I was reminded that the day this post first appears is March 8, which has been designated as International Women\u2019s Day, so despite the fact that I had another post almost finished, I decided that I should write about women.<\/p>\n
I mean, I am a woman. While I like a lot of things coded male \u2014 swords, for example \u2014 I am definitely not male. In fact, my current go-to answer when asked to name my gender is \u201cnot male.\u201d<\/p>\n
And while I find the idea of non-binary attractive, especially since I do not fit particularly well in many of the niches coded female and am fine with \u201cthey\u201d as well as \u201cshe\u201d when it comes to pronouns, I am a woman. I am also very sure that nobody gets to tell me what that means.<\/p>\n
In particular nobody gets to tell me it means wearing pink or wanting babies or civilizing men, not to mention that nobody ever \u2014 EVER \u2014 gets to tell me that I can\u2019t do such and such because I\u2019m a girl.<\/p>\n
I resisted that lie as much as I could while growing up, which, of course, meant that I never fit in much of anywhere.<\/p>\n
I still don\u2019t fit in much of anywhere, but one of the best things about getting old is that you don\u2019t give a fuck.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve done some things to push boundaries in my life, like criticize sexist practices in organizations, go to law school back when women didn\u2019t much, and get a fourth degree black belt in Aikido, but here\u2019s the thing I\u2019m proudest of:<\/p>\n
I love my body.<\/p>\n
I came to this love through martial arts because I discovered in training how my whole body informs who I am. So part of this love is the fact that my senses and the way I move are integrated into who I am.<\/p>\n
But also, I\u2019m capable of looking at my naked body in the mirror and enjoying the shape of it, the curves of my hips and breasts, the width of my shoulders, the strength in my chest and legs, my height.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t have a supermodel body; my height\u2019s in my torso, not my legs, and there\u2019s no way I could get skinny enough to fit into those tiny clothes even if I wanted to because my bone structure is too large.<\/p>\n
Also, I like food way too much to starve myself. It\u2019s my understanding these days that, despite all the uproar about obesity, being what is labeled \u201coverweight\u201d is actually healthier than being \u201cnormal,\u201d not to mention \u201cunderweight.\u201d<\/p>\n
Which is to say that our norms for health and weight are completely entangled with our norms for beauty and it\u2019s hard to take any of them seriously. I claim overweight with some pride.<\/p>\n
Another thing I\u2019m proud of is that I am not afraid of men. <\/p>\n
Now I am afraid of a lot of things. Pandemics, for example. Fascism. (Individual fascists taken one on one are not scary, but the overall movement is.) Earthquakes. Tornadoes. Climate change. Guns.<\/p>\n
But men in general do not scare me. And when they try to intimidate me by looming over me, they just make me mad.<\/p>\n
I may be old and I don\u2019t throw people around on a daily basis anymore, but I didn\u2019t spend forty years studying martial arts for nothing. I will not back down.<\/p>\n
My response in those situations does not always comport with my Aikido training. I know there are better solutions, but I will confess that men trying to loom over me tend to push all my buttons.<\/p>\n
(See years of being told I couldn\u2019t do things because I was a girl.)<\/p>\n
I read a lot of work by young feminists \u2014 by which I mean people under 50 and mostly women \u2014 and while I really appreciate what they have to say, I often find myself saying \u201cbut we addressed all that in the 1970s.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lyz Lenz has a new book out called This American Ex-Wife <\/i>in which she praises divorce and talks about what\u2019s wrong with marriage. I haven\u2019t read the whole book, just some excerpts from it, but what I\u2019ve seen is great \u2014 she\u2019s a wonderful, funny writer.<\/p>\n
Still, every excerpt from it makes me think of what people said in 1972 about marriage. Wasn\u2019t anyone listening?<\/p>\n
How did millennials grow up to make the same mistakes our mothers and some of our contemporaries made?<\/p>\n
There are some valid criticisms these days of second wave feminism. So much of it ended up being for middle class white women, many of whom seemed to be glad just to be allowed to pursue careers that had previously been denied them and didn\u2019t credit the feminist movement that made that possible.<\/p>\n
I mean, you don\u2019t have to be a woman to be a feminist, but any woman who isn\u2019t one is missing the whole point.<\/p>\n
And too many straight feminists were scared of being called lesbians, though as someone who ended up with a lot of lesbian friends through feminism, I found that stance irritating and cowardly.<\/p>\n
Black women were left out in part because they had to navigate both racism and misogyny and in general for all the reasons people don\u2019t listen to Black women in the United States.<\/p>\n
And of course, there was very little understanding of gender beyond the binary, though you can find people who got it.<\/p>\n
But on marriage, sex, birth control, abortion and other reproductive and health rights, career opportunities, women in elected office, and women\u2019s rights generally, second wave feminism was dead on.<\/p>\n
Also, by the way, on self defense. Many women took up martial arts in the 60s and 70s and also started teaching self defense. The National Women\u2019s Martial Arts Federation is still going strong, but with a few solid exceptions, you don\u2019t see much about that sort of thing in academic gender studies.<\/p>\n
Which is a damn shame, because those things are how I learned to love my body and not be afraid of men.<\/p>\n
(And yes, I know all the arguments about how abusive men should change their behavior. When you figure out a way to get them to do that without enabling women to tell them to fuck the hell off, you let me know. I spent too many years as a lawyer and watching governments to think passing laws makes enough of a difference. I\u2019m all for going after rapists and abusers, but I\u2019d rather stop things before a person gets hurt.)<\/p>\n
Anyway, all you women out there (yes, that includes trans women) this day\u2019s for you. To me it\u2019s also for all those people who are questioning gender in so many different ways, though I doubt anyone official will say so.<\/p>\n
So far, a day to make nice about women is about all the international community wants to do for us, but I have no doubt that we\u2019ll continue to push for one hell of a lot more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was reminded that the day this post first appears is March 8, which has been designated as International Women\u2019s Day, so despite the fact that I had another post almost finished, I decided that I should write about women. I mean, I am a woman. While I like a lot of things coded male […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[332,853],"class_list":["post-3270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants","tag-feminism","tag-international-womens-day"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3270"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3270\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3271,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3270\/revisions\/3271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}