Finally made myself get up and do some push-ups and situps this morning before jumping in the shower. It’s too cold out to bike places, and grad student budget does not allow for spending on muay thai classes or anything that I’d actually like to do.  So I was feeling weak and lazy, and decided to do something about it.

I discovered Renegade Evolution  this morning and decided that she was my new favorite blogger. This post pretty much summed up how I feel some of the time after reading some other feminist blogs. (Not the ones linked to, BTW.) Regular women are turned off by feminism every day because it makes them feel guilty about who they are and what they like, and that sucks. I keep reading even people whom I don’t agree with because it makes me think and challenge my notions of who I am, but sometimes, y’know, I just want to talk about lipstick and clothes and boys. I’m 27, working on a master’s degree, and sometimes I need a break.

It took me a long time to get to the point where I was comfortable with my sexuality (you’ve heard this theme before, longtime readers), and then recently I had it shoved back into a box. I’m not going to go into details about that, and if you’re reading this, I’m sorry if you’re offended but I’ve got to exorcise some demons before I can move on.

Four years in New Orleans, where the climate is sticky and sweaty and everyone glistens and shows lots of skin, will make any girl at least a little bit more comfortable with herself. But I still wasn’t OK with knowing what I wanted in terms of my own sex life, my own pleasure. That whole line about how women hit their sexual peak in their thirties? Bullshit, at least as far as hormones and biology are concerned.

Quite simply, back in high school, if boys weren’t overtly encouraged to explore their pleasures, at least it was condoned wtih a wink and a nod. Girls, however, were being trained to treat sex as a commodity we exchanged for things. You want that pretty boy for your prom date, along with corsage and limo? You better be willing to sleep with him. You want a boyfriend? Better like giving blow jobs. Some of my friends took pride in their skill at oral sex like they took pride in getting an A on a paper–only more visibly. It was cooler to talk about whether you gave your BF a hand job than if you rocked your math test. Discussion of OUR pleasure was nonexistent.

I was morally opposed to the idea of going down on guys for a while. I didn’t think it was fair, and some inner as-yet-unnamed feminist in me rebelled at the idea of sex being something we did just for boys’ pleasure. It still didn’t lead me to much experimentation with my own, and that sucks.

I told my ex that I’d buy my daughter a vibrator when she hit puberty and teach her to explore what she liked on her own long before she started messing around with boys. He didn’t like the idea.

Anyway, it took a few years on my own for me to understand what I liked and who I liked and what I wanted and didn’t want. To say yes, emphatically, and no, just as emphatically, not “ok, if it’s what you want.” To be comfortable in my skin, my clothes, my life.

And I let that be pushed around by someone else’s beliefs and issues, rather than realizing up front that whether or not I cared about this person very much, he would never be able to accept me. We both waited for the other to change, and it wasn’t going to happen. There are some things I can’t compromise.

It wasn’t about whether I could wear a miniskirt, what was appropriate, whether I was asking for sexual attention from men. It was and is about what decisions I make for myself, my body, and my pleasure.

But it’s not just men who make us feel bad for our choices. Other women do it too. Slut-shaming and all of that jazz starts back in the same high school where we learn that being sexy gets us things from boys. And it happens even in feminist circles.

I found another blogger I like a whole bunch, Candy Poses,  from a comment she left at Feministe noting that because she was a nude model she would be discounted by a bunch of Feministe readers. This struck me as sad, because how many times in the mainstream media are women discounted because they’re strippers/sluts/whatever? Have you heard an article or news blurb about Diablo Cody that doesn’t mention that she was a stripper, as if it makes it somehow more impressive that a stripper had the brains to write a screenplay that could beat out those written by men to win an Oscar?

We don’t need to perpetuate that on ourselves. I’m sorry, but I think that if you feel the need to denigrate a woman as not-feminist-enough because she’s a stripper/porn star/SuicideGirl/nude art model/stay-at-home mom, you’re just feeding into that patriarchal binary that says that those women are less important and women are only valued if they somehow pass into the honorary male category.

Bitch, Ph.D. has a good post today about the sanctimonious child-free crowd.  Whether or not you want kids, you have to understand that talking down to women who do have them is doing the same goddam thing as men who told women that they should understand their place and stay home and raise the kids. To tell a woman that she can’t have an opinion because she poses for nude photos to make a living is doing the same thing as the man who writes her off as just an object.

Screw all that.

I used to have a SuicideGirls account. I did some writing for them, and then I gave it up in part because my ex hated it and in part because it was changing from what I had liked about it originally–that it gave these women who posed naked a voice, a blog right next to the photos of their boobs, that it was impossible to separate the body from the mind. As it got bigger, it lost that dynamic.

But I have friends who are still SuicideGirls and they are not stupid, unfeminist, or deluded. They are smart, self-aware girls who get pleasure and money from the site, and if it makes them happy, GOOD.

As Ms. Evolution said in the above-linked post, nothing is going to be empowering to all women all the time. You can’t tell women that they’re assholes for voting for Obama instead of Clinton because they feel more empowered by his message than hers. You can’t tell women that they’re not feminist because they shave their legs or wear miniskirts or show their boobs on the internet. You cannot be the judge of what makes them feel good. Pleasures are individual, special, and important.

Here’s a short list of things that make me feel empowered. You might not agree, but if you post something telling me that I’m deluded for thinking so, it will be deleted, stat.

1. the click of my heels on the floor. I like shoes that make noise. I like to announce my presence with authority, like Tim Robbins said in Bull Durham. Whether they’re cowboy boots, my favorite kitten-heel suede boots, or four-inch heels, I like the sounds.

2. the movie Gilda, from 1946, starring Rita Hayworth. I won a women’s studies essay contest as an undergrad writing about this movie, but that’s not why it makes me feel good. It’s because Gilda throws all the male prejudices back in their faces, and still comes out on top. And because Rita Hayworth was so pretty. (don’t try to out-Mulvey me with arguments here, either.)

3. those pushups and situps I did this morning. Seeing the muscles in my arms. fuck being skinny, I want to be buff.

4. watching Gina Carano  kick ass. even if she is on American Gladiators right now, when she’s in the real ring she’s a badass.

5. writing something good. this is self-explanatory.

6. knocking on doors for political candidates. getting middle-aged white men to take me seriously when I talk about policy.

7. hot pink lipstick

8. not feeling guilty about showing some skin.

9. chocolate ice cream. without guilt, again.

10. talking to my mother about feminism.

11. any movie, anywhere, that stars a woman who is smart, sassy, strong, and not just the girlfriend.

12. Hermione, from Harry Potter.

13. Joan fucking Jett.

14. roller derby. would be more so if I actually took part instead of being a fangirl, but yeah, whatev.

15. yes, watching Diablo Cody hold up that damn Oscar. with the big tattoo on her arm and in the leopard-print dress with that black bob and red lipstick and thinking, “She’s a lot like me.”
What empowers YOU? (Not just for the ladies in the audience.) If you made it through this whole post, please leave me a comment!