Some days I wonder why I keep arguing about feminism on the message boards, especially when I should be working on my next book.
But then I turn on the television for ten minutes – 10 minutes of PBS – and there’s a public service announcement co-funded by Liz Claiborne that states that one 1 in 5 teenage girls is sexually or emotionally abused by their boyfriends.
So I did a little research and discovered a website dedicated to preventing relationship abuse called Love is Not Abuse.
And in its statistics section, this is what I found:
That’s why I keep arguing. While it may not seem that discussions as to whether or not women can use their sexuality as a kind of power have any relevance to the above statistics, I think they do. There is a tendency in the world in general to gloss over the actual lives of women, and instead fixate on the exception. Ironically, I think that comes out of an optimistic impulse: we don’t really want to believe that women’s lives can be so horrible only because they’re women.
But there’s something really wrong here. Women’s lives have not gotten better because they can show some cleavage and get some guy to buy them a drink. When a married tranny argues with me that getting yourself bought a drink or turning a man’s head is power, I often wonder if they think first to ask their wives why they don’t use their sexuality as power. After all, a lot of us are attractive women. But we’re also smart. And we don’t use that power for a reason – and it’s not because we don’t think we have it. It’s because once you use it, there’s this raft of assumptions about who and what you are. Most of us, frankly, just want to get through a day on our skills or our brains and really don’t need our tits to help out.
These arguments are not abstractions for me. I’m not arguing for the hell of it – I’d rather be writing. But I have very little patience for people who want to and willfully try to believe in something that makes them feel better instead of dealing with what’s really going on in the world. And I acknowledge that I get especially impatient when that person occasionally dresses as a woman, but remains somewhat oblivious of the reality of most women’s lives.
