Punk Mum

We have a problem within activist & feminist communities. Things like the widespread acceptance of marriage rights, the success of Disney hit Frozen, and praise of feminism by celebrities like Emma Watson and Beyonce are sometimes denigrated as being unimportant or alienating.

Let me be the devil’s advocate for a minute. Let me ask you to consider that these achievements are the puddles we, the sopping-wet person in the office, are leaving behind.

Everyone’s been in this boat: your umbrella gets fucked, or you miss the bus or you (me) leave your sunroof in your Accord open and all of a sudden you have to be sopping-wet to go to work or your appointments. Everyone looks at you for a brief moment, because you’re an interesting oddity in the otherwise-blah blah office, and you leave puddles on the floor from having sopping-wet clothing.

The puddles get noticed. People slip on them, they clean them up–they notice them.

We, fellow feminists, are the sopping-wet people in our offices–and these mainstream achievements our movement has accomplished are the puddles we leave behind.

Am I saying it’s right for these puddles to detract from the us; the LGBTQ kids facing violence, homelessness, and mental illness; the women of color and working-class women routinely alienated by academic feminism; the male assault survivors who haven’t found a space to heal in female-dominated crises; the most-of-us on this planet who don’t live in the “developed” world, for whom gender inequality truly represents a public health crisis?

No. Not at all.

But look at what we’re coming up against. Unfortunately, simply by representing a movement which has no place within the standard narrative of society, we’ve already been flagged as not worth taking seriously, or off-base, or even terroristic. To present the notion that gender roles are socially constructed, in a society that teaches you to ignore what all of those words mean at their core, is to try to play pinata in a light bulb store.

Believe me. I’ve tried. Have you ever tried explaining polyamory to people who believe masturbating is cheating? No? It’s pretty hard.

What we need to do to accomplish more productive change, the change I mentioned a few paragraphs ago, that really make an impact on the well-being of humanity–we need to work internally and make sure that everyone in the movement is looking out for everyone else. I don’t know what my Black sisters face on a daily basis, and I don’t expect childless college women to know what I face–but we can try to find common ground to construct solutions that work for all of us.

As to the puddles we’re leaving?
I call them a success.

When my mother was my age, homosexuality had only been considered not a mental illness for twenty years. She could (and did) show her daughter films like Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, and The Little Mermaid–movies which depict women’s roles only in relation to how they serve men. Riot grrrl had taken off, but only as a fringe subculture. (Dare to compare Courtney Love & Kathleen Hanna to Beyonce in terms of mainstream acceptance or status?)

Marriage rights, Disney movies, and celebrity presence should not be our end-all be-all. But we need to acknowledge them for what they are: progress.