in a nutshell, this is a narrative of what feminism has meant to me through the years and where I go to seek and express feminism in my life now. to a good extent, my progressive / liberal politics have formed and expressed along similar lines.
feminism in my life, came from my mother along with a love of Count Basie and Dave Brubeck. she was a lifelong registered Democrat and feminist. growing up in the 60’s, with civil rights, feminism and my first exposure to concepts of treating people with fairness and equality, these things all became synonymous to me. we lived in South Chicago, in a neighborhood that housed the steel mill there. it was white as hell, mostly from Slavic, Irish & Polish ancestry. other kids’ moms would be complaining about “the Mexicans” and “the blacks”, but my mother was an island of equality, dignity and rights. she was friendly with those families but distinct in her regard of race and gender.
my father was a fairly sexist dude and in a very cheesy 60’s and 70’s manner. he’d call a waitress ‘love’ and have this whole cheeseball aura. it was pretty embarrassing. he used to tell me that because I was his oldest child and a son, that when he left the house – I was in charge. this was bullshit of course, because mom was in charge. I never felt comfortable stepping into the “cheeseball dude” role, so I just let him say that shit without much of a response from me. it made him happy, I suppose, plus I had zero chance in getting him to stop.
Posted at SexGenderBody’s tumblr
I knew I was white and male, but I didn’t know the benefit I drew from being in both of those two groups. I had a sense of fairness, but I only saw myself as someone who could chose to ‘do what’s right’. I saw feminism as something to say ‘yes’ to, something to support, something to be. I had no idea the many things I would say and do in my life that would be sexist, racist or god knows whatever. to me, sexism and racism and classism seemed like feelings and attitudes for me to either adopt or reject. in fact, I took a certain sense of pride and compared myself favorably to others that spoke or acted in a sexist or racist way. I really believed that sexism and racism consisted of how I felt about people or how I treated them. I did not understand the systems of racism and sexism, much less my role in perpetuating them nor the benefits I draw from them every day.
but, starting from childhood – I was a feminist. whatever the hell that was in my mind at the time. I may not have had too deep a vocabulary not much of a grasp on the mechanics, but I did know that I was going to oppose sexism and racism.
to my white cis-male child mind, feminism was something to be, requiring only that I choose to be feminist.
(note: I did not think of myself as cis-male then. it was beyond my comprehension for decades. I use the term here because I know the difference now and because I no longer hold gender in those terms. it is relevant in describing my childhood worldview to describe myself as cis-male while at the same time I am responsible in pointing out that this distinction was not learned until later in my life)
as a white cis-male, I was told that I could be anything I want. no cost, no punishment – just be it and nobody’s gonna stop me. that reality was so ubiquitous that it never even occurred to me that anyone had less freedom than me. I was ignorant of the impacts of race, class, gender, sexuality to a very large extent. while I knew that racism and sexism and other oppressions existed, I did not know what it felt like to feel the effects of those oppressions.
so, as I declared that I was going to oppose sexism and racism, I was safe inside all the benefits of institutional sexism and racism.
by the time I entered middle school, I had decided that what I believed in, is equality of all people, period. looking ahead at my life, for wherever it was going to go, I would measure my morality on the dignity of all people. I thought that equality is more important than anything else. after watching people protest war, racism, sexism and a host of other excesses of human cruelty, it was just who I knew myself to be. attending Catholic grade schools exposed me to sexism and misogyny from the Vatican. rather than sign on to blind allegiance under the fear of some eternal punishment and in the process, surrendering my ability to choose for myself – I became an atheist and began to find ways to actively participate in activism, like the time I resisted my pro-life school’s letter campaign.
in looking back at my grade school and high school years, my heroes were people who challenged systems of oppression.
I was a skinny kid and I was not part of the bullies’ groups. I got picked on and called ‘sissy’ by those bullies. so, I learned to exist outside the safety of bully groups. I did a lot of socializing and friend making on the basis of finding others excluded by bullies. it was a mixed bag of misery / anxiety, tempered with the freedom to choose to do / believe whatever the hell I wanted, since there was no threat of exclusion – I was already excluded. by the time I left 8th grade, I was anti-war, pro women’s rights, anti-racism and atheist. kinda lefty.
through my childhood and middle school years, my exposure to feminism and feminists came into my world via people I would meet that were friends of my parents, neighbors and what I would see on the news. my folks had all sorts of activist friends, many of whom were feminists, among other things.
one feminist friend of my mom’s that I knew was Paula Giese. among many things, she was an activist for indigenous persons and tribes, living in Minnesota and the Dakotas. she had an endless supply of energy, defiance and a wholly infectious enthusiasm for saying what she believed and to spend her life standing in the way of empire, to paraphrase Arundhati Roy. whenever Paula and her husband Clayton visited us, I listened to all her adventures in opposing the war in Viet Nam, indigenous rights, opposing Nixon and whatever else she would do.
one example of Paula’s mind and spirit is the fact that her house was featured in the opening credits for The Mary Tyler Moore show, because the story was set in Minneapolis. that house in the opening credits was the house that Paula owned. she got sick of tourists bothering her and taking pictures of her house, so she marked it up with “impeach Nixon” and the tourists went away.
Paula Giese was an example to me, of a feminist doing feminism and feminist things and she was happy in doing this.
my high school and college years were in NJ / NY. feminism for me then was woven in between grades, team sports and family life. the fire and energy of “women’s liberation” and “civil rights” had quieted down somewhat, along with the withdrawal from Viet Nam. adolescence was upon me and I saw my mom return to work, as a feminist act. she would drag me to political rallies and I would try to meet girls, ’cause…you know. she had a friend who was raising 3 kids on her own, working her ass off and they spent a lot of time together.
my high school was about 50% white and the other half a mixture of black, hispanic with maybe 10% asian. feminism, as a lived experience for me was in representation. our high school radio station had cis-male and cis-female DJ’s and the team sports other than wrestling and football had male/female squads. swimming around in adolescence and recovery from sexual assault, I can best describe myself as having been a consumer of feminism.
I started college but I was more interested in drugs, alcohol, punk / new wave dance clubs and women. I was a “wake & bake” pot smoker, skipping classes, failing out and working just to make ends meet. I had no idea what the fuck I was doing.
when I turned 20 I took a tab of LSD and watched Caligula (the long version). the next day, I joined the Green Berets, I spent a lot of my time in the southern US or overseas. Army bases are in the middle of nowhere, with a bunch of rednecks living just off post in a town built mostly to give soldiers a place to spend their money: pawn shops, adult book stores, used cars and shopping malls. these towns are white bread, sexist and racist as fuck. I wanted to date feminists, but a lot of the time, I was just looking to fuck.
I had lived in Chicago and NJ/NY and did not fit in too well in that culture. I was asked “where you from?” more than anyone I ever met in the military. politically, I liked to say that I was neither Republican nor Democrat (just like every other white guy I ever met :-/ ), but in practice I really was a Democrat. Reagan and his christianist racists had nothing that I wanted any part of. I was in the Army to defend the separation of church and state and not to usher in a money train of theocracy and a US christian empire. I was in defending everyone’s right to choose, not just white men with guns and a plastic Jesus.
while a good number of my co-soldiers were all about waving a flag, loving Jesus and defending football from the commie scourge, I was defending the whole of our country and the people who live here. I figured that bullies don’t need the military to protect them, but people without guns & wealth do. my childhood view that all people are equal still informed my politics. while Reagan and the southern white boys were injecting the bible into the military, I was in the military to defend the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, Social Security, Medicare and to see the ERA be passed into law. to me, that was worth fighting and dying for.
the Green Berets taught me to wage unconventional / guerrilla warfare and to impact large forces from a smaller number. so, I started looking at feminism from a guerrilla mindset. we were taught how to construct, grow and support an insurgency. so, I started thinking about how a feminist insurgency can be constructed. we were taught elements of psychological warfare and I applied that training on my fellow soldiers when I was bored / fed up with their misogynist bullshit, etc. to be honest, I still think in those terms regarding group politics.
I had all sorts of personas or modes of operation that I drifted in and out of. I had soldier mode, which is exactly what you would expect. I had “barracks” mode, which is where I did my reading and solo time. I managed my ‘fish out of water’ lifestyle in unique ways sometimes. one of my Army friends was from NYC. we couldn’t stand country rock or country-anything. so, our solution was to buy a Sunday NY Times, fill a cooler with drink mixings, ice, etc. and head to a drive-in that showed porn. we would pull in there, tune the radio to NPR or classical music, read the Times, drink cocktails and watch porn. it was the closest we could come to combining sex with a brain that didn’t want to talk about NASCAR or bass fishing.
I wasn’t out of place in the south simply because I thought all genders and races of humans are equal, but that was a big part of it. I was also an arrogant jackass from big cities and had a overbearing sense of being smarter and more sophisticated. and if you’re thinking I sounded like a prick, you’re not alone – I think the same thing when I remember the shit I said and did.
I read my feminism during those days, partly to keep my eyes looking toward progressive thinking and partly to keep my mind off of the local culture. lots of 1st & 2nd wave books and the occasional speaking engagement by an author. I dated a woman who handed me The Dialectic of Sex by Shulamith Firestone as a precondition to dating. I didn’t come down on the same militaristic / marxist side of the fence as Shulamith did, but I did see her point alright.
on a side note, I have this sentimental nostalgia for this particular book. the 2nd wave feminists have lots of problematic elements including dealing with race, trans persons and cultures other than women’s studies departments in prominent English-speaking universities, not to mention the issues of trying to replace the dogma of white patriarchy with the dogma of white feminism. and this book represents to me, that time in my life when I took to books in order to take in as much feminism as I could.
most of my feminist intake came from books and kinda by dumb luck in a bookstore or as a suggestion from someone. Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf had been on stage for a few years when I picked up the book. it was feminism and race and class and culture all covered in an explosion of personal expressions of love and loss. this was a drastically different experience of feminism to what I had been reading. instead of “academic / white” voice, I was reading “living / black” voice.
in reading “For Colored Girls…”, I was aware that a world of voices not represented in the mainstream feminism I had been taking in. the difference was race. another one of the people my mother respected and talked about was Cesar Chavez, and taking a cue from my memories of those conversations, I looked into Chicana Feminists and what they were saying about their experiences. from that point forward, my feminist thoughts, conversations, actions include race, language, culture and many other overlapping factors of oppression. from that point forward, I looked at a feminist conversation to see if it was all white. from that point forward, I centered my feminist interactions by asking “whose definition of feminism are we talking about?”.
I was in the Green Berets through a good part of my 20’s and I had lots of time to read. I wasn’t doing anything feminist in my day job, that’s for sure. I did my fair share of drinking and fucking in my spare time. this is not to suggest that I was not a sexist, loud mouthed assface, because I sure as hell was. I was using alcohol and sex as interchangeable drugs, which I have discussed in the story of my addiction. I still had not distinguished that there is a difference between saying that I am a feminist and doing feminist things. many days of my life were not very feminist – and that’s putting it mildly. I cheated on women I was dating, fucked all over town, did drugs, drank and went from one endorphin boost to the next.
the same year my Army time concluded, I got sober. I was living back in Chicago, and I started learning to construct complete sentences, independent of the reactions and assumptions of addiction. that took a dozen years. during that time, I would take in my feminism in conversations with friends and in books.
for most of the first 30 years of my cis-white male life, feminism was something that I talked about and that others did. feminism influenced the women I found attractive and how I interacted with the women I knew and the women I dated.
in my early 30’s, I did something different: I learned to love someone in a way that I had never loved anyone before. in loving her, I explored feminism in the spaces of intimacy within my own life – a place that I had not brought it before. I trusted and loved her without condition and I listened to her as love and not sex. I had not done that before. it was nothing to write a book about, it took no money, no effort, no fight. it was a very low price of admission into the arena of doing something feminist, but I took anything I had ever thought about feminism and equality and sex and love and put them all into the same place: my love for her. I loved her as equal and nothing was more important – not my pride, my fear…nothing. I told her about my being assaulted and shared with her the things about my past in addiction as I faced up to them in my sobriety. I admitted my mistakes to her as I made them and for the first time in my life, I chose to make our love more important than my fear of being not good enough. I learned to listen to someone. when we discussed feminism, it was not about theory or abstractions – it was about she and I and what if any good we could be for each other.
still, I was a white cis-gendered male, living in Chicago on Michigan Ave. I was well inside the systems of sexism, racism and classism that gave me every benefit simply for having this body. said another way, I was playing the game of life at the lowest difficulty setting. I had done something feminist on a very small scale and that’s the truth of it.
that relationship ended when her brother took his own life and the impact on her was more than our relationship could handle.
after that love, I loved again and we wed. feminism was part of our initial courting conversations. our wedding plans were feminist, she kept her name and I considered even taking hers. we had met while in a training program that examines the role of language in shaping our perceptions. she has been a partner in my feminism for 15 years now.
as a result of my being in relationship with this feminist, I took part in a training put on by Visions, Inc. that enabled me to grasp the impact of class, race, gender, sexuality inequality along with some tools and practice in speaking / listening with accountability. she and I explored a great deal together and she has been my access to transitioning from talking about feminism to taking feminist actions.
we have a daughter together. from the instant of conception, gender roles, sexuality, autonomy, rape culture, agency, race, class and the equality of humanity have been the building blocks and focus points of this parenting. it has been my great privilege to parent a female ID’d child. in addition to being in a feminist marriage, I am a feminist parent. there are a never ending stream of opportunities to think of the feminist impact in all the little things of our daily lives and to act on them.
after the child was born, blogging became widespread. the first blogs I looked for were feminist. the feminist blogs I found were not my cup of tea, for a couple of reasons. content wise, they were mostly cis-gendered, white, hierarchical, wealthy, academic speaking and missing / omitting / silencing women of color. I left them to find feminism in the rest of the world. indigenous voices, women of color, trans bodies and persons, queer voices, differently abled voices, voices speaking in languages I do not know. there were a great many feminist voices and identities and expressions in the world that I could not find at these sites.
another thing about these blogs and the traditional blog model is that content is controlled by a select few or one. this model of gate-keeping is a miniature version of the patriarchy. one challenge for any progressive group is that the tools for organization that we all learn, are formed as part of the systems and institutions of patriarchy. without realizing it, we are forever rebuilding the patriarchy with the very structures we construct in order to address the patriarchy.
about the same time, I found another model of blogging: the community, collaborative model, such as daily kos. I loved this model instantly because it allows anyone to start a conversation or respond to one. this was far more along the egalitarian and open-source model that I support and believe in. daily kos focuses on progressive, group politics. through my years of examining rights, equality, race, gender, sexism, class and so forth, I have had one nagging riddle or fascination:
how can a society of individuals exist within a group in such a way that benefits both the individual and the group?
where do the rights and terms of identity of the individual end and those of the group begin?
where do they overlap?
where do they coexist?
while I was hanging out in and running some blogging meetups, I met a BDSM activist & feminist, Clarisse Thorn. she inspired me to take the idea of a community collaborative blog that made possible the interactions between individual identity expressions just as daily kos provides for the group identity expressions of progressives.
I wanted something comm/collab and feministy. making it happen was a feminist action that I could take, outside of love and parenting.
I created sexgenderbody.com for all gender / sexuality / feminist expressions as equal and integral. a place where no one’s experience of sex, gender, body is up for review. a place where people can practice both articulating their own identity on the basis of its own merits and to practice hearing others articulate themselves on their own terms.
for me, the time I have been blogging and meeting people and talking to people and attending events, since the sexgenderbody sites were created, has been a constant stream of opportunities to examine how I listen to the world and how we listen to each other.
this feminist guerrilla campaign I’m on is rather mercurial, but I think I can sum it up as this:
I go where I don’t know anything…and listen. I seek to understand and sometimes I find an opportunity to contribute, when asked.
I am fortunate enough to have met some wonderful friends out here in the space between group identities. in many ways, I am still seeking out connections on the basis of two people listening to each other as individuals and equals.
it is my position that there no one is able to speak for anyone else, much less the entirety of humanity. my little guerrilla war is to fight patriarchy by listening to people in the terms they choose to identify as. it’s a combination of what I know and what I feel.
what I discovered for myself and I offer up here, is that this really is a journey and there is no point where I have examined every bit of myself that bears scrutiny regarding race, gender, class, ability, language, sexuality, education, culture, faith or anything else. there is no ‘passing grade’ or ‘certification of authenticity’ or post-graduate degree that I can attain, which will cement me as having achieved correct feminist status. no social rank, no bona fides, no membership in the club of those who ‘are feminists’ as opposed to those who ‘are not’.
these days, I don’t always know what feminist thing to do, or that can be done. sometimes, when I encounter something that is sexist or racist or classist or ableist, the only thing I can see to do is to get in the way of it. making life difficult for a sexist or a racist is sometimes all I can think of in the moment. I know that the machinery of whiteness, sexism, class, culture, colonialism and such is colossal and that my membership in the groups that those systems benefit has me playing an active part in keeping them active.
all of my participation in feminism has been because I chose to do so…because I could choose to do so. because of the freedom I am granted as a white cis-male. I could choose today to be a GOP / tea party fuck stain and no one would stop me. I didn’t seek feminism because I was punished like cis or trans women are punished, or people of color are punished or cis or trans women of color are punished. I have had it pretty goddamn easy and I don’t deserve or want any cookies for choosing to be decent to people. feminism is not centered on me. that’s not what this post is about.
this post is basically just me sharing my experience of feminism. I don’t like dogma and feminism is no exception – my experience of feminism (or anything) does not trump your own. if you read this and find some value in it, then I’m glad. take away whatever you want from it. if it adds to your life in any meaningful way, then I am grateful for that.
my feminism is love
my feminism is inclusive of all class, caste, race, age, culture, language, ability, gender, sex, body identities
my feminism is a living, fluid part of my life and it will be until I die.