The F-word

I finished both my theses this week, and I'm completely done with work. For the first time since my freshman year at college, I have nothing to do. No obligations, nothing to worry about, I can simply do what I want. And of course, me being myself, that means I've got a lot of time to sit around and reflect on things. I came to an interesting realization that even though i never did get to make my own major (a feature that Hamilton boasts, but rarely grants to it's students), I still ended up writing my theses on exactly what I wanted to study: a combination between women's studies, psychology and hispanic studies. But the way in which I wrote them, the views I took- that was the strange part. Particularly with my hispanic studies thesis, where I examined the psychological portrayal of sexual women in films directed by Almodovar and Trueba. I was particularly nervous about handing in this thesis, mainly because of my newly developed off-beat views on feminism, which I will discuss below. But my fears were placated when my professor wrote me an email back, congratulating me on a job well done. It was sweet, to say the least, and a bit shocking- I can't remember the last time a professor had complimented me so candidly about my work.

Over the past four years, I've held about every view on the spectrum as far as feminism goes. I came to Hamilton a radical marxist feminist, and was convinced after one week of classes at this school that learning in a co-educational, traditional, conservative environment was not what I needed. I had done that already, having attended a boarding school which was all-boys for 148 years or so. I wanted college to be different. I wanted to be nurtured. I tried to transfer to Barnard College in NYC. Being surrounded by intelligent, inspiring, female leaders, I thought, would be exactly what I needed. But the universe had other things in store for me, and my plans fell through. I returned to Hamilton the next year, defeated and hopeless, dreading the future which lay before me. I took a philosophy course which examined feminist views throughout history. I began to see the pointlessness and alienating nature of feminsim that was so radical, and the impossibility of marxist feminism (which claims that female oppression is based in capitalism) and became fascinated by a more approachable, malliable feminism. This was existential feminism. I read The Second Sex over and over, was amazed by the beautiful rhetorical questions that Beauvoir posited. Existential feminism wasn't a feminism based in social revolution, but rather personal revolution. Revolution of how you see the world, and therefore how the world would see you. I stuck with existential feminism for quite some time, until I got lost in it's application to every day life. What to do with women who live in bad faith (thinking they are free, but are actually not)? I became depressed, thinking it was a lost cause.

Then I went to spain, and it all changed. Spain changed so much for me, as you can probably tell by my constant ramblings. But there I saw a different kind of woman, and with it a different kind of beauty. There I saw women who were proud to be women, who walked with their hips and not their thighs, who wore skirts and low cut shirts and at the same time had every man under her control. Men walked around the streets, carrying babies, holding hands with their children. Not grumpily either, but proudly. Men were dependent on their mothers and wives, but in a completely different way. Not disrespectfully, just lovingly.The women there didn't starve themselves, they didnt go to gyms every day to work out, to rid of their softness. That was just it: the women were soft, in every way. As my friend Ana put it, "Women are soft and graceful, but not weak. There's a big difference. We have our own strength."

And that acceptance of softness is what I wrote my thesis on. The women in Almovdovar's films in particular are by no means "masculine". True, he does bend gender stereotypes to the point where you don't know what makes a man and what makes a woman in his eyes. But the characters that idenitfy as women, even the men, have this acceptance of softness about them, and an acceptance of their sexuality. It's different than the acceptance of sexuality of the "liberated" women in the states. Here, a woman who is "sexually aware" is that typical college girl, who dresses in leather and goes to the gym and obsesses obsesses over her image. She'll put up sexy pictures of herself on the internet. She'll objectify herself and claim that she's doing it out of self-awareness. But that is not true sexual liberation. There is no gratification in self-objectification because to be objectified means that you are an object TO someone ELSE. Not yourself. No, the sexual awareness portrayed in Almodovar's films is a different type of sexuality. It's women who are beautiful and strong, who know they are beautiful and strong and don't need to prove it to anyone. Case in point: Cruz's character in Volver. The scene where she comes home to find that her daughter had killed her stepfather (Cruz's husband) because he tried to rape her. Cruz, with red pouty lips, and smoky black eyes and a form fitting dress looks at her daughter and tells her that she was the one to kill her husband, and that it wasn't her daughter's fault. Then, in the next scene, she is seen mopping up the blood with a paper towel on her hands and knees, and scrubbing the bloody knife in the sink. Apart from all the blood, she looked like a stereotypical housewife cleaning her kitchen. Furthermore, the women who are explicitly sexual in his films are not objects. They have their own source of strength and beauty, a source that comes from their acceptance and awareness of themselves as they truly are. As Almodovar himself put it:

"It’s true that when heterosexual men make movies- I’m not talking about pornos- they pay less attention to the power and sexual beauty of women. The goal should be simple: to create a wonderful woman. Just pay attention to a woman. It doesn’t matter whether you are gay or straight- if you pay attention you will see how rich they are."

How is this man not a feminist?! It's funny now, to look back and see how much I've changed and how simple my feminism really has become. It is no longer even a struggle for equality in the sense that men and women are equally capable of accomplishing the same things. We are not the same. My feminism is simply a recognition and celebration of all things feminine, an acceptance that though I may not be physically or mentally the same as those who are masculine, that my physical and mental capabilities are equal in value to those different than me. Sure, I'm moody and my emotions get the best of me many times, but these emotions allow me to be passionate and be compassionate to those around me. They allow me to communicate on deeper levels, and allow me to even elicit emotion in others who hide their emotions behind masks of rationality and logic. Sure, I am not strong enough to lift heavy objects, nor am I comfortable with the idea of it being ones "duty" to kill another, but I am strong enough to go into labor for extended periods of time(a process that most psychologists agree is more painful than anyone ever imagines it to be) and I am capable of creating life, instead of destroying it. These are traits that both men and women may posess (ie: not every man is masculine and not every woman is feminine) and are traits that I have come to accept. You cannot assign a value to one without acknowledging the importance and necessity of the other. It is as if I have brought feminism back to it's original purpose: a simple celebration of being feminine, and knowing what that means.