check your sugarcoat at the door

Ever since I was 16-17, cruising around in my El Camino, (er, being independent with my own car ‘n stuff) I started absorbing the pieces that would eventually become my current view and its application to my life on feminism. I would drive myself to the nearest overpriced bookstore, chill out in the magazine section with Bitch or Bust or in the women’s studies section with Bell Hooks during the rare down time in my fifty+ hour work week. Feminism, third wave, herstory, riot grrrls, girl bands, dyke writers, sex workers — all of it, all of them, coming at me in waves. It was my own niche. To this day, eight years later, I still don’t know women who enjoy the same subscriptions or authors as me and this drives me to share my findings with anyone willing to listen and always always always wanting more.

I have a habit of highlighting well written sentences or facts I find fascinating or any part of the written word that strikes me. A lot of my books are streaked with bright yellow. In Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class one of the contributing authors is Tara Hardy. Her 8+ page addition to this book is almost completely struck through in florescent yellow. She single handedly unknotted some of the biggest tangles I’ve found in my own version of feminism/feminist application and I could not appreciate her words any more than I do.

GIRL
KICKS
ASS

     “…my mother had the ‘privilege’ of putting her infant, my brother, into day care and going to work. Unlike the women in the suburbs who could choose the age at which they’d leave their children nestled with nannies in their comfortable homes, for my mother, being liberated did mean the ‘opportunity’ to get a job. For her, true choice would have meant the option to stay home with her new baby without having to wean him. At first, my mother tried to make it to the baby sitter’s during her breaks but my brother was too hungry in between. Left no other choice, she spent night after night rocking him back and forth, trying to get her desperate baby to take the bottle. She was desperate herself by the time he finally did. During all of this, I was desperately home alone with my father.
     So, excuse me for not trusting feminists. For not trusting the bourgeois movement of those with enough time on their hands to actually feel dissatisfied. My mother didn’t have time for dissatisfaction – she had time for labor. Far from being fulfilled at her job, she was imprisoned by it. And so, by association, was I.”

     “Some of us who are claiming what has been mistaken as ‘traditional femininity’ are doing so precisely because it was not part of our cultural, familial traditions. Those of us who aren’t middle/upper/owning class, who don’t wear suits or don pearls with our New York haircuts, and who haven’t had the privilege to buy our genders at fucking Nordstrom. Those of us have cleaned other people’s shit off their walls, and I’m not speaking metaphorically here, in exchange for a wage that forces us to ruin the ledger of moral character known as the ‘credit rating,’ because we can’t afford the cost of living and have the gall to need a phone, heat or a pair of goddamned shoes anyway.”

AMEN, SISTER.

On remaining femme in the face of contradiction (in the bra burning, hair growing sense) of feminism and the need to blend in:

     “My questions is this: Does it ever occur to the privileged that we don’t actually want to emulate you? My god, the staggering arrogance! Does it ever occur to you that we think you’re filthy? And maybe, just maybe, we don’t ever want to be mistaken for one of you?”

*heart-happy sigh*

-CJ