Woman, ranting

So tell me, my feminist sisters, do you ever just want to grab other women by the throat and scream, WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU THINKING? I do. Yesterday I went to see an exhibit of paintings by a local artist--a feminist artist--that was so smug and mindless it actually made me shudder. It was a series of portraits of women, all sitting in gardens holding various fruits of the earth. The paintings were pretty bad, but most paintings are. I wouldn't hold that against anybody. No, the problem was the artist's statement and the captions she wrote for each piece, which kept identifying the women's bodies with nature and talking about how the world would be at peace if men would just ... well, be more like women.

Given my Wiccan sympathies, I suppose it might seem a little surprising that I would be so disgusted by the idea of the uterus as a vessel of peace, but I actually think it's a profoundly woman-hating, anti-feminist notion. It's one thing to embrace a consciousness of the feminine aspects of nature, and to value our place in the endless cycle of birth and death. It's something else entirely to reduce individual women to some kind of faceless femaleness, and to suggest that biology bestows moral purity. That's exactly the kind of thinking that any feminist worthy of the name should reject. There's no difference between saying (as fundamentalists of every stripe still do) that a woman's body is filthy and sinful, and saying that her clit is a sign post to the divine. Both ideas rest on the assumption that women aren't rational and have no moral intelligence.

What I hate most about the Mother Earth brand of faux feminism is the gutless passivity it promotes. Don't get me wrong--I'm all for peace, but we live in a world where peace is despised. Peace is not going to happen because we wish for it. We have to demand it. We'll never get it sitting in the garden with our heads up our cunts.