The Melancholy of a Feminist

18 March 2007
Brooklyn, NY

It has been four months since I have updated my blog. This lapse in attention is not due to the lack of interesting events in the world around me, but due to the combination of my busier schedule and my depleting passion for criticizing. Not criticism, but criticizing. I’m tired of waking up everyday and reading the news and not being able to keep track of how many things make me angry. Issues of continuing racism, sexism, sexualized violence, violence in general, anti-environmentalism, xenophobia, fame-obsession, classism, and just general lack of attention to how people and events are represented are tiring me out. And it is nearly at the point where I just don’t care anymore, where I have become one of the millions of people in this country who don’t know where or why people are being slaughtered, starved, or stunted in their ability to express themselves. I’m getting tired of beating my head against a stone wall of apathy and ignorance. Everyday I am confronted with small incidences where I think, “Now, if they had really thought about what they were saying, they wouldn’t have said it like that. Surely not.”

For example, at work last week, one of my co-workers kept referring to all the “foreigners” that come into our store and how they can be a security/loss-prevention issue. He argument was basically that people with accents or a less than perfect grasp of the english language are shoplifters. After the third or fourth time he said “foreigners,” I finally just interrupted him and said, exasperated, “Could you please stop saying ‘foreigners’?”

“Why?” he asked, genuinely puzzled.

“Because it’s racist and xenophobic,” I said.

“What? What’s ‘xenophobic’?” he said. This is a guy who is pretty smart, or at least well-read. Or so I thought, working at a large bookstore.

I explained to him my understanding of xenophobia (fear of that which is Other or different from oneself, although I’m getting more and more tired of referring to the Other like it’s some kind of aberration or interruption of the flow of [white, heterosexual, Western] normal-ness). And then I did something that I normally do, and I apologized for being “all PC.” I think I even referred to myself as a member of the PC Police. But after I said that, I took a beat, and then took back my apology. No, I’m not sorry for refusing to buy into racist clichés. I’m not sorry for being offended by your apathy. I’m not sorry that I refuse to allow you to continue to think in ways that harm yourself and those around you. Maybe next time you’ll give one second of consideration before you say something like that again. Or at least, that’s my hope.

But this argument is tiring. It’s tiring to be on your guard all the time, to be constantly made aware of how much people don’t think about what they’re saying, what they’re showing, what they’re arguing without even uttering a single word. And I feel this ache, this exhaustion now more than ever before. I want to give up, to go mindlessly past posters for Norbit and Black Snake Moan without feeling the stab of being let down once again by a movie industry that really doesn’t care at all about issues of representation. To read headlines about Britney Spears’s breakdown and Anna Nicole Smith’s death and not become painfully aware about how we still love tragic white women while simultaneously destroying them through our infatuation. How women are sexualized even in death. How working class identity is a point of ridicule and laughter and general cause-and-effect thinking: She was always white-trash anyway. I’m tired of reading another US Weekly cover story about how Angelina Jolie is adopting another child from a developing nation, and there being no comment the fetishization of non-white, non-Western children. I hate going to work everyday and having to face a giant poster of Mischa Barton in Bebe’s spring line looking like a girl-child in her older sister’s stilettos, drugged out and impossibly thin. I’m tired of being angry all the time. But living in the culture that I do, knowing the things I know and seeing the things I see, it is impossible not to be mad.

As a native Midwesterner from one of the most conservative communities in Ohio, I held New York City to be filled with liberal and polyvocal possibility. There isn’t anything that you can’t do or find in New York, or so I was told. You have infinite options and choices, or so I was hoping. The city has banned smoking, MSG, and trans-fat...they must be cool, right?
But this city has also the worst newspapers and free daily rags I have ever seen. Even the Village Voice, that last bastion of leftist cultural commentary, has been bought out and overhauled, turning it into an ‘edgy’ celebrity gossip mag as much as anything else. The cultural fringe has been co-opted by the affluent hipster mainstream, which is as consumed with aesthetics and fashion as the Park Avenue set. The look has taken the focus. Appearance, shell, façade - these have taken precedence. Depth, meaning, message - these have been mirrored back onto the outer shell, so that what it means matters only in the context of what it can say about the surface. An endless reflection back onto itself, a narcissism that is reflected in Western culture to the nth degree.

Who can break this endless reflection, the recycling back upon itself of the image, the appearance, the surface? “It hungers for depth, it wants to go deeper.” Eve Ensler originally wrote that as part of her landmark of feminist theater, The Vagina Monologues. That play is now nine years old. Isn’t it time yet to finally go deeper? To shout our questions at the world, instead of just asking them to each other?

This is why, despite my exhaustion and general want of a vacation from seeing the world in such horrifying terms, I cannot shut up, I cannot apologize, and I cannot feel guilty for refusing to let myself or anyone around me go to the easy option, the easy answer. We are better people than that, than the easy answer. And we can make those around us better as well. That is our challenge, and can be our legacy.