Most women I know who never took up the cause explain that their encounters, with WST 101 in particular and feminists in general, were unpleasant. One woman I know put it like this:

"Feminists that I know are hard core about their beliefs and so they should be. I have always felt a little like I am being recruited to an army, based solely on my gender, and that I don't appreciate. Of course I believe in equal rights for women, but what I don't believe in is the intensity that some feminists must always bring to the table. It makes me uncomfortable and makes me want to go play with the boys in the sandbox."

Personally I wasn’t in the class for the other young women. I was in it because I realized there was a whole different way of seeing the world. I’m not sure how I knew there was something wrong with the world I’d been taught, but something didn’t feel right, and I had a hunch that feminism could put its finger on it.

One of our first assigned readings was from Women’s Madness: Misogyny Or Mental Illness? by Jane M. Ussher. Mental illness was one of my bedfellows growing up, but it had never occurred to me that it was a women’s issue.

Betty Friedan’s [1] The Feminine Mystique had already exposed the contemporary woman’s greatest problem in 1963, but as my mother explained, “The sixties passed” her by, and so Friedan’s attack on the popular notion that women could only find fulfillment in domesticity didn’t help my mother any. She had given up her career as a physiotherapist to raise my sister and I during the economic boom of the 1970s.

The rain came, despite all appearances – the Great Dane, the sports car, the Rolls Royce, the annual jaunts to Europe, dad’s blooming law firm, the house overlooking the river valley, the dazzling dinner parties straight off the cover of a magazine, the lime-green appliances and two healthy babies. Mom was suffering from severe acute depression when I was conceived and born.

Before she had children, mom had been hospitalized for her depression for lengths of time and undergone various treatments. Besides the hospitals, shock therapy and pills, I don’t know precisely how it was dealt with back then, but can only imagine there were no New Age theories that it was all in her mind or spirit, given the prominence of psychiatry in those days.

It wasn’t until 1977, after all, that the U.S. Congress created a national committee to protect humans from biomedical and behavioral research and began seriously investigating the practice of lobotomy.

I’m quite certain none of my mother's doctors blamed her “chemical imbalance” on the institutionalization of female mind control or lost sleep over the fact women were many times more likely than men to be tranquilized, shocked and locked up.

My mother’s illness had always been a source of sadness, but after reading Jane M. Ussher [2], suddenly it was a source of anger, and not the kind I had to internalize. Finally it was something else’s fault. Suddenly it was society, and my mother was no longer crazy. It spoke to me.

Other readings screamed at me, making me angry over things I’d been previously ashamed about, such as the sexual assault when I was 14 years old. In my early adolescence I went through a confused, dark phase. I dyed my hair so black, it shone blue. Eventually the blue-black felt ugly to me, and I wanted my dark brown hair back.

My dad drove me to a hairdresser in our sleepy suburb town to get the black stripped out. It was a complex chemical procedure that required me to sit under the hair dryer with a head full of stinging bleach.

The female hairdresser had gone for the evening, leaving me alone with the man named Mark who was trying to strip away my dark. While I sat captive in that prison of bleach and hot air, Mark began rubbing himself on me and put his hand up my shirt.

Looking back, I’m not sure why I didn’t protest. It may have been that I knew I couldn’t leave with the bleach in my hair, or I’d go bald. Perhaps I thought if I protested, he might not go through with stripping away my dark. I'd gotten myself into this mess, after all.

In hindsight, I know I was scared stiff. I hadn’t even kissed a boy yet, and suddenly a grown man was rubbing his erection on my shoulder, telling me how “sexy” I was. In the end, that’s as far as it went, and he still couldn’t get the black out of my hair. My dad came to pick me up, and I didn’t say a thing.

Feminist anarchist Andrea Dworkin's [3] so-called radical and “bitter” world view that male sexuality is inherently oppressive and degrading suddenly felt like a safe place to me. All of a sudden I had women articulating the things I didn’t know how to say while I was being victimized.

Many women have been turned off from feminist associations because this bitter place is admittedly exhausting. As the blogger The Daily Tentacle [4] put it, “I deeply respect the work of Andrea Dworkin...But it should come with a label attached to it - Warning: can cause loss of perspective, heart palpitations, vaginal dryness, and other symptoms of neutered sexuality.”

Well said.

Nowadays I take my Dworkin with a grain of salt and a spoonful of sugar, but there was a time in my life when I needed her anger in order to heal, and she still has a home in the spectrum of my politics.

The women’s movement exists because our histories – personal and collective - have scarred us. Some of the wounds happened before our time, but the fact my great-great grandmother never got to vote because she was not a “person” under the law [5] is in my blood.

Women need to go through a phase where we’re angry on behalf of our entire ancestry. Those of us in parts of the world where we can speak freely need to shout loudly enough for those who can’t.

I think at the most basic level the women's movement still needs to exist because women are still prey. We occupy a world where we are often killed because we are desired. We are told not to wear our hair in ponytails because they are easier to grab us by. If we are raped, we are told it was our fault for being too beautiful.

The psychological impact of living in a world where women's heads are found in freezers, as happened to at least 20 women in my town, is profound. Who was it that said, "Men's biggest fear is that women will laugh at them; women's biggest fear is that men will kill them"?

In a world where at the most basic level we are food for predators, women need to stick together. Safety in numbers, even if we disagree about the clothes we wear or how high to raise our placards.

Early in my Women’s Studies program I heard one of my classmates scoff at my high heeled boots and say, “The only reason she’s in this class is because she can write.”

I was labeled a “lipstick feminist,” also referred to as a “stiletto” or “slut” feminist – someone who waves the feminist flag while simultaneously putting on a show to attract men. I was seen as someone who missed the whole point.

Truth is, I was there for the same reason they were. I was there because the personal is political.

If you are a woman who doesn’t know whether or not you want to join the army, I say come on in. The water’s fine, and it doesn’t matter what you wear. You don't have to hate men. You can love them.

Quotes:

"The fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease....Men weren't really the enemy - they were fellow victims suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill."
- Betty Friedan (1921-2006)

"By the time we are women, fear is as familiar to us as air."
- Andrea Dworkin (1946-2005)

*****

If you enjoyed this story you may enjoy The Naked Feminist [6] or Lapdancer Revisited [7].