an IWD treatise

this year i did not attend an international women's day (march 8) event...i have found since moving to ontario that the women's events are disappointing. on dec 6 at MAC, for instance, a team of self-promoting undergrads who collect old bathroom supplies to give to abused women in shelters did a "bubbly" powerpoint presentation called "rub a dub dub put your stuff in the tub". ahem. i doubt i need to describe the depraved depths of humiliation i felt watching these girls capitalize on the deaths of fourteen total non-victim, engineer martyrs to get some charity brownie points. i do not mourn by listening to teenagers congratulate themselves for giving women in hiding some old shampoo. nor do i mourn by listening to the male president of student council then read (ok, stumble) over a painfully inarticulate, uninformed, and totally self-obsessed diatribe. fine if you want to come and mourn, buddy, but damn you for rubbing your unearned podium power in my feminist face on my day to wear black.

last year on march 8 a girlfriend and i went to an IWD event at a latin resto in hamilton's cruddy downtown. it involved mostly heinous silent auction items, horrific food (which they ran out of- he he, woody allen), and salsa lessons from a full-buttoxed animator shouting "ladies, move like this to please your man". pleasing men with some hip jirations is great fun and all, but wasn't march 8 invented so i could take a day off from that?

this year i arrived at an irish pub coincidentally just as the IWD festivities there were winding down on the second floor. i could hear the gyno-stirrups-bad-joke routine going on up there from the front entranceway. then i saw the poster: hystrionic red roses and bold text reading "Comics! Psychics! Clowns! A Neil Diamond tribute!".

WHAT????!!!!!!!!!

Clowns? Psychics? And don't get me started on the irrelevance of neil diamond.

Yesterday CBC had a call-in about the demise of feminism, after interviewing some Carleton Uni students who won't call themselves feminists and claim not to identify with the movement. Older women and men called in to say "what is the matter with young women today they don't know their history they have no respect why are they afraid to call themselves feminists..." etc.

i couldn't get through to the call in line. maybe they could tell i was a young woman.

what i have witnessed in ontario is not the kind of feminism i grew up with, which consisted of (and still does back home): good food, ladies laughing about politics and each other's antics, dancing, singing whimsical protest songs, articulate speeches, leadership, sitting down with policymakers, breastfeeding in public, clarity about the issues that matter: war, hunger, poverty, violence, hate.

of course young women don't want to call themselves feminists here. if feminism is bathtub charity and cheesy salsa lessons and psychics, i want out too. i want to go home for my feminism, where the women knew each other, liked each other, liked themselves, liked to work hard doing real things, never went looking for praise but went looking for change, liked to feed (from the breast and the pot), like to sing and dance but, when with each other on iWD, not like they were in some madonna and brittany for-men-but-all-girl-on-girl-action porn video.

feminism in ontario is cheap and anonymous. last march 8 at that nasty restaurant, some sly little bitch stole our table when we went to the loo. does that sound like sisterhood to you?

i don't know if this big province ever had something richer like what we got at home. but i quit going to events i know i will hate. i don't want to join the movement here. it's competitive, infantile, and slightly looney.

while in ontario, my plan for feminism is to just do it, instead of "celebrating" it among strangers with strange ideas. anyway feminism not a thing to join anymore. feminism now is a verb. choose. choose what you do and the company you keep. keep choosing. that's the project now, to keep choosing, build it, until it is so damn possible to choose to leave the wrong man that every woman actually does it. until it is so damn easy to choose whether or not you want to get pregnant that every child is just beaming light they're so loved and well provided for. until it is so damn normal to choose only a job that pays women their worth that the pink ghetto is "manned" by robots instead. choose.

(choose not to go to neil diamond tributes. choose).