Do your politics fit between the headlines?
Are they written in newsprint,
are they distant?
Mine are crossing an empty parking lot.
They are a woman walking home,
at night, alone.
They are six strings that sing
and wood that hums against my hipbone.
-Ani DiFranco
So...things have been coming to light, lately. Things I don't want to write, or say, or even think, but I need to get out so that I can carry on. Like everything else, it's a learning experience, but this has been a particularly brutal one.
It is not enough to say that you are a feminist if you hate women. That much has become abundantly clear. If at the end of the self-righteous ranting day, you cannot treat other women with love and respect, as sisters, then nothing you ranted about means anything. It is easy to talk. It is easy to read Dworkin and MacKinnon (well, not that easy, but go with the rhetoric here). It is easy to take Women's Studies classes. It is easy to learn what the feminist party line of any given group is and to spout it ad naseaum. It is less easy, though, to listen to other women's stories and value them, even when they directly conflict with your own experience. It is difficult to value other women enough to treat them with patience and kindness. It is hard to move through the world in a way that shows respect to the very people who we have been taught our entire lives to view as competition, at best.
In recent days, I've had some firsthand experience with women who say they are feminists, who talk a good game, but who are unable or unwilling to listen when I speak, to treat me with anything resembling respect. These are women I used to look up to, model my feminism after. But I've had my moment of doubt, and come through it even more certain that the best thing I can do, the most feminist thing I can do, is to be true to myself and how I feel, and to be secure enough in that to treat other women as I would like to be treated. Theory and all of its resulting arguments are secondary--how I treat people is real. And how I treat people is and will continue to be the important part. To hell with their theories; to hell with the idea that I have to live up to a vision of feminism created by someone else. I know what I have to do.