AGA Roll Call: Female Fractures

I love Summer. I love the heat and sweat of it, I love being able to wear less clothes. What I don’t love is the fact that people think that they can comment about my body as though it’s theirs. Just because I am black and curvy and stand out in your typical small-town Ohio crowd does not give anyone permission to comment about my body or choice of clothing.

A few days ago I went to the nearby quarry with a friend to get some sun and swim. I sat on a picnic table in a blue bikini near a popular diving point. I looked around at the people spread across the 2 mile beach; families playing in the shallows, high school graduates tanning, not a single other black person. Awesome. For me that is a big cue that I am going to be treated differently from everyone else.

My beautiful red guitar. I picked it up for the first time in a small room in the back of the only guitar store in town. Its was acoustic, not well made, 3/4 the size of a normal guitar (everyone thought I would be able to play it easier because I am a girl), it was never tuned and only cost 70 bucks. To some people a guitar is just some wood, a few metal strings and a few bits of plastic. To me, however, my guitar was everything to me. I wanted to play for 3 years before I finally was able to get my hands on my own guitar.

I learned my first songs on it (although they were out of tune, no one ever told me to get a tuner) Time is On My Side, Across the Universe and Blowing in the Wind. I wrote songs on it as well and performed them in our schools open mic night.

One thing I've personally come to terms with, the older I've gotten, is that for myself, and for a lot of women I've talked to in my life and work, the wounds which come from other women can often cut more deeply than those from men do.

As women, betrayals from our mothers often seem to hit us harder than betrayals from our fathers. A female friend who hurts us often seems to have the capacity to hurt us more deeply than our male friends can/could. For those of us who are bisexual, queer or lesbian, we might experience that the first time a girl or woman breaks our hearts the depth of that hurt is unexpectedly more painful than we have experienced with men.

We could theorize until the end of time as to why that is (and plenty of women have, inside and out of feminist contexts), but WHEN it is, it can be really tough to deal with.