sheroes

Mother, wife, teacher, friend, mom is gone.

It has been several months and still I have no words to describe the gaping black hole in my life that has been created by her absence.

No words but there are questions. So many questions. Who will answer the questions I never got to ask her;
When you were my age, did you feel this lost?
This silenced?
At gatherings did the men talk over your head while a thousand unspoken comebacks raced through it?

The questions I have yet to even think of. Who is going to teach me how to mother my own babies?

What do I do mama now that my foundation has been ripped from beneath me? Where do I find the confidence to build a life?

At a time when every female singer is an actress and every actress is a vapid, vagina flashing, coke snorting, attention whore, people like me can only shake their heads. I really don’t want to talk about the recent spate of celebutante arrests. In fact, every time I see Hilton, Lohan or Richie on a media outlet I put my hands over my ears and shout out things that I care more about than how much these brats weigh and how drunk they were when their luxury SUVs got pulled over:

WORLD HUNGER AND POVERTY!
A WOMAN’S RIGHT TO CHOOSE!
GLOBAL WARMING!
AM I GOING TO RUN OUT OF TOILET PAPER BEFORE MY NEXT TRIP TO THE STORE?!!

Today something wonderful happened. My friend is getting me a karaoke version of an amazing song to sing for the talent show. This song is by Evanescence, written and sung originally by Amy Lee.

First, a side note. I adore Amy Lee. She is beautiful. Her voice is amazing, four octave range, and she writes wonderful songs. She is her own, strong individual. She has her beliefs. She has had her issues. She is stronger for it. And now to the part this is REALLY supposed to be about.

My friend told me that Amy Lee has been standing up for Britney Spears. Apparently some person put a video up on youtube of how screwed up Britney has become. (Gee I wonder why she'd be screwed up, right?) They had bits about her car crash, and various other things.

My christmas wishlist this year consisted almost solely of feminist literature. Books written by, for and about women. Books I'd heard or read about in the past few months and that had roused my interest. The two books I received are the autobiography of Ayaan Hirsi Ali (which I have blogged about previously) and a book by author Thea Dorn, who interviewed 11 women who shape German media and politics. This last book I started reading even before the gift-unwrapping-process was finished and I literally haven't put it down since. It's absolutely awesome and inspiring in more ways than I could list. And suddenly, as I was reading the interview with Charlotte Roche (VJane I have also mentioned previously) this morning it hit me: These women are my sisters. And dammit, we rock.

"The yacht was like a white streak of motion, a sensitive body strained agaisnt the curb of stillness. Dominique looked at the golden letters - I Do- on the delicate white bow.
"What does it mean?" She asked.
"It's an answer," said Wynand. "to people long since dead. Though perhaps they are the only immortal ones. You see, the sentence I heard most often in my childhood was 'You don't run things around here.'"
-Ayn Rand, 'The Fountainhead'

Last week I went to a lunch with my dad where Ruth Bader Ginsburg spoke. Of course, everything she had to say seemed to carry a tangible weight of importance. What she has accomplished, and how she has done so, has made her a living example of the maxim she opened her remarks with; “the differences between men and women are something to celebrate, not denigrate”. She talked about how she had three strikes against her from the outset of her career – she was a women, she was a mother, and she was Jewish. Even though she graduated first in her class at Columbia Law School, no law firms would grant her an interview, and Felix Frankfurter refused to select her for a clerkship, saying that he was not ready to hire a woman. As a professor, she had to fight to receive a salary comparable to her male colleagues’, and struggled to be given a maternity leave. When she later started to handle gender equality cases, she encountered criticism from other women saying that she was not feminist “enough”. These roadblocks only motivated her to work harder.

I have a number of posts waiting in the works but I had to get this one out today.

So, apparently Madonna has adopted a little Malawian boy . While I may not always agree with celebrities like Madonna, any attention by the world-at-large being given to the AIDS crisis in Africa is good news to me.

The big reason why this story stood out to me was because it reminded me of my Aunt Stella and her little baby boy Hezekiah. My Aunt Stella worked as the National Director for an organization called World Relief Malawi, in Lilongwe, Malawi. She was and still is passionate about enabling local churches to take a greater role in addressing the AIDS crisis in Malawi (as well as in Rwanda where she worked previously, and Uganda, her home country).

With all the negative blogs I've posted lately, I think it's time for a thoroughly positive one. Last night, I discovered my first Shero.

I am one of those annoying people who read the TV guide from front to back and mark the shows they want to see with pink hightligher. The one for last night was a weekly late night talk show I don't usually watch, but this weeks topic was "The Lies of Feminism", so naturally, I wanted to take a look. Inspired by the book of author Eva Hermann (which I've posted about previously), a group of women discussed whether or not feminism has had a positive effect on the lives of women.

...Kyra Sedgwick is one wicked actress. Now this post isn't so much about the Emmys as much as it is Kyra's character Brenda Johnson on "The Closer".

I have a tiny confession to make first and that is this: I loathe southern accents. I resent myself for this but I even make an attempt to avoid the south, period. I mean all the manniersms and formalities and even the mind-set. Well...I can't get past it. It's mostly the accent though. I had a three hour layover in Georgia last week and I couldn't wait to get out of there. This all makes me very sad.

But I have to give kudos to Sedgwick for doing an outstanding job playing the role of Brenda Johnson. The character is so unexpected, refreshing, and spot-on. I can't stand the mannerisms, the accent, or that polite formal smile she always has plastered on her face but I sort of love her character anyways and appreciate how much it contrasts with her rather ambitious inner bitch. She gets the job done and she doesn't take crap from anyone.

We, as AGA bloggers and by virtue of our age, have never lived in a country without Griswold and the right to access to birth control. We've never lived without Roe and the right to choose abortion. And it's easy to forget that not so very long ago these rights were greatly restricted or withheld altogether. We must remember the work of our foremothers; and the times when we forget, there is one group of women who never fail to remind me.

Before the Feminist Majority Foundation, Before NARAL Pro-Choice America, before NOW--

Heather Booth made her first referral.

First of all, apologies for being so quiet lately. My summer is coming to an end so I have been and will continue to be ridiculously busy over the next couple of weeks.

I had forgotten how nice it is to have girlfriends. Like many girls who find themselves labeled “different”, I have a lot of male friends. I have heard it echoed around AGA and by many other young women, guy friends just involve less drama. There isn’t as much cattiness, the group dynamic is more straightforward and the fun is often more physical.

At the end of a summer of new friends and experiences with new cultures, I have come to re-appreciate good girlfriends. Allow me a moment in which to appreciate my girlfriends, old and new.

I can’t express how much I cared for her. I don’t know if she knew how much I loved her, especially since I wasn’t there for her in the last three years of her death. Her will was amazing, as she spent over twenty years trying to outrun the cancer in her breasts. Even when she couldn’t get out of bed, she kept loving.

She taught me to love myself. To love my life and to help others love life. Her amazing soul will live longer than her body and I feel so touched to have a piece of it in my heart. More than anyone, she influenced the woman that I am becoming. Although she gave me many books, my first and favorite changed my life, "Succulent Wild Women."

Wow: you guys really dug into that forum thread about your favorite movie sheroes! That's fantastic!

I got thinking, though, that your posts expressed a range of ways of looking at cinema, and I thought it might be interesting to see some more formal essays about your favorite female characters.

So. Your assignment, if you choose to accept it, is to tell us about your favorite female film characters. However, make your essays full: tell us why they are your favorites, and because it is part of the goal of this site, consider to what degree these characters are feminists.

Last summer I saw my mother cry for the first time. She had just found out that her sister had been brutally murdered (in a way very relevant to our AGA discussions but a little too fresh and painful for me to write about yet). Her pain aside, I cannot describe the shock I felt in watching the person that is such a rock for me and my family, show such vulnerability.

In my family, no one even bothered to pretend, as is done in many African households, that my father was head of the home. Although he was either the sole or the primary breadwinner for most of my childhood, it was my mother who made the decisions. My sister and I would try to get things out of my father, who would occasionally spoil us, but his stock answer when it came to anything more important than a bar of chocolate was “I have to discuss it with your mother”. My father had to travel a lot and my mom had to be both parents for up to 6 months in a year.

A fifteen year old girl stands in front of her bathroom mirror. She is naked, except for a pair of panties covered in little pink kitties. Unlike most girls she isn't thinking about how fat she is or wishing her boobs were just one size bigger. Instead she flexes her arms and admirers how big they have gotten in the past few months. She feels her bicep. It feels like stone, it feels like it could break through stone. She turns around and is so happy to see how great her back looks, her shoulder muscles flexed, beautiful, strong. She once again turns around and looks at her abs. Rock solid, perfect washboard abs.