There were multiple issues emerging here: The ongoing homophobia at that school, a whole generation of females who had no sense of history about civil rights giants spanning from Alice Paul to Gloria Steinem and beyond, and of course their befuddlement at how a macho alpha male spouted feminist philosophy.
So many times in school what’s happening underneath what’s happening is much more interesting. I could understand their confusion. The town they lived was the home to an extremist fundamentalist church. Diversity was nearly non-existent. The school was about 98% Caucasian, 1% Native American, and 1% Hispanic. The students had few if any models of adults who embraced and walked civil rights values. They may have learned the history of civil rights and suffragettes in history class but it seemed dead, distant and remote to them.
The music they often chose denigrated women. Females in the school system became sexualized at a very early age. More than one commentator has observed that girls as young as nine today dress like 21 year old women.
With all this background experience, it was no wonder that my pronouncement that I was a feminist must have confused them. My personal presentation was contradictory in their minds. I hunted, I taught yoga. I was calm and forceful at the same time.
My own emergence as an advocate of equal rights for all, however, did not come naturally to me. The town I grew up in town was a larger version of the school I worked in. The Caucasian people were threatened by the Hispanic people. It was not considered improper to make jokes about people of other races. I had few examples of strong women except for my sister.
I would like to say I became a feminist because I am a highly evolved spiritually attuned individual like Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa or Martin Luther King but the reality comes from a more primal and immature base. My reasoning is simple:
Inequality is boring. I don’t like being bored.- I value my personal freedom so highly that I fear if any one group of people loses their equality my own might be threatened.
- Over 50% of the people in the world are women.
- I love this earth.
- Our world is in great distress and needs all the brainpower and cooperation we can muster. Disenfranchising over 50% of the potential source of solutions is just downright foolish.
- Because I am a heterosexual, romantic life and companionship would be so boring without having an equal partner. I don’t like being bored.
I do not know if my sister would call herself a feminist. I have never asked. All I saw was that Jan did exactly what she wanted to do. If she wanted to ski, climb mountains or get pretty or dirty, nobody questioned her. At only five feet two inches tall she has always been a force to be reckoned with.
It took years of listening to stories of girls and women and how they experienced American culture to bring my male alpheness to bear on the dynamic of ongoing inequality. I listened to my wife talk about how she was told that she would earn less because men needed to support their families. She was a single mother at the time. I listened to girls at the school I worked in tell tales of being verbally abused by the superintendent. I grew nauseous around guy cultures that degraded females.
More to come! Stay Tuned!
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