if you smile at me, i will understand

I've been wondering if it's time to close out this blog. I have entered a new stage of my life where these kind of introspective blog posts hold less meaning for me. I'd like to continue blogging, but in a much more light hearted way that's a little less personal, and one that mirrors my new life, my new body and my new friends. Life is no longer a struggle and I'm not just squeaking by.

If I started something fun and colorful and silly would y'all read it? Or would I just be typing into space for no one to read?

i wonder if she knows

I know I've been absent from here for a while. I started this post to write about how I was negotiating the world, but specifically, my marriage as a feminist. Although I no longer have that marriage, I'm still negotiating the world as a feminist, but things feel enormously different. I feel like I've become Feminist 2.0, my new understanding of who I am and how I should enteract with the rest of the world in order to achieve the results I want.

Let's start here. Nearly all of my feminist beliefs, at one point, could be boiled down to this point made by Simone De Beauvoir in The Second Sex.

"To emancipate woman is to refuse to confine her to the relations she bears to man, not to deny them to her; let her have her independent existence and she will continue none the less to exist to him also; mutually recognizing each other as subject, each will yet remain for the other an other."

A little more briefly, my main claim to feminism was this. There are men, there are women and there are variations that are in between, both or neither of those things. With little or no need to categorize or define gender or sex, also meaning little or no need to compare them to each other or to create one standard by which the other was judged, then we could all flourish and lead our most productive and happiest non-oppressed lives.

However, at some point a few months ago, I had a revelation. The issue, in my view, wasn't that we were categorizing, defining and comparing men and women, but that we as a society were fixated on trying to draw a line between masculinity, men and the male gender as well as feminity, women and the female gender.

I've discovered that I believe, among all the things I believe about God and the universe and our purpose in the world, that there is a cosmic balance between the masculine and the feminine, not a cosmic balance between men and women. All of us, regardless of sex, gender, orientation or age are composed of some parts feminine, some parts masculine. For many of us, we might find that we are far more one than the other, but I cannot see that one could exist without traits of both. The union of masculine and feminine is the resolution of cosmic unrest. We balance this within ourselves, we balance it with others in our romantic relationships, in our friendships, in our relationships with our family, with our goals and desires, our very being.

Okay, I know this all sounds kind of yin yang-y. But what I'm trying to say was that I found a lot of difficulty in arguing that we should stop worrying about the gender binary. And for the most part, we should. But it's not the gender binary that is the problem, it's the insistence that men are masculine and women are feminine. It's an inability to let people be people without holding them to these defined standards.

...to have independent existence.

Crap. I'm back where I started. I'm not very good at blogging about feminism. Maybe I should get a hobby and blog about that.

I guess the issue isn't so much that I don't believe what I did before, rather that I have a fuller understanding of it. And that I've come to appreciate the masculine and feminine within myself, and the masculine and feminine in others. And I'm learning to love the things about myself that I no longer view as contradictions, but part of a beautiful balance that makes up who I am.

Also. New "about me". (scroll down)