feminish

As part of my continuing building and tweaking of this blog, I’ve now created a short and sweet contact/profile page. Emails are welcome; a photo will follow (eventually).

My feminism is quite random - and maybe inconsistent (unlike Rilke’s). There are things I’m certain I oppose and want to work to change (like porn becoming culturally mainstream and OK), things I’m certain we need more of (like Ursula K. Le Guin’s humanistic feminist writing) and other things I’m not sure about (like marriage).

But I wonder if, by putting together a list of likes and dislikes, it might be possible to begin to formulate a kind of no-nonsense, get-on-with-it feminism that makes sense for young lasses now.

This should be a WiKi page ideally, but that’s beyond me for the minute. For now it’s a scrapboard - let me know what you think.

Yes please:

breastfeeding in parliamentary chambers
generic female pronouns
respecting-your-space* yourself (and your partner 50/50)
sassy lingerie
Ursula K. Le Guin
gentle essential oil perfume
Simone de B.
digging earth/carrying wheelbarrows

*ie. housework

No thanks:

porn
high heels (except sometimes)
highlights
‘bitch’/'whore’ t-shirts
mirrors
mags & rags (esp daily mail - one day I’ll find time to analyse it… )
Germaine
melanie phillips
music videos
manicures
the word ‘pottering’
most ads

There’s a lot I want to write about and I’m struggling as to where to put it. I have such an urge to have multiple identities, and names, and diaries and blogs. But really I think I just want one that I’m happy with.

It’s an important question: how much of myself have I the courage to reconcile with? I’d like to be one streaming coherent whole, from Suffolk mud and Kentwell recreations and an unremarkable parkland private school, to Emmanuel and the fens (via Kathmandu) and then to feminist thought in London, writing websites and making TV. And then to monasteries and a paysan dwelling in Quercy where I listen to bells and contemplate (when I’m not pouring concrete). I’m not sure how it all fits.

So for now, as a temporary measure, I shall call myself Natasha.

I could worry about whose gaze this is and why…

But then I remember that I didn’t know the photo was being taken. I was involved in the action of being dirty getting clean; being cold getting warm; being dusty getting fresh. In this moment I accepted the cold, accepted my dirtiness-becoming-clean, and accepted my body for what it is.

Maybe you can’t see that in the picture. You can’t shiver with the damp chill, or smell the soap, or feel the softness of undusty baby-fuzz hairs on my skin. But there is a silence to it, a concentrated silence. And there’s a simplicity; the sheer simplicity of human flesh, washed in splashed water as it has been for thousands of years. (How many generations of my ancestors have known hot, body-full baths anyway? four? five?) I’d like to think there’s more stark humanity here than femininity; it was a human moment for me more than a feminine one.