feminish

The U.S. Army is, it seems, issuing families of soldiers serving overseas with life-size cardboard cut-outs of their loved ones.

I was struck by the words of Kay Judkins (quoted in the Boston Globe) whose husband, Jim, is a minesweeper mechanic in Afghanistan, talking about the place the cut-out has in her family:

“He sits at the head of the table. Yes, he does.”

I immediately had visions of comparable female-soldier households, with the 2-D Flat Mommy serving the real-life-daddy his dinner as he continued to sit patiently at the head of the table… while in reality the soldier wife was out shooting bullets and ducking grenades in Iraq.

And I noticed the NY Times’ revealing choice of title for their article When Soldiers Go to War, Flat Daddies Hold Their Place at Home, and wondered precisely why the headline wouldn’t quite work as “Flat Mommies Hold Their Place at Home”.

But I immediately realised that it’s not funny at all, and I felt quite sad. On the one hand there are men and women risking life and limb so they can suppress, kill, maim or capture other people (or whatever it is they do); on the other there’s a life-size cardboard photo that a child puts next to him on a swing. It seems very odd.

Admittedly, the whole business did begin fairly simply: a wife wanted a real-size photo of her husband so her young infant could more easily make the connection between the two-dimensional photo and the nice man called ‘Daddy’ who, every now and again, showed up and stayed for a while. But for those like Kay Judkins who are putting him at the head of the table, the practice seems to have been taken to a whole other level. It’s no longer just about teaching a child to recognise an image; it’s quite a deep denial of the costs and losses and pains of War.

I’m not sure how this one crept up on me silently, but -

Today is the British Library’s “One day in History” Day.

They’re calling for as many Brits as possible to write about their day today and submit their account online, creating “a mass blog for the national record”. The British Library have already started publishing people’s entries here, and have committed themselves to preserving everything they receive for ever and ever. I suppose the only question is whether humans will expire before their hard copies do?

So, email your friends and get on the phone to your Mum and Dad and see if you can persuade them to write a few words and post them up. After all, if you’re reading this you must think blogs are even just a teeny weeny bit worthwhile.

But if it doesn’t tickle your fancy, you can always shimmer over to Clioweb which is hosting the latesd all-singing all-dancing History Carnival. The Aztecs, the Athenians and the Australians all get a look in - and it’s all the more fascinating for its lively crop of women’s history (including one or two numbers by Yours Truly).

The light is hazy and thick in the valley this morning - not at all glaring or crisp. I like it.

The past few days have been bright and clear - the kind of penetrating, stark light that leaves no room for slow wake-ups, that gives you no chance to say ‘almost’ or ‘maybe’ or ‘perhaps tomorrow’; the kind of light that makes everything around you immediate and transparent - an almost urgent daylight: ‘up we get’, ‘off we go’, ‘come on now’, ‘let’s get to it’, ‘you’re already late’!

Today is different. The world seems softer - a bit more suggested, a little less obvious. If the bright days tell-it-how-it-is in high digital-camera definition, days like today are quintessential Lomo days: mysterious, blurred and heady. You’re not quite sure what’s going on. It feels like dawn has been extended and daylight postponed - the hours have stretched a little and it’s safe to slow down and to take your time.

It’s the kind of day when I can press pause on my feminism and enjoy my cup of tea, properly.

“No wonder our perception of beauty is distorted”
…runs the tagline to cosmetic company Dove’s latest dramatic video ad in their ‘Campaign for Real Beauty’.

I found it oddly moving. Even stunning eyes can be sad.



[Hat tips to Jess at the magnificent f-word and to Maxy-Max]

Dew courtesy of The Patterner, who was meditating on’t at dawn.

As a political project, feminism at its most ambitious argues that Everything could be different, very different.

Feminism argues that the forces at work, the values and prejudices and perceptions flowing through national consciousness can all be transformed; that the complex dynamics of political, economic and racial gender inequality and oppression can change; that there’s a chance that sex can be beautiful, meaningful and fun - and not the site of exploitation and objectification.

This is the dream.

Feminism at its most realistic and down to earth argues that each of us in our own daily lives can make decisions, take choices and follow through with actions that can change these huge and complex political, economic, sexual and social dynamics, where and when our little lives engage with them - when we vote, when we buy stuff, say stuff, decide stuff or go off and do something.

I’m sure I’ve spent way too much of my life grazing placidy on the patriarchal green (( in the words of Twisty Faster )) - and I probably still do so in my ignorance. My life exists within the Big Beast, but the point is that my life is as much as site for change as the Beast itself. When I shout at the Beast I see I have to shout at and look to myself.

But all I can do is my best. I can keep asking myself questions, keep considering things carefully, forcing open my awareness to whatever is happening in my mind and the world around me. Who am I judging? What am I saying? Is this a good idea? Am I sure? And when it gets too much I take a break. I step out of the conversation, out of the office, out of the clothes shop, away from the News. I go for a walk and I stop thinking and I find a bug or hear a bird and I smile; I phone a friend, watch the clouds or put the kettle on. There are some corners of me the Beast can’t touch, and I’ll darn well take refuge in them when I need to.

Feminism is an active project, as personal as it is political. And it is hard to do.

And the point is to do what is hard to do and to take the road less travelled.

It’s hard to say no to a lot of money from a porn-promoter ((see Creative Destruction’s account of the controversy surrounding the selling of feminist blog Alas’s URL for porn promotion. The post links to posts discussing the hoo-haa. The strongest opposition has come from Heart. Other posts (each with a different take) by Sour Duck, Hugo, and Alas contributors Tekanji and Earlbecke are also worth reading. The issue is also now under discussion over at Alas. )), it’s hard to negotiate the feminist minefield that is getting dressed for work ((see this thread over at Happy Feminist )), it’s hard to decide whether to love or hate heels and feminine grooming (( see this post from Jill at Feministe, a discussion inspired by this post from the wisest of Spinster Aunts. You can also read zuzu there too )). (And it’s harder to write this post than to stay quiet.) And because it’s hard, and because it’s complicated, and because we are all actually still (STOP PRESS) more human than we are feminist, sometimes we’re going to fall a bit short - of our own ideals and of everyone else’s.

But dammit if I’m going to stop trying. Another world is possible but we have to do radical, hard, difficult things in our own lives to make this other world possible.

Like saying no when it’s easier to say yes.

Ever idly wondered what a woman might have been writing in her diary on this day in, say - 1920?

I just found Harvard’s Open Collections website, where they publish primary-source documents from their collections - 7,500 pages of manuscripts, 3,500 books and pamphlets and 1,200 photographs. If you go to the diaries page you can see women’s journals opened at today’s date (updated daily).

I read what was written on this day by a farmer in 1887 ( “…rained quite a shower after dinner”), a schoolteacher in 1906 ( “…took a bath. Mended.”), a secretary in 1914 ( “…stayed in bed and fooled until 8.30″) and an actress in 1920 ( “…we saw Cohan’s opening - “meanest man in the world”).

Vicarious and addictive.

Technorati tags: women’s history, historical documents, women, diaries, history

I try to be here in my body as often as I can.

I remember my feet, and let them sink into the floor under my desk. I feel my bottom where it meets the chair, and my elbows on the desk. And I notice my forehead sinking towards this screen, and reel it in.

The Patterner sat well this morning. His breath furled and unfurled, he said. Like a long, soft banner into the wind. (Or like a chameleon’s tongue, I said. Or like one of those plastic party horns, I might have added, but didn’t.)

Sometimes my breath is steady, falling into my lungs and breezing out again gently. Sometimes it bathes me like water lapping in and out of the shore. Other times it gets caught, taut around my chest, like apron strings in the washing machine.

Which is what happened yesterday, when I read this:
Read the rest of this entry »

It’s that time of the month again…

There’s the first-ever Carnival of African Women on ‘Blogging and Identity’. And there’s the 24th Carnival of Feminists, with posts on feminism and pop culture, choice feminism, sex-pos feminism and ifeminism.

And, of course, a crop of links about the Veil Thing.

What veil thing? you might ask, if you spent most of this week sheltering under an umbrella from the overhead storms of cyber-media-discourse.

I write that and I immediately think of something I once heard from a very wise woman about a verandah in a monastery in China. It was known as the Listening to the Rain Verandah…. She had stood on that verandah once in a huge, warm thunderstorm. As she was enjoying the verandah she wished she could always have that verandah to go and be on in thunderstorms; to have a reassuringly dry place to take refuge in while the world happened noisily, at one remove, around her. The kind of verandah you can walk out onto and hear the rain and watch the rain and be in the rain and yet not wet. Sometimes I want to come back to that kind of nice, dry verandah in myself. You know the mood…. Those days when you don’t want to catch people’s eyes and wished you were wearing a hoodie so you could just pull it right over your brow and be protected from It All. The kind of day when you don’t want to talk. And the rest of the world can just deal with it.

There’s a lot to be said for hoodies. And umbrellas.

But I digress. Back to the Veil Thing. Well, there’s the Jack Straw Veil Thing, which is sizzling away here, here and here (there’s also a good point here).

And then there’s the feminist blogosphere Veil/burqa Thing (see also this and this) - an evolution of last month’s Boob Thing.

And the thing is (“what is the thing, Natasha?”), the thing is - these discussions are better than any I’ve ever had offline. Honest. Go read.

[UPDATE: I just improved the linking in this last paragraph re. Bitch|Lab’s fair comment below.]

I’m struggling to live in peaceful co-existence with the couple of hundred aoûtats that took residence chez moi yesterday. They must have jumped aboard while I was harvesting walnuts or at dusk when I was ruminating on an outcrop of the cliff above the valley.

Now I know my body has probably 100,000 non-human cells for every human one, but these little luminous orange specks having a buffet on my belly is just not A-O.K., Okay?

The restaurant’s closed, guys.

Move out!