For Christmas, my best friend Will, a long-time feminist, bought me the book "Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution" by Sara Marcus. I read the brief introduction detailing her experience with the movement, limited but, for her, life-changing. It made me want to cry. It made me want very much to finish the book. It made me want to throw the book away.
I began my political work as a feminist, I remain a feminist. I work and live and interact with other people as a feminist. But I have made my brand of feminism a very palatable thing. The more conservative people in my life would disagree, but I think the mere fact that I am close to so many truly politically and socially conservative people is proof in and of itself: I am no longer the kicking, screaming, angry little feminist I began as. Three years in non-profits in DC and a long relationship with someone in the military have something to do with it. Time spent working in communications has also been a factor; I came to see the ability to communicate effectively as vital to the survival of policy, and anger often doesn't communicate well. It doesn't necessarily help you (or me) accomplish what you wish to accomplish.
But anger and the "strident feminism" of my life a decade or so ago accomplished other things. For one thing, it was loud. Gloriously, amazingly loud. Which means it got heard. I wish I had words for how hard it is to be heard as a woman. We still make less on the dollar than men doing the same job, we still get raped, we still get told what we're allowed to do with our bodies by people we've never met, we still get told what we should do with our bodies by every media outlet on the planet earth, and on and on. And we are taught that the way to be heard is to be polite, and ask nicely, and work hard. It is important to get along with people and not make enemies; making enemies is not the way to get what you want. And to a certain extent, I very much believe that. I bought in enough to have ended up, at this point in my life, as a pretty moderate version of a feminist working hard for what I believe in.
But like the LGBTQ(QA) movement I have spent the majority of my life working in, I believe anger from the left is important fuel for the fire in the middle. I believe a push from the far left moves everything along on its way. I think left to its own devices the middle will dawdle for an eternity, because the middle is comfortable, and most people in the middle are there because they are comfortable, and who wants to move when they're comfortable?
No one, that's who.
So this book makes me think back to an angrier but louder and more joyous time in my life, a time of more clarity and perhaps more sincerity and wonder: what do I want from this degree I'm pursuing? What do I want to change, and how? What kind of feminist do I want to be when I grow up? Studying incredibly personal issues in the dense theoretical abstract of grad school has still managed to make me squirmy and uncomfortable with the sense that I no longer know the answers to these questions, and now that my first semester has ended, it's time to consider them.
