The Things We Carefully Pack

The past week has been occupied with an onerous chore that seems to have no end: moving.  My roommate and I have been hauling several car-loads full of furniture, boxes of books, and random odds and ends from a second-floor apartment to a house.  There is no better exercise to teach one just how much stuff one has.  My clothes alone took up five large suitcases, and that’s not including the pieces I used as padding for fragile knickknacks.  I wouldn’t consider myself a hoarder, by any means, but our culture teaches us to surround ourselves with things.

Now, I could argue that I need most of these objects.  My clothes of course are necessary, as well as the twenty-five pairs of shoes I own.  Without my (large) desk, where would I sit to work?  Without my journals from the past twelve years, how would I remember my own development as a writer?  And of course I can’t throw away that file of old work—someone might be interested in it when I become famous one day.  That book of recipes I’ve copied by hand will someday be a family heirloom, though I certainly don’t plan on learning to cook any better than I do now.  Okay, yes, that stuffed yellow camel doesn’t fulfill any purpose to make my life better, but I won him in my first year of college, and isn’t he cute?

You get the idea.  We often make excuses for our things, because we get strangely attached to them.  Most often, though, our stuff is valued either because of its connection to the past, or its hope for the future, sometimes both.  Chairs that belonged to my grandmother, a fan that I bought on my first trip abroad, glasses given to me by my best friend—all of these things somehow make me feel less alone.  They remind me of people who love me, or pieces of myself that I might have forgotten.

I am lucky in that most of the things I own do have these associations tied to them.  They make me happy, and that is a perfect excuse to make the trouble to move them seven miles down the road.  You don’t really have too much stuff until you look around at what surrounds you and realize that most of it has no meaning, none of those fond shadows of memories attached.  When you own to possess, and not to appreciate, that is when you should think about cutting back.

Look around.  How many of the things you look at make you think of someone else, or of something that happened to you or others?  How many of your things have purpose to them, and how many are just taking up space in your room?

Why I Need Feminism: Sword For My Fight

The other day, I was having something of an argument with a guy at work. I don’t remember how we got onto the topic, but at one point he looked at me with profound suspicion, asking, “Are you a feminist?”  When I told him yes, he threw back his head and made a very loud noise of exasperation.  

I’m getting used to this reaction.  Feminism has a very bad name, among men and women alike.  This distresses me, because it shows me just how far we still have to go.  But I’m proud to be a feminist, and that’s not just the strength of my education at a women’s college talking.  Feminism is vitally necessary in this world.

Now, I don’t intend this post—or any other, for that matter—to be an attack against the men in my life.  I got the impression that that was my coworker’s real objection to the feminist viewpoint; he told me more than once that “not all men are like that.”  I know that very well, and if I ever come across as accusing, I apologize.  But the fact is, not all men have to be like that for one of them to kill me in an alley someday.

Yikes—that escalated quickly, didn’t it?  But that’s the reason that feminism is so important.  Violence against women is all too acceptable, and that’s what it comes down to.  The sexist comments, the disrespect—that’s all bad, too.  But it’s part of a system that enables more dangerous cruelty.

I read a line this morning that stopped me in my tracks.  “They’re girls,” said one of the characters in the novel to another.  “They were born in danger, and they will live their lives in that condition, regardless of circumstance.” (An Echo in the Bone, Gabaldon, p.228)  Now, this conversation was set in the late 1700s, but it chilled me that it still has the ring of truth to it, almost two and a half centuries later.  Every woman in this world grows up aware of the danger around her.  A girl learns, even if she is never consciously taught, that she has to keep her head down, that she shouldn’t make men angry, that she should be careful what she says and does.  She learns to restrict her wardrobe for her own safety.  She learns not to make eye contact with men on the street, and to avoid groups of them that she doesn’t know.  I’ve been in that position.  A few moments of unwanted conversation with a strange man has the power to terrify. 

Of course, in the book, the other character—who is a man—responds by pointing out that the world is dangerous for men, too.  And that is true.  It’s also true—you have to admit that it is true—that women are in more danger from other people than men are.  But yes, we are all at risk out there.

The quest of mankind, as a whole, is to work towards a greater peace.  We must, as a species, learn to be kind rather than cruel, to be understanding rather than close-minded, to be curious rather than insular.  We must learn to not only accept our diversity, but rather embrace it.  And I firmly believe that we are working towards that end, little by little, and someday we will reach it.  We’re a seething, chaotic mass, and there will always be some of us reaching back for the days of casual violence, but I have hope—no, I have certainty—that those of us who look upward and onward will win the day.  On that day, no one—man or woman—will walk out of their home with even a thought that they might come to harm at the hands of another human.  On that day, we will have no enemies.

But it will take time.  We’re moving in baby steps, not always in the right direction, stumbling, sometimes falling.  All we can do is take what tools we have at our disposal and make what small difference we can.

Feminism is one of those tools.  It is something that can chip away at the massive obstacles and help us get closer to the larger goal.  If I can over time show a few men—or women, even—how important feminism is, then I have made a tiny bit of progress, and that is worth something. 

I define feminism as the acknowledgment of the need for greater respect between the sexes.  It is the awareness that we are all human, and that we as humans can be better than what we are.  It is the acceptance that there is a fight going on out there, a fight that happens in the mind and in the soul, the most important fight we’ve ever gone into.  It is for that fight that I arm myself, every day, with kindness, patience, and determination.  It is the fight for our brighter future, and if we’re going to win, we need everyone to be on the same side, men and women alike. 

Mind Over Matter

Back in the spring, I spotted something that intrigued me.  This happens often—I’m easily intrigued.  But often with such things, I make a note of the idea, or tear that particular page out of that magazine, and then never think about it again.  This, however, has stuck with me.  It was an article I found about a lingerie company, Panache, which had done a campaign entitled “Modelledby Role Models.”  The campaign brought to light six women, all with impressive accomplishments, and used them to showcase Panache’s lingerie.

It was the unusual nature of this that caught my attention.  We’ve come to expect lingerie models to be perfect: long slender limbs, skin airbrushed to a bright glow, hair perfectly coiffed and face made up and suitably sultry.  There are a few companies beginning to move away from that, but for now, that is the majority of the ads that I see.  (Not that I go looking for that kind of thing.) 

Naturally, being a feminist and approving of anything that moves away from the objectification of female bodies and the upholding of an unrealistic ideal, I clicked the link.  When I clicked over, however, I had a little voice in my head saying, they’re not going to seem pretty to me at first.  Much as I liked the idea, I knew that part of my brain was going to look for the cellulite, the lines, the stray hairs, the rolls.  Just because a woman is smart and strong, doesn’t mean she’s beautiful.

Yet looking back through it now, I realize again what I realized then: I was wrong.  These women are beautiful, and I say that without reservation, without needing to muffle that voice of judgment in my head. 

What I’m wondering is, how much of this conclusion comes out of what I know about these women?  Is that voice of judgment silenced by the admiration I have for their work and their vision?  Or is that their passion and success somehow make them beautiful?  You may have come across this phenomenon in your life: you meet someone, and you look them up and down and think, meh, they’re all right.  But as you get to know them, their attraction becomes real, even physical.  Or maybe it happens in reverse, where you initially find someone very attractive, but as soon as they open their mouth…

We like to think of mind and body as separate things, but the fact is, they really aren’t.  We are all stuck in the body we were given, and it’s very clear from all the body-image struggles I’ve witnessed that our bodies have influence on our minds.  It’s nice to know that it works the other way, too.