no subject

I need to redesign this journal liek whoa; it was one thing when it was mostly an inactive semi-private feelings-dumping ground, but change is coming, I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth ... fandom is awake again, and moving. Time to streamline.

eta: she edited! check it out: new journal look!

Insights That Feminism Has Given Me, aged 32 and 1/2

-The first was the insight, visible when I was about 25, that it was my sex, and not me, that was hindering my goals. I had started to go a little crazy, not sure why my excellence and dedication was getting me nowhere fast, as the mediocre men around me took it easy and yet (almost) kept pace with me. Structurally, there were two reasons why I wasn't rising. One was that I like the company of women, and societies formed by outsiders, and so my mentors loved me but had no money or power to share with me. The other was that I failed to position myself sufficiently in re: my gender; I do tend at pivotal moments to default to thinking of myself as just human, and I forget that I have to deal with the situation of gender in a more active way. I think I can come across as both over-feminine and very assumptive of male-typed leadership roles; in University I was very much "boxed" as the feminist, and my male faculty had strange and slightly adversarial relationships with my primary archives that they hid behind overtly progressive-sounding language.

-The second was the insight, visible to me only just now, of just how much pressure remains on women to give up their juicy parts, their excitement, their self-exploration, in favor of domestic labor and service to others. Everyone has a different reason, but it all adds up to the same thing: stop having fun and pick up (men's) slack. My now-ex-husband shamed me, once, for writing pornography in fanspace. His reason was that he'd been made uncomfortable, once, in a fannish space on the internet, at a fairly young age. But -- years before that, the boys in our elementary school had been snapping my bra straps. Why is a woman's pleasure, a woman's creativity, a woman's sense of play, so easy to sacrifice? Why does it seem so small and squelchable? My ex needed me to pick up the slack of his life, and tend to his accumulated hoard of stuff, and make him the protagonist of my story; but that made me crazy, in short order. Right now, my feminism is telling me that joyful exploration of the juicy parts of life is essential to living sanely, and it is showing me the forces that want me to forgo that, for their own comfort or profit.