Chapter 1: I Start Bleeding!
Chapter 2: I Become Furry!
Chapter 3: I Don't Know What to Call My Breasts!
Chapter 4: I Am a Feminist!
Chapter 5: I Need a Bra!
Chapter 6: I Am Fat!
Chapter 7: I Encounter Some Sexism!
Chapter 8: I Am in Love!
Chapter 9: I Go Lap-Dancing!
Chapter 10: I Get Married!
Chapter 11: I Get into Fashion!
Chapter 12: Why You Should Have Children
Chapter 13: Why You Shouldn't Have Children
Chapter 14: Role Models and What We Do with Them
Chapter 15: Abortion
Chapter 16: Intervention
Caitlin Moran is hilarious. Her honesty about including Aslan the lion in her sexual fantasies and dealing with handbag-buying pressures is refreshing, the kind of conversations you have with your girlfriends at Chili's after a couple of cheap and delicious margaritas. I love honesty, and I love good writing. Moran does both pretty well.
The cover boasts two claims. One, "The British version of Tiny Fey's Bossypants." I haven't gotten to that one yet, so no comment. The other quote is "Caitlin Moran is a feminist heroine for our times."
Feminist heroine. That's a pretty intense title.
And in her own way, she deserves it, along with every other woman who has stared patriarchy in the face and decided to love herself anyway. But Moran's battle cry is for normalcy, to be treated as "one of the guys." And while that is totally legit, especially for women in male-dominated careers, it's not exactly ground breaking. Caitlin Moran is a damn good feminist. I'm just not sure that makes her a heroine.
I wanted to be "one of the guys" too, for a long time. I was 10 or 11 and had just heard sex explained in the most frigid and creepy way, by scared conservatives who had never come to terms with their own sexuality and didn't really want us to, either. Sex was for reproduction, modesty was to keep men and their animal lust under control, and vaginas were holes to put things in or drag things out. If that wasn't bad enough, I was told I was going to bleed every month for the rest of my life and that this was a gift from God.
I refused to have a vagina.
I was a scrawny pre-teen that wore my brother's cargo shorts and my dad's cast off t-shirts to school every day, who tried to beat up boys during Capture the Flag and made fun of the one girl in school who wore nail polish. I was terrible at all things boy- couldn't play sports, hopeless at video games, and totally not into picking up cockroaches. But I still tried to be as boy-like as possible, because the alternative was unthinkable.
Fast forward through lots of experiences that I'm sure will come up at a later time, to auditioning for The Vagina Monologues at my college. I told my mom about getting a part, the angry vagina part. I could HEAR her blush over the phone. "Hey mom! I auditioned for The Vagina Monologues!" Audible blushing. "You can't SAY that word, Jenni! I'm at the office!" Because I'm sure they were all listening in on our vagina conversation.
Anyway, vaginas. I'm totally biased because it was my first full on feminist experience, but Eve Ensler is a god. She doesn't believe in being one of the guys. She believes in lovin your vagina self, drawing pictures of it, naming it, dressing it up and giving it things to say.
Eve is the one who taught me how to be a woman, much more than Caitlin Moran did. She taught me that I'm beautiful and wonderful and glorious and mysterious because of my vagina, not in spite of it. She was the first one to let me know being a woman was pretty great, not just average or something to ignore as we all try to blend in and be the same. The "we're all just humans" line is great until it turns us into something like Greendale's mascot.
But while we can argue "one of the guys" feminism vs "vagina power" feminism all day long, lets skip that and cut to the chase. Love yourself. Love all of you. And love the people around you, too.
No comments:
Post a Comment