So what kind of feminist am I?

Thus was asked the question, and thus did I endeavor to consider it.

and unto the question came the answer:

hell if I know.

 

An odd one, perhaps, is the full extent of the measure thereby which my feminist leaning might be considered.

How can I be anything but such, with my  painted nails a tipping away on my keyboards and my painted toes grinning through knee highs with with little white petaled flowers on a pink background on the big toes that still hurt from being shoved into shoes that I couldn't yet afford but want ever so badly?

How can I be anything but when I still have sigh at the sight of my body when I pass by a window and think unto myself, yes, someday, but not today, despite all the wishing and trying.

How can I be anything but when I revel in the drape of a skirt or bemoan the rise of a cute top that's just not long enough or hugs too tightly?

How can I be anything but when I cry at the sight of myself without a wig?

So and Odd one, yet again, for whilst I still revel in the simple pleasures of things I was for so long denied, allowing myself the significant luxury of enjoying the pink after so much blue, I am still very much an individual woman who feels that there is not enough yet done.

But I am not the one to do it, either.

 

Mayhaps I am not a feminist.

Consider:  I like men.

I like the way they smile. I like the strength in their faces. I like the simplicity with which they move themselves about. I like the subtle deference they grant to me without thought, even as they scowl disapprovingly should I have erred in some way I have not yet learned whilst on this side of that peculiar divide I still occasionally bounce across.

Consider: I have been a man.

And I have built up in a multitude of layers so many strange and wondrous layers and complexities of behavior that often times I cannot see them until shown to me, having so utterly subsumed them into my own self.

I have enjoyed those privileges of Man, and used them.

Consider: I have been married.

And in that marriage, I have done all that seemed expected of me in that position and that Role, and had the deference, however annoying it may have been at the time.

And I tried, wholly, and utterly, and with all my being, aye, even that which I kept locked within, my own private little music box dancer inside, to grant that which I felt was obligation to she whom I married.

And I did it.

I feel remorse, and guilt, for what I did not provide. But I was not a failure thereby, merely not someone who achieved all that had been set forth as a goal.

Consider: I see men suffering now, as their own restrictive expectations begin to choke them in the same way they choked women -- and I do not wish them to suffer in that way.

How can one who was a man be a feminist, then?

Oddly.

 

Possibly uniquely, but uniqueness is a sum total, not a sum thereof, and I am only an incomplete equation still.

I am a willing tool of the Patriarchy, who conforms as she might be willing on terms with which she is comfortable, and that might mean potentially degrading herself in deference to that man who has, thus far, claimed her heart, despite her certainty that he'll not be with her for as long as she might wish. Who waits patiently in a location miles away from me, and knows I have a long road yet to travel.

I am also displeased and apathetic at cries of the harm still sounded as the blare of the horns and the beat of the drum call battle against the forces of an enemy that is not so simply overcome.

Who is the patriarchy, one needs must ask. The answer to which is that all that surrounds us is such.

Changing it is isn't going to be possible without destroying it, for the patriarchy lies at the root of the beast, where gender lies.

Where I lie.

And I'll not willingly thrust a spear into my own heart. Not without the conviction and sense of duty that bespeaks such a need.

**

30

**

 

unrelated, but occurring:

Why do I blog?

I don't expect readers, though I am pleased and thrilled to know a few have peeked.

I do not share the blog's presence openly.

So why do I do it?

To express myself in the way that I know best. To think aloud and through, whilst coming to understand the things I am going through.

To bitch and rant, moan and gripe, laugh and celebrate.

To share, outside myself, without regard for form or force or function, those things which I happen, at this moment, to care about.

And to enjoy them, in the days ahead, in all their sad and happy and peculiar oddness.

In the end, that is what I am, and I am proud and unhumbled by it, and I shall wave it under the noses of all those who seek to humiliate and degrade me, to find a pigeon hole for me in their own minds and place me within it, alongside other souls of whom I know not one whit.

Because I am ODD.

I am off the beaten path, I am alone in the crowd, and I am alive in the world.

I am me.

Fuck 'em, otherwise.