes in hand, and my fingers fumbling with the freaking buttons on the elliptical machine, get a freaking workout.

Gay Purgatory

Mr. Williamson, my high school biology teacher, made his position on homosexuality clear. He posted "Yes on Measure 9" propaganda all over his desk: bumper stickers, fliers, signs, etc. He wore a button on his suspenders, which cuddled the sides of his round belly, everyday. He turned on Rush Limbaugh and let him rattle away his conservative values while we worked away at our labs three days a week.

I sat at a table with four people who I remember very distinctly: three who, although they couldn't yet vote, were against Measure 9 (including myself), and one who was for it. I don't know if my table mates knew my mothers were gay and had been together, by that time, nearly 13 years. I certainly didn't out us. Maybe the mask I'd put on for the world was so affixed that not even I wanted to admit to myself that my parents were gay.

I'm not a unicorn. There are kids all over this world; biological, adopted, fostered, or otherwise; who have parents, aunties, uncles, cousins, or grandparents who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transexual, transgendered, or queer. And they're not going away. And they will remain both out and faceless. The will not be heard from, they may not be asked or they may not speak out. The will need to be protected and they will need to be consoled. They will not understand and they will understand very clearly what the consequences of hate has upon their families.

I was once one of those kids. Now, I am one of those adults who endured a lifetime barrage of anti-gay legislation. There have been many in my time: Measure 8, Measure 36, Measure 13, Prop 8, and so many more I can't recall, and so many more to come.

Today, with the passage of California's Prop. 8, I can't help but consider so many things. To a degree, I am still closeted, blog and all. I am in Idaho and although my peers here are my allies, I am still afraid and careful of how much I am visible. How much can I be visible in the Idaho collegiate system? How can I be an advocate for my students who are in the process of developing their own identity? How can I be an activist in this community and be safe? How safe can I be when my partner is in town for a visit?

I am in gay purgatory, and have always been. Somewhere between being out but not being identifiable. Pass me on the street and you would never know I had gay parents or that I myself, identify as queer. And although I've sat before rooms full of people at city hall, at conferences, in colleges, and community meetings, I am still hesitant to engage people in conversations about gay rights. I know people sit at their desks reading the news about protests in California and roll their eyes? "Well, the people have spoken and you have to accept that." I've heard the apathy from our own community, "Oh well, it's been this way for a long time." I know both of these responses because I've responded the same.

Yes. It's been this way for a long time. Ballot measure comes up, gay rights come into question, and measure passes. We are used to defeat and elated by scraps of separate-but-not-equal rights we get.

Rights? These are the rights I have: I have the right to look over my shoulders in public, before I give my partner a good-bye kiss on the lips. I have the right to consider my vacation destinations because my partner and I could be killed in state parks while camping, in small towns as we leave the bar, on hiking trails, in our own town, and in foreign nations across the globe. I have the right to hide my identity from my landlords for fear that my relationship will have my lose my housing. I have the right to hesitantly hold hands in public. I have the right to determine what actions may cause me and my partner to be gay bashed. I have the right to fear small towns and rural communities. I have the right to be unionized or partnered in counties or states but as soon as I cross the state-line, lose that recognition. I have the right to, god forbid something happens while we are together, be separated from my partner in an emergency room because we are not family.

I am tired. I am sad. And I am fucking angry.