Blog Archives
New Series: The Birth of a Feminist
I’m beginning a new series in my sidebar. It will be the Birth of a Feminist series, a record of what went into my formation, or I suppose I should say rebirth (given my understanding of feminism) as a radical feminist.
I was raised academically as a quantitative analyst. A boys’ club to be sure. Statistics are important in describing problems and in predicting outcomes, and being able to quantify things is useful to some extent for a variety of reasons. I was further raised in this tradition to pooh-pooh everything that seemed subjective or qualitative – we were ‘hard’ scientists in the ‘soft’ science of psychology – there was a lot of posturing needed, of course, to make sure *our* dicks stayed hard. This is how men roll. The unspoken rule was that that qualitative shit was the domain of women. Women and their experiences. Women and their stories. Women and their emotional ties to information. And I believed it for some time. I didn’t take my fellow graduate students in community and social psychology so seriously. After all, I was mapping the brain and quantifying male-defined forms of intelligence. I had access to numbers. I was using math. So there. We win.
And then years later, I went back to graduate school expecting to do more work in numbers and business and technology, and I found myself exposed to different forms of knowledge creating, dissemination and preservation. I learned about the art and value of story-telling. I learned about the complexities of non-quantifiable knowledge exchange. It was fascinating. I followed that academic degree with a year of research with a group of doctors and, more interestingly and importantly, qualitative analysts. Our work was in mixed-methods (quant and qual working together). I realized that numbers only take you so far. You need stories and personal accounts and understanding and sometimes including biases to truly explain reality. You need both. I felt I improved as a researcher. I was humbled. Humility is essential in a researcher. So I see value in stories. They have an important place in our record. Our early ancestors communicated this way, and somehow we moved away from it as men have come to dominate.
So anyhow, onto Genesis: my series on the (re)birth of a feminist.
Genesis:
the origin or mode of formation of something
Feminists, or women-centred women:
- are born;
- swiftly and relentlessly undone and subordinated; and then
- remade through
- experience resulting from
- systematic, impersonal misogyny through rape culture, and
- unique, chance encounters with particular individuals, times, places, and situations;
- and glimmers of remembrance of the collective memories of feminists-past lying in their subconscious.
- experience resulting from
Or something along those lines.
If I think about how I became a feminist, that is how I would describe it. I think all girls are born to be free. The majority (excluding those with the propensity for the nastier of the personality disorders) are born with the capacity to be free, intelligent, creative, empathic, mindful, and cooperative.
I think girls are born into the flavour of subordination dictated by their culture/patriarchy whereupon all members are subject to that culture’s indoctrination. But girls are also individually stripped of their birthright to feminism upon entry into the world when all the ‘cutesy’, protective, paternalistic, and dismissive, underestimating treatment particular to their family/group starts.
All girls test out rebellion – a natural response to the language-free remembrance of their real woman-defined purpose as women through what Jung* termed the ‘collective unconscious’ – in small ways. They defy gender-defined behaviour. They break rules designed for them as girls. And they are smacked down in a variety of ways – verbal, emotional, psychological, physical and sexual punishment. For almost all girls, this works effectively to keep them in their chains and then to do the work themselves to keep the chains in place unquestioned.
* [Note: I have little use for the misogynist, Jung.]
For others, for one reason or another, the punishment doesn’t take. The call of the wild, the natural, their real purpose is too strong. And they take a better, but harder, path. The one to feminism. Woman’s natural and rightful state.
This collection of stories was/is my path to feminism. Many of the punishments worked on me, but my feminism was always so close to the surface of consciousness, that in the end, I got back to where I belong.
Genesis I: The Girl and The Stranger in The Car
The Girl and The Stranger in The Car
This post is part of the ongoing Birth of a Feminist series. Listen along to my recording on YouTube and/or read the article below ♥♀
Although our goals may be similar, there are two significant differences between serious feminists and superheroines. First, true feminists wear comfortable, woman-friendly clothes. And second, unlike superheroines, feminists don’t usually have a clear, specific origin story. Rather, we have moments of clarity or realization. Moments that accumulate. Moments that may not become significant or actionable until later, sometimes in combination with other moments. Sometimes, it is a seemingly small event or moment that puts a lifetime of horror into perspective. You meet someone, you read something, you see or experience something that just makes you say ‘I see what is going on, and I’ve had enough’. It is a matter of right time, right place, and readiness/openness. Although it may happen, I think it is a rare woman who, like Athena, is born clad in full warrior gear.
In this vein, if asked when I became a feminist, I don’t think I could tell you. There have been many significant events that have made me what I am. And I’m still developing. I still make typical mistakes. That is gender programming. It takes a lifetime to siphon the poison from one’s personal psychology and behaviour.
I still remember an early formative moment. It’s something I think about decades later, and it still guides me. It’s not the most important formative event, but rather, one of many.
I was 13. It was a winter evening at about 9:30 pm. It was freezing, dark, snow everywhere. I had attended my father’s university lecture in psychology. We were driving home. I was sitting in the passenger seat in the front of the car, looking out the window.
And I saw her.
A woman being dragged by her hair across the snow into a bush. She was fighting, but not winning. The man who had her was bigger and determined. And it was late on a weeknight in the winter. There was no one around.
I shouted to stop the car. Startled, my father pulled over. I pointed and insisted. We intervened. The man ran off. We hustled the woman into our car and drove her home. She was mostly silent, but we learned her attacker was her ex-husband. I was also silent, emotions confused. I was learning something important. I realized that had I not seen her and done something, something BAD would have happened. But my understanding wasn’t nuanced.
And afterwards, my father, the brilliant psychologist, never spoke a word about it. I was not debriefed. Not counselled. I was left to draw my own conclusions. Possibly, he remembered having to intervene when his father beat his mother. No excuse though. When I look back at that child from the perspective of an adult, I’m shocked, saddened, and I wish I could go back to do damage control. But would I be what I am and do what I do if I’d not worked through that business alone?
A girl is exposed to explicit, real life violence – a stranger’s near rape/beating/murder. She plays a significant role in ending that violence, shares a space with the stranger for a few minutes, the significant connection between them left unarticulated, the silence controlled by another man, and then, and the child is left to wonder, to analyze, to worry, to fear. To build a schema.
It was only years later after many, many object lessons on what men were, thought about and did to women, after intervening in other near-rapes and beatings, that I realized that the woman I had saved years before was only temporarily safe. Temporarily safe from this specific man in her life, and generally, from all men no matter where or when. There is no beginning and end to violence for women. There are episodes in a lifetime of fear. And there are many lifetimes. This woman was one of millions and millions and millions through time. We are all that woman at some point. And to not be a feminist – to not want female freedom from male violence and control – is just not an option. For me, at least.
This post is part of the Birth of a Feminist series.
♀️ If you care to support Story Ending Never, we are appreciative. ⚢
Story Ending Never 
You must be logged in to post a comment.