On Developing as a Feminist

Part of my Femifesta is ecofeminism. I’ve been an ecofeminist for 20 years; my feminism came about when I was 16, read The Women’s Room, and realized that the ostracism, criticism and judgement I had been facing—for not doing what I was supposed to do, not valuing what I was supposed to value, not being who I was supposed to be—didn’t result from who I was but from an artificial social construct of gender called sexism. I was at the time aware of racism—its artificiality, its arbitrariness, its injustice. I had always been, for the most part, much more interested in books about girls and their adventures. I had (not so quietly) rebelled against the restrictions placed on me by parents, teachers, caretakers, even peers; but all the while I internalized the criticism and subconsciously believed I was somehow fatally flawed.

What a relief to realize it wasn’t me—it was a social injustice, not a personal flaw. I celebrated by becoming even more rebellious; and for a Southern “well-bred” white girl, that meant, more than anything else, sexually liberated and highly experimental (well, again, remember the context). I immediately jumped the color barrier—after all, my caretakers as a child had been ample, warm, honest-smelling black women. We didn’t call them Mammy, we called them by their first names: Beatrice, Anne, Hattie. And they called our parents Mr. and Miz (they only called me “Miz” when I was in trouble, as in “Miz Jane, you better get your little butt in this bathtub!”). My mother tried to control by nagging and the occasional switch; Dad hollered and hit. I respected neither of them and my response to their “discipline” was the same as a cat’s: I just didn’t let them see me do it.

But those large, firm, black women had my complete respect and obedience—well, as much as I could give it—in exchange for the warm and sincere affection they showered on me. No place was so safe after a knee scrape or a wasp sting than Anne’s ample lap; only her sweet-smelling breath could ease the burn of mercurochrome. So when Marilyn French and feminism gave me permission to follow my desires for sex (and approval and affection and love), it was natural that I crossed that forbidden color barrier.
My first black lover was a beautiful man—at 17, he was tall, sleekly muscled with the athlete’s broad shoulders tapering to a fine sinuous waist; upper arms as lithe and powerful as a race horse’s; smooth, narrow hips and that beautiful black man’s butt: high, hard and round. I wasn’t inexperienced and the size of his “member” didn’t shock or frighten me, but it definitely did nothing to dispel the size mythology that surrounds black men’s sexuality. I never had an orgasm with him—I had not yet had orgasm during sex. I’d only learnt a short while before to have one with myself and I was too shy to suggest any extracurricular activities on his part. I don’t remember the sex itself being particularly fabulous—only the urgency of my desire. It never took very long and he, like every other teenage boy I slept with, was always eager to be on his way afterwards. Most of my pleasure was in the anticipation and the admiration of his beautiful, mocha-colored body; his huge, slightly tilted brown eyes; his regally high cheekbones and aquiline nose; and those full lips, so gorgeous, so inviting—the first time he kissed me I nearly fainted. I probably would’ve been happy with just kisses.

Less than a year after our—relationship? affair? fuck-fest?—ended, he was dead. He was in an automobile accident; we’d gone to different colleges but a mutual friend told me about the horrendous wreck and that he was hospitalized. When I saw her the next day in the student center, her usually knowing good-natured features ashey with pain, I knew he was dead; I fainted at the news. I had never known anyone so close to me to die. Especially someone so vital and pulsing and arrogant with life. It was impossible to fathom. I went home for the funeral, but when I drove downtown and saw all those dignified black folks out mourning yet another loss of youth and beauty, I knew I didn’t belong. His parents wouldn’t welcome me—they’d answered the phone a few times when I’d called and I knew they were no more happy about him seeing a white girl than my parents would’ve been if they’d known. I couldn’t go to the viewing or the funeral—some time later, I went to the grave, a flat, scrubby plot, the stone tiny and nearly anonymous. I imagined that godlike beauty shrinking and crumbling in the coffin; his athletic valor, his physical grace, his demand that the world acknowledge and respect him. I certainly had. I mourned not knowing him better—his dreams, the impediments—of which there were many. He came from a upwardly-mobile black family in an old Southern town that had fought integration hard and had even come to violence not long before I was in high school. The fact that he was in college was a triumph, though I’d heard he was partying too much and not working hard enough—he was bright, very bright, but unprepared and unmotivated. It’s questionable that he’d have finished college. I think now of the Houseman poem:
“Now you will not swell the rout

Of lads that wore their honours out,

Runners whom renown outran

And the name died before the man.”

and wonder if, despite all his beauty and potential, his life would’ve got better or worse; if, were he alive today, I’d still admire and respect him.
But I digress. The radical-ness of my feminism never diminishes, though its form morphs and shifts—a belief in liberated, free sexuality has only developed; but my philosophy of feminism grows, becomes larger and more inclusive. The first foray outside of women and sex was ecofeminism. I visited a friend at Evergreen State College in Olympia Washington. Famous for producing such 90s radicals and creatives as Cobain, Vedder, Love and Cornell, in the 80s Evergreen and Olympia also nurtured (and probably still does) a quite radical green pocket—and one that fully incorporated a feminist perspective. In Olympia, I met my friend’s “goddess-Mother” Willow, who soaked the blood out of her menstrual rags and used the water on her moon plants—which produced the most lush, amazing flowers I’ve ever seen! I learnt about Starhawk and Charlene Spretnik; James Lovelock and Deep Ecology; Alice Walker and Marge Piercy. It being the 80s, and a crest in the wave of women’s empowerment that began in the 70s, these ideas got a lot of play at the time. I was lucky enough to visit some of the places they got their start: Olympic National Forest, for example, is a place where the philosophies of Deep Ecology seem not only possible, but undeniable. It is like the Narnian forest that Lucy tries so hard to waken in Prince Caspian; the trees are like Tolkein’s quiet, deeply raging Ents. You feel their energy, their power—at the time, I also felt sadness. I did not belong in their forest, it was clear. Even though my intentions were good, I had no place there. I had flashes of the dryad who comes to tell King Rillian that the Lantern Waste is being murdered; but I was not the king, nor were these trees subject to me. Nor did they know that I was not one of those who laid them waste in broad, murderous swathes that caused the topsoil to wash away and the land to bleed its rich, red clay into the rivers of the Pacific Northwest. It was a powerful connection I made with the trees there, one that has never left me. It also opened me up to many more connections with the natural world—connections that I remembered from my early childhood but that I had lost in the process of “civilization”.

(to be continued)