One Year of This Shit

Today, I went to the Women’s March in Albany, one year after attending the march in DC. Obviously the crowd wasn’t as big, but there were good speakers, representing a broad spectrum of the population, and the crowd was good and fired up.

I did not wear the hat this year. Plenty of folks did, but for myself, I feel like if someone tells me something makes them feel unwelcome or left out, it’s important to listen to them and acknowledge their feelings. Making them feel included, and like they matter, is more important to me than a hat or a symbol. The whole point, to me, is to support others, to come together to fight all of the injustices we see happening, to roar together in a collective that can’t be ignored. We stand or fall together. And if something makes anyone feel like they don’t belong, it’s antithetical to that purpose, no matter how I personally feel about it. People experience things differently, and feel differently about those experiences, and that’s ok. What’s not ok is failing to listen. What’s not ok is insisting that other peoples’ feelings are wrong just because we don’t feel the same way, or didn’t experience the same things that they experienced. Men do that to women all the time, and I know we don’t like it when we’re on the receiving end, so we should keep that in mind in how we treat others.

This was the sign I made to carry. I wanted to carry a sign that acknowledged all of the different fronts in this war, but where do you even start? We have white supremacists occupying seats of power in our federal government. We have a racist, rapist misogynist sitting in the Oval Office. Poor kids are losing their health insurance. People are being deported, back into dangerous situations where they are separated from their families with abject cruelty. Refugees are being turned away in their time of dire need. LGBTQAI+ people and women can now be denied medical care based on the religious beliefs of people who swore to Do No Harm. It’s a big sign, but I could have covered it in text an not covered enough.

So I borrowed a quote from Flavia Dzodan, from her excellent article, My Feminism Will Be Intersectional Or It Will Be Bullshit. Seriously, go read it if you haven’t. And if this is a new thing for you to think about, sit with it a while, and think about how calls for “solidarity” routinely ask an awful lot of women and nonbinary folks to carve themselves up and ignore the parts that white women don’t share.

Go with me here. I’m 38 years old this year. And I’ve come to realize that sexism goes way beyond the overt stuff, it’s in all of our cultural training, and it slips it’s way through literally every part of our lives, every relationship we have, every interaction we are part of. And there isn’t a single man I have ever met, no matter how well-intentioned, no matter how kind, no matter how much he “respects women”, who has not at some point done something sexist. Talked over me without realizing it, rejected my input on something without even considering it, explained an experience I lived back to me, downplayed the sexism another woman faced in front of me, etc. Not one. Not even my husband, the man I love and respect more than any other. And most of the time I can take a breath, and deal with it calmly, but it just gets fucking old. And it hurts. God, does it ever fucking hurt. In some ways, it hurts more that they don’t even realize they’re doing it. And I’m a white woman.

Now, I can’t speak with experience about what it’s like to be a woman of color. I read a lot of things written by women of color, but I am not, and I never will be one, so this is just me extrapolating based on what I’ve read, and based on my own feelings around sexism. But imagine facing that marginalization coming at you on two fronts simultaneously. Imagine that you experience sexism when you’re with people of the same race, and imagine you experience racism from people of the same sex. How shitty must that be to face yet more bias and bigotry from inside those movements which claim to represent your interests? It makes my heart hurt just to picture it, and there’s no way my mental picture can even get close to that reality.

And some people face so many different fronts of marginalization beyond that.

And goddamn it, they should feel at home in feminist spaces. They should feel supported, and welcomed, and loved, and heard, and SAFE in feminist spaces. Those spaces should be a hearth that warms them, not just another shitty space full of bullshit and micro aggressions.

But white women are like men, when it comes to racism. We’re so naive, and so woefully unaware of our own biases, myself included. The only way to do better is to listen. To listen, even and especially when we are uncomfortable. To listen in the ways we want to be listened to. To accept how culturally-indoctrinated we are in racism and other forms of oppression, and then work continuously to unpack it. We don’t get to take the lead on this, and we never should, just as men can’t lead the feminist movement.

So I made my sign to remind other white women, and to remind myself, that our resistance can’t be just about us. Equality is not equality if anyone is left out in the cold.

I finally finished my first leather thing! I got the fastener, but then it turned out I needed a special anvil to attach it, and even once I had it it wasn’t going well, until I used the post that came with my rivet setting kit. I guess that helped focus the force better.

Once I got the thing really fastened down tight, I was able to sew the last seam together, and then it was done. And the hammering, I must confess, is always a bit cathartic for me. It’s good to get out a bit of the angry in something creative.

It’s a little hard to tell in the photos, but there’s room for a phone behind the bit with the card slots. There’s also room for cash or other papers behind the zipper section.

It’s totally ridiculous, because it’s leather after all, but I’m a little afraid to use it because I don’t want it to get messed up. I tend to feel that way about a lot of the things I make, though they’re a lot more sturdy and of better materials than the things I buy in stores. I guess the time I put into it changes my perception of the value of things, which I think is a good thing. Maybe it’ll help me break a little of the siren song of consumerism.