I am a lesbian woman of Color whose children eat regularly because I work in a university. If their full bellies make me fail to recognize my commonality with a woman of Color whose children do not eat because she cannot find work, or who has no children because her insides are rotted from home abortions and sterilization; if I fail to recognize the lesbian who chooses not to have children, the woman who remains closeted because her homophobic community is her only life support, the woman who chooses silence instead of another death, the woman who is terrified lest my anger trigger the explosion of hers; if I fail to recognize them as other faces of myself, then I am contributing not only to each of their oppressions but also to my own, and the anger which stands between us, then must be used for clarity and mutual empowerment, not for evasion by guilt or for further separation.

All through my sophomore year in high school, I was in love with a boy and we were sleeping together in the back seat of his car. He was the captain of the football team and I was only a sophomore. Sometimes when my folks weren’t home, we would make it on the couch, so one time toward the end of the summer after his senior year, he came by when nobody was home. I could smell beer on him, but I couldn’t not do what he wanted. He asked me to take off all my clothes and went to a kitchen cabinet and came back with the butter dish. “I’m gonna cover you with butter, Susan,” he said. He moved his hands real slow and soft, butter over every part of me. Then he said, “Bye-bye,” and went out the door, and I remember thinking, “What is this to do to the future Homecoming Queen?” and I found out the next day how he’d had his first date with a new girl that night. My father had a gun. So I waited in a little park across the street from this boy’s house, and when he showed I went over and said to him, “Look what I got.” “What?” he said. I waved it. “Wow,” he said. “That’s right,” I told him. And there was this Mickey Spillane book called ‘Vengeance is Mine’ I had just read, so I said, “Vengeance is mine.” “I got a full scholarship for football, Susan,” he said. “It’s a Big Ten school.” And I shot him. I didn’t know you could be shot and not die, so I didn’t shoot him anymore. I just walked away. He lived and went on to play Big Ten football after a year delay. It’s something, though, how once you shoot a man, they’re none of them the same anymore, and you know how easy, if you got a gun, they fall down. You wanna go out, get somethin’ to eat? I’m gonna go over to Bookbinder’s and get myself an elaborate meal.

The feminist movement is generally periodized into the so-called first, second and third waves of feminism. In the United States, the first wave is characterized by the suffragette movement; the second wave is characterized by the formation of the National Organization for Women, abortion rights politics, and the fight for the Equal Rights Amendments. Suddenly, during the third wave of feminism, women of colour make an appearance to transform feminism into a multicultural movement.

This periodization situates white middle-class women as the central historical agents to which women of colour attach themselves. However, if we were to recognize the agency of indigenous women in an account of feminist history, we might begin with 1492 when Native women collectively resisted colonization. This would allow us to see that there are multiple feminist histories emerging from multiple communities of colour which intersect at points and diverge in others. This would not negate the contributions made by white feminists, but would de-center them from our historicizing and analysis.

Indigenous feminism thus centers anti-colonial practice within its organizing. This is critical today when you have mainstream feminist groups supporting, for example, the US bombing of Afghanistan with the claim that this bombing will free women from the Taliban (apparently bombing women somehow liberates them).

The refusal, especially among liberals, to believe that pornography has any real relationship to sexual violence is astonishing. Liberals have always believed in the value and importance of education. But when it comes to pornography, we are asked to believe that nothing pornographic, whether written or visual, has an educative effect on anyone. A recognition that pornography must teach something does not imply any inevitable conclusion: it does not per se countenance censorship. It does, however, demand that we pay some attention to the quality of life, to the content of pornography. And it especially demands that when sexual violence against women is epidemic, serious questions be asked about the function and value of material that advocates such violence and makes it synonymous with pleasure.

Miss,” however delicious its scent in the private house, has a certain odour attached to it in Whitehall which is disagreeable to the noses on the other side of the partition; and that it is likely that a name to which “Miss” is attached will, because of this odour, circle in the lower spheres where the salaries are small rather than mount to the higher spheres where the salaries are substantial. As for “Mrs.,” it is a contaminated word; an obscene word. The less said about that word the better. Such is the smell of it, so rank does it stink in the nostrils of Whitehall, that Whitehall excludes it entirely. In Whitehall, as in heaven, there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage.

If you are the exception that proves the rule, and the rule is that women are inferior, you haven’t made any progress.

From a consequentialist standpoint, a woman’s right to bodily autonomy outweighs fetal pain because we live in a society that does not force people to use their bodies to support others — not their organs, not their bone marrow, not their blood, not their skin. We do not force people to sacrifice parts of their bodies to save others not because we don’t care about a patient’s pain, but because we recognize that bodily autonomy is an essential part of a functioning free society. To suggest that we ignore that and make an exception when it comes to forcing pregnant women carry a pregnancy to term suggests that we force pregnant women to submit to a violation of their rights that we impose on no one else. That’s not consequentialism; it’s hypocritical inconsistency.

As girls come of age sexually, the culture gives them impossibly contradictory messages…. Somehow girls are supposed to be innocent and seductive, virginal and experienced, all at the same time. As they quickly learn, this is tricky. Females have long been divided into virgins and whores, of course. What is new is that girls are now supposed to embody both within themselves. This is symbolic of the central contradiction of the culture—we must work hard and produce and achieve success and yet, at the same time, we are encouraged to live impulsively, spend a lot of money, and be constantly and immediately gratified. This tension is reflected in our attitudes toward many things, including sex and eating. Girls are promised fulfillment both through being thin and through eating rich foods, just as they are promised fulfillment through being innocent and virginal and through wild and impulsive sex…. The emphasis for girls and women is always on being desirable, not on experiencing desire…. advertisers can’t conceive of a kind of power that isn’t manipulative and exploitive or a way that women can be actively sexual without being like traditional men…. A young woman seems to have only two choices: She can bury her sexual self, be a ‘good girl,’ give in to what Carol Gilligan terms ‘the tyranny of nice and kind’ (and numb the pain by overeating or starving or cutting herself or drinking heavily). Or she can become a rebel—flaunt her sexuality, seduce inappropriate partners, smoke, drink flamboyantly, use other drugs. Both of these responses are self-destructive, but they begin as an attempt to survive, not to self-destruct.

Think of all the women you know who will not allow themselves to be seen without makeup. I often wonder how they feel about themselves at night when they are climbing into bed with intimate partners. Are they overwhelmed with secret shame that someone sees them as they really are? Or do they sleep with rage that who they really are can be celebrated or cared for only in secret?

Some men do the dinner dishes every night. That doesn’t make their wives free. On the contrary, it’s just one more thing she has to feel grateful to him for. He, in the power and glory of his maleness, condescended to do something for her. It will never mean more than that until the basic power relations are changed. As long as men are the superior caste and hold the political power in the class relationship between men and women, it will be a favor your lover is doing you, however imperiously you demand it. And beyond that one thing, nothing else need have changed.

When men feel inconsequential, it’s easier to blame women than it is to confront patriarchy-the true source of the diminishment and lack of meaning in so many men’s lives. When men feel unloved and disconnected, it’s easier to accuse women of not loving them well enough than it is to consider men’s own alienation from life. It’s easier to think of women as keeping men from the essence of their own lives than it is to see how men’s participation in patriarchy can suffocate and kill the life within themselves. It’s easier to theorize about powerful, devouring mothers than to confront the reality of patriarchy.

Beneath the massive denial of men’s power and responsibility and its projection onto women is an enormous pool of rage, resentment, and fear. Rather than look at patriarchy and their place within it, many men will beat, rape, torture, murder, and oppress women, children, and one another. They will wage mindless war and offer themselves up for the slaughter, chain themselves to jobs and work themselves to numbed exhaustion as if their lives had no value or meaning beyond controlling or being controlled or defending against control, and content themselves with half-lives of confused, lost deprivation. What men lack, women didn’t take from them, and it isn’t up to women to give it back.

Men often react to women’s words - speaking and writing - as if they were acts of violence; sometimes men react to women’s words with violence. So we lower our voices. Women whisper, Women apologize. Women shut up. Women trivialize what we know. Women shrink. Women pull back. Most women have experienced enough dominance from men - control, violence, insult, contempt - that no threat seems empty

Any patriarchy survives and thrives only if its leaders and members can perpetuate a widely accepted standard of ‘proper’ femininity. A dominant notion of ‘proper’ femininity is especially potent when it becomes the basis by which women (and girls) judge, or ‘police,’ each other. Such daily judging—of girls and women by girls and women—creates divisive hierarchies among women, making it more likely that they will see other girls or women as sources of competition or even as threats to their own sense of well-being. This sort of preoccupation makes it less likely that girls and women will notice how the larger pattern of relationships, rules, and presumptions of patriarchy shape their own lives, much less that they will join together as women to challenge masculinized privilege. That is, when racism, class prejudice, nationalism, patriotism, militarism, and competition for boyfriends and husbands divide women and girls and divert their attention, patriarchy becomes more secure.

A woman’s beauty is supposed to be her grand project and constant insecurity. We’re meant to shellac our lips with five different glosses, but always think we’re fat. Beauty is Zeno’s paradox. We should endlessly strive for it, but it’s not socially acceptable to admit we’re there. We can’t perceive it in ourselves. It belongs to the guy screaming ‘nice tits’.

How To Subjugate A Body  © Sophia Wallace 2012