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| I realize I rant about this far too much, but here we go again. After reading this post on feministing.com (a fabulously crazy and candid blog dealing with all things feminist) and visiting this part of the mentioned website having to do with why I should be having lots of babies now rather than doing important things like, oh I don't know, continuing my education, I decided that I needed to once and for all issue a statement of why what I decide to do or not do with my uterus is absolutely none of your business. Ever.
At the moment, the family groupings of which I am a part have two young women who are currently expecting. As can be expected when others are expecting, I have been fielding numerous questions about when Jer and I will be having a screaming, pooping, peeing, vomitting blob of infant to call our own. Two answers: 1--Not for a very long time, and 2--It's really none of your business.
The worst part of all of this is that as soon as I say, "Oh, not in the near future," I almost inevitably get a "Well, you shouldn't wait too long. You're not getting any younger." Seriously. I've had a person in one of these various family groupings tell me that I'm "not getting any younger." Now, I don't claim to be up on etiquette, but since when is it polite to say that to ANYONE? Has anyone ever visited an elderly grandparent and kindly told them, "Well, Grandma, you're not getting any younger"? Has anyone ever mentioned to a middle-aged parent who expresses a hope for the future, "Well, you're not getting any younger"? If we can generally agree that the phrase "you're not getting any younger" is rude in these contexts, why can't people seem to get it through their heads that telling a fertile young woman that she's "not getting any younger" is equally rude? Grrr.
The real heart of this issue, for me at least, is the issue of gender. Because I am a woman, it is for some ridiculous reason expected that I will reproduce and that I will WANT to reproduce. What?!?! Somehow based on the sheer biological fact of my possession of a uterus, I should want to add to the world's over-population problem? Yes, I have a uterus, but no, that does not mean that I want to get it up and running as a baby machine.
So, here are some suggestions if you actually don't want to have me tear your head off:
1--Unless I bring up babies, don't you dare mention them. If I feel like telling you about my lack of desire to have children, I will, otherwise, keep your nose out of my uterus's business. I haven't asked about your ovaries.
2--Try actually being supportive of the life decisions I am making. I am currently choosing to further my education in preparation for a successful career. Maybe instead of talking about babies, you could actually talk to me about things I'm interested in.
3--Don't you dare insinuate anything about my "closing fertility window." I will have children when I want to have children. Your comments about how I "shouldn't wait too long" and how I'm "not getting any younger" are entirely rude and unappreciated.
4--Unless you are prepared to dole out the finances and time to care for my children for me, don't expect me to listen to your suggestions about when it would be right for me to have kids.
5--Don't assume that just because having kids was "great" for you means it will be for me. This is my life and my uterus.
Ok, I need to stop. One of these days I still need to write a non-angry post on the sexism that is at work behind all of this. I promise that I am capable of being a non-angry feminist. I just get angry when you talk about my uterus like it's your business. That's all.
~Melly~ *popping birth control pills like candy*
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| Controversial title? Oh yes. Controversial post? Not really, but I'll let you decide that.
I was walking out of a building today and held the door open for the man who was exiting behind me. I turned slightly to look at him as he said "thank you." He was, quite possibly, one of the most beautiful humans I've ever seen. As my darling husband knows, I am quick to point out to him beautiful people, be they male or female. As I see it, admiring people is like admiring a piece of art, and admiring the beauty of people strikes me as one of greatest compliment to the divine artist who created them. Yes, perhaps it's a bit odd that I (a straight female) point out hot women to my husband (a straight male), but it is precisely the fact that this strikes me (and possibly you) as odd that makes me think that bisexual people are really more mature than the rest of us.
The second we begin to say "I like men because..." or "I like women because..." we find that we are committing the error of gender essentialism. In laymen's terms, gender essentialism is what we do when we say that men or women "are" a certain thing or are predisposed to act in certain ways. (i.e. "Women are caring and sensitive." "Men are powerful and do not cry easily.") Basically, making blanket statements about either gender and (often) then inferring certain activities that are "appropriate" for each gender. (i.e. "Women should be mothers." "Men should be leaders.") In a very, very simplistic comparison, gender essentialism does on a gender level what racism does on a racial level.
So how does all of this relate to the beautiful person I saw today or to why bisexuality is the most mature orientation? To put it as controversially as possible, the rest of us only care about what is or is not hanging between your legs. What you have going on down there ultimately determines how we interact with you, whether we are conscious of that or not. From the bisexual view, you are a person. You are beautiful or you are ugly. You are mean or you are nice. In other words, you are evaluated first as a person, not as the possessor of a penis or a pudendum, and really, can't we all agree that it's just a bit more mature to look at a person and not what's in their pants?
This is not, of course, to say that what's in the pants doesn't matter at some point. It does. In a covenanted, monogamous relationship, that does (and really should) come up (heh...I just realized that could be a pun). I don't want to come off as a prude who ignores the issue of sex. This may come as a shocker, but believe it or not, my husband and I have sex. We make whoopie. We do the horizontal tango. We get busy. We do it. We bump uglies. And you better believe we enjoy it. In the context of this relationship that I share with this person with whom I've made a covenant of monogamy, I certainly do care about what's in my partner's pants. I care about it, and I like it. But when it comes down to it, of all the many many relationships that I've had (romantic, platonic and everything in between), it's only in this one single relationship that what's in my partner's pants has really had to matter.
So, if in the majority of our relationships the issue of genitalia isn't an issue, why are we not all bisexual? Why do we not just love people? In fact, while this is a theological issue beyond the scope of this post, I think I could make a good case for the fact that Jesus was bisexual in the sense that he was a lover of people as they were, not as people qua penis-possessor or pudendum-possessor. The moral of that post might be that if we are striving to be Christlike, we should strive to be bisexual.
Before I conclude, I want to anticipate what I'm sure will be comments to this post from people who have misunderstood what I am trying to say. While I don't even want to try to define what a "sexual orientation" is, I am NOT trying to suggest that we should be of a certain one. I am NOT trying to say that people who do identify as having a bisexual orientation are inherently more mature than the rest of us or that they have thought in these terms. I AM trying to say that the concept of loving people as they are (which I am, perhaps incorrectly, identifying with a broad category I am calling "bisexuality") is a good thing to do. I AM saying that making assumptions about who people are, what they should, what they should or should not look like is a pretty stupid thing to do.
So, with all that said, my friends, go and be bisexual!
~Melly~ *bisexually*
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| I spent years hearing the stories of "The Good Samaritan" and "The Samaritan Woman at the Well" and being told by preachers or teachers that Samaria was the "rough side of town." I would dutifully imagine the "rough sides" of the places I frequented and would knowingly nod at the speaker to demonstrate my understanding of that cultural factoid. What I understood, though, was what the proverbial Samaria looked like from the outside, not the inside. While I could certainly not profess to understanding the inner-workings of a first century Samaritan mind, spending the past year living on the notorious "West Side" has made me feel a bit less Judean and a bit more Samaritan.
A few months back, a neighbor commented how he first thought I must be an undercover cop because "ain't no white girls live 'round here!" Yesterday, a woman riding the same bus home mentioned that I was "too cute" to live in this part of town, and when I relayed the the undercover cop hypothesis, laughing, she replied, "I woulda thought the same thang!" Today, while walking Muffy, a man standing a couple of yards away talking with some friends called me by yelling across the street, "Hey White Girl! C'mere so I can looka 'chu!" Perhaps the saddest part of this last tale is the fact that I knew exactly whom he was calling before I even had to look in his direction.
I lead a double life. By day, I am a budding biblical scholar, By night, I'm White Girl (who is studying theology, no less. Here's a sample my most recent theological conversation with a neighborhood man after I told him I was studying theology: "Wha' that?" "It's like religion." "Oh, I ain' n'er heard of that sh**.") In a sense, I'm not even properly "Samaritan." My fellow Samaritans don't recognize me as one of them, and really, they're right. In all probability, I'm among the few in this neighborhood who could pack up and move whenever I need to. I'm one of the few who isn't selling some weed or my own body on the side just to make ends meet. I'm one of the few who has the option to ride the bus because I want to be a little more earth-friendly sometimes and not because I have no other means of transportation. I'm one of the few who has the luxury of spending my days in climate-controlled classrooms discussing existential ideas rather than working overtime just to avoid foreclosure and put food on the table for my family.
So maybe I was wrong. Maybe I don't understand what it's really like as "inside" Samaritan, but I live among the Samaritans. I walk with them, talk with them, ride the bus with them, laugh with them. I know them well enough to know that they will (probably rightly) never see me as a fellow Samaritan, and I know that that is because I have the luxury to sit in my ivory tower and discuss the parsing of a particular Greek participle and its impact on the exegesis of a certain obscure passage. In fact, the very thing that I want to spend my life doing is so very, very far away from the very real lives of my fellow Samaritans.
And where is Jesus in this? Jesus rebuked the ivory tower of the religious elite of his day, and instead, engaged in conversation with a certain Samaritan woman and told stories that glorified the very Samaritans at whom the elites were appalled. And so, have I really followed Jesus' call to follow him if I climb up the steps of the ivory tower?
I am, of course, asking these questions at all the wrong time. This is the time when I bolster myself in my desire to continue on the path I've begun as a means of reassuring myself that I have the desire to make it through a PhD program. This is when I convince myself that all of those Greek participles inadvertantly have an impact on the Samaritans next to whom I am living. But the sad and scary truth is that I really fear that this is simply not the case. "I ain' n'er heard of that sh**" is as much as my Samaritan neighbor knows about theology. No matter how I argue, those Greek participles aren't affecting his life. They're not getting him a better job. They're not putting food on his family's table. And they are most certainly not pointing to a Kingdom of God in which he is first and I am last. I sometimes wonder if it's not the case that these Samaritans couldn't teach me far more than the ivory tower.....
~Melly~ *aka. White Girl*
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| What if.... A phrase that opens up new possibilities and closes doors. A phrase that suggests hope for the future and despair over an unattained past. A phrase adequately summing up my doubts and fears about my ability (and desire?) to do what the past 5 years have been pushing me toward.
At the beginning of any semester, I am usually overwhelmed as I look at the projects, papers, and translations that I must accomplish in a few short weeks. This semester is no different in that regard. What does seem different, though, is that this semester is also the time that I need to spend constructing a career and an application that will ultimately land me a spot in properly prestigious PhD program. This problem is compounded with the fact that 3 of my 4 classes this semester are PhD classes in which I am studying with the people who I would theoretically be calling my colleagues next year. I wish that I could some how turn my response to this into a positive thing and say that I am "humbled" by the chance to take such courses with such people, but the real truth of the matter is that I'm scared to death about what I've spent the last 5 years getting myself into.
In addition to this fear, I also have the gift/curse of being able to justify just about anything in just about any situation. (My roommates from college can recount numerous times when I've justified chocolate to the point of calling it a health food.) With that in mind, I find it increasingly easy to justify to myself that I would be doing the world a greater service if I were doing something more "humanitarian" and less "cerebral." I reason with myself that there are children starving all over the world, and spending time learning Paleo Hebrew script so that I can decipher parts of the 4QPaleoExodusm manuscript would be better spent working on providing those children with food, water, and the basic necessities of life. And ethically speaking, I think that this is a fabulous argument. I don't really know if I really can justify the fact that I'm accepting thousands of dollars from a properly prestigious university in order to study highly specialized material which is completely irrelevent to the hypothetical starving child.
The fear mixed with the seemingly good excuses for why I shouldn't be doing what I'm doing have me filled with so many doubts about what my future should hold. I recently looked back on one of my pre-college diaries and had to laugh at how I seemed to be expressing similar doubts about where I should be applying to college and where I would even be able to get in. I looked over my pre-grad school diary entries as well and found the same story there. All of that is to say, I know in my mind that this fear and anxiety about my abilities is not new. I know that this is a normal thing for me. But still......I'm terrified. What if I don't get in at the properly prestigious places? What if I don't get into to ANY program? What if I've really been doing all the wrong thing and have just wasted the past 5 years of my life? What if I've completely screwed up my sense of vocation? What if I'm not as opposed to taking the "easy way out" of church ministry as I thought I was? What if I don't love what I'm doing as much as I thought I did? What if I do love it as much as I think I do and lack the ability to do it? What if I do nothing with my life? And so many other "What Ifs."
I know that things will all "work out" (whatever that means), and in a year's time I will probably reread this little rant and laugh at how nervous and scared I was for no reason. I know that from reasoned and rational perspective. Unfortunately, however, there's a very large part of me that is neither reasoned nor rational, and that part of me is so very afraid of what the future holds.
~Melly~ *anxiously*
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| It's been a while (only months, but it seems much longer) since I've done much in the way of thinking about women. Then today, for whatever reason, as I was walking from my parking spot to the classroom, I found myself thinking about my many problems with calling myself a feminist. I've often told people that I'm a feminist in the same way that I'm a Christian. Because both terms come so fully loaded with so many connotations, I don't like using either, though both are essentially a large part of who I am.
As I thought more about the specific "feminist" title, I found myself wondering if I could avoid "feminist" by claiming Alice Walker's "womanist." As I've encountered the term being used, "womanist" almost always seems to refer to black women (I don't even say "women of color" because it seems that Latina women have claimed "mujerista"....at least in the theological bits and pieces that I've come across). However, after going back to Walker's definition of a "womanist," I realized that skin tone is only accounted for in the first part of Walker's four-part definition. The other parts seem open to women (or men?) of any race. According to Walker, a womanist "loves the moon. Loves the Spirit. Loves love and food and roundness." Beautiful.
"Womanist" has so many fewer negative connotations attached to and, in my mind at least, so many more positive connotations. "Womanist" evokes that beautiful relationship between Celie and Shug which I, as a college freshman, wanted to define as a lesbian or a straight relationship. It was both, and it was neither; it was gorgeous because of the very ways it shunned everything that demanded black or white answers. And for this very reason, I want to claim the term "womanist." I want to have a term that can describe my experience of loving the taste of a woman's kiss, though I am faithfully and happily bound to a man who I call my life partner. I want a term that can embrace the ambiguity of sexuality, love and Spirit. "Womanist" does that.
Yet in spite of my infatuation/fixation with "womanist," I am so very hesitant about claiming it for myself. For centuries, white women have been robbing all women of color, and especially black women in the American antebellum South, of their property, children, bodies, ideas and dignity. White women have stolen, and continue to steal, anything and everthing that a black woman might call her own. And herein lies my dilemma. As much as I love the term "womanist" (and the women, food and roundness that come with it), I am painfully aware of not wanting to further rob other women, especially those who have been historically robbed for centuries, of their own rightful terms. And here is where I remain stuck. Can I claim the term "womanist"? Can I honor the integrity, dignity and intellect of the black women who have coined and claimed this term if I claim it for myself? Am I being "overly sensitive" and making up a problem that doesn't exist? How do I resolve this? Thoughts?
~Melly~ *womanistly or feministly?*
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