A Boston Marriage

I’ve been thinking about compromises a lot lately. I understand that a number of people in my life believe me to be uncompromising—which is lovely and I am awed that people think that of me. But a) I’m a human being and b) I’m a practicing feminist, so I actually compromise like woah. However, for a long time I didn’t use the word compromise; I thought of my concessions as failure on my part—being too vain, too indulgent, only committed when convenient, and so on.

I’m talking about compromises in my day-to-day feminism—not the writing and the rallies and the work with women’s groups, but the everyday choices I make in my life. I view pretty much everything as political (oftentimes, the more mundane or trashy subject in question, the more traction is has with me), so very little escapes scrutiny. I can’t shut this critical voice off either—no matter how tired or drunk, the analysis goes on. It’s exhausting, evaluating every little thing for its political implications and acting accordingly. But, I argue with myself, these are my politics, it’s my moral schema—of course I can’t turn it off! They’re meaningless if you only uphold them when it’s easy! So, when I make a concession in my daily life, I am hyper-aware and feel like a shithead.*

I have recently acknowledged this struggle regarding my (what sometimes feels like constant) compromising. In addition to acknowledging the negative feelings I have around compromising, I began to work at accepting the necessity of compromise as being central to me not-losing-my-mind both daily and in the long run. I felt the need to write about this because this realization has been important for me and because I think that readers of this blog may feel that I’m too exacting in my feminism (and they fear that if I ever found out they do this, that, or the other potentially unfeministish thing, I will disown them).

Of course, this realization was a process. I struggled with ill-formed, looming half-ideas and sticky, nagging feelings that I couldn’t articulate. And then I stumbled upon an article by Amanda Hess at The Sexist that began with this: “…feminist women are forced to engage in some cognitive dissonance in order to satisfy two conflicting parts of ourselves: The part that wants to dismantle the patriarchy, and the part that must live in it.” Upon reading that sentence, clouds rolled away from the sun, the hills came alive, and my existence orgasmed. Cognitive dissonance, of course!

Has this long been obvious to everyone else? Because this was revelatory for me.

Hess continued: “A simple awareness of feminist issues can’t magically negate the power of the culture in which we live…Embracing feminist cognitive dissonance can be a helpful tactic for continuing our theoretical work while still allowing ourselves to live normal lives. And a big part of living our lives includes working to receive the validation that comes with being a ‘good woman,’ even when we know the idea of being a good woman is some fucked up shit. Hopefully, the theoretical work we do will help to contribute to the much more difficult task of changing our cultural values, even as we capitulate to them in our personal lives.”

A lot of my capitulating has to do with, surprise surprise, body image. I constantly pit my understanding that many (if not most) standards of beauty applied to me/bodily practices expected of me are fucked vs. my desire to feel/be perceived as being attractive and desirable as a woman. To quote Hess, again, “As it turns out, a lot of women are well aware that the cultural expectations paced on our bodies can be absurd, unhealthy, and largely impossible for us to fulfill. But awareness alone won’t necessarily curb our attempts to satisfy the feminine ideal anyway.”

See, for oh so long, I felt that awareness alone should be enough to get me to snap out of it. I knew better, so I should do better—yet, try as I may, I continued to want to wear high heels with dresses (that’s not meant as a flippant example—I have had many stern conversations with myself about giving up heels). (I would also note that there are some feminine bodily practices that give me no grief at all—i.e.: getting ridiculously dolled up in fake eyelashes and lacy clothes over modernized corsets is so over the top and obviously drag—yes, even on a woman—that I feel very Judith Butler about it and have no qualms.)

Realizing that my feminist peers also struggle with reconciling their understanding of how patriarchy works with their day-to-day bodily practices has also greatly assuaged my guilty feelings. Last week, one of my bestest badass feminist friends (who is part of the rad Vancouver feminist collective The F Word) and I were discussing standards of beauty and that fact that as we enjoy romps with hetero men, we have to embody some of the things that (the vast majority) of that demographic enjoys. Then mascara was applied.

Which brings me to a different article from The Sexist. Hess interviewed a woman by the name of Jaclyn Friedman on the topic of ‘fucking while feminist’—how to manage to stay true to your feminism while still managing to get laid. When asked if she had a feminist litmus test, Friedman replied: “Right now, I feel like I’m in an endless cycle of asking myself, ‘Am I willing to let this slide?’… I don’t feel like I can go in to these dates expecting dudes to know as much about feminism or sexuality studies or rape culture, the stuff that I live my life talking about and thinking about. I feel like I’m going to die alone if I do that… Feminism is what I do with my life, it’s how I spend my days, it’s my job, it’s not just an opinion I have among many other opinions. If I had a hardcore litmus test, the pool of men I could date would be so tiny. And then when you weeded out men who are gay, the men I don’t find attractive, the men already in monogamous, committed relationships—really, I would never get laid again. So I do feel that I have to try to be flexible out of necessity. Right now my basic litmus test is this: Is he interested in feminist issues when I bring them up? And can he talk about them in ways that express curiosity and engagement and respect, instead of defensiveness or dismissiveness or attachment to stereotypes? If we can talk about this stuff in ways that are interesting and productive, I can work with it most of the time.”

“I can work with it.” Work with. Be productive with—as opposed to being so mired in the patriarchy-resisting potential of every moment that I wind up paralyzed.

So that’s that. I have made peace. I’m not going to disparage myself for “guilty pleasures” anymore. I am going to continue to compromise as needed in order for life to be liveable—and I’m going to understand it to as a healthy practice. But, what I really want to know is if Hess’s words resonate with anyone else? While working through my feelings and writing this, I felt that this was all very young of me—important, but something that my friend’s who’ve got a few years on me view as common sense. Oui? Non?

* Epitome of compromise and feminism in my daily life: food. I could write a whole other bit on how my discomfort with compromises and with my discomfort with expectations of femal thinness (and, therefore, restrictive eating) in our culture interact and are played out in my eating habits. Quick breakdown: As a woman I’m supposed to be a restrictive eater?! HA! I’ll be uncompromising in my indulgence! Talk about an unhealthy and self defeating protest, Bordo-style.