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Speech at UNCA

I thought at first that I'd give this rousing oration like "Rise Up! You have nothing to lose but your shackles!" something totally inspiring that would make everything change. I would inspire people to look at their lives more deeply and to take themselves more seriously, and would change the fundamental ways we all communicate and it would inspire people into action, to create new art and new media and vibrant communities and to start screaming and standing up for ourselves, or being quiet and learning to really listen.

I have about 100 notecards. I was trying to cover just about everything I possible could fit into the catagory of Silence and Breaking Silence. The floor of my room was seriously covered in notecards and I was trying to figure out how to weave it all together simply, so I could present something totally cohesive that would touch everyone's hearts. Then my sister said "You don't have to change the whole world in one speech" and I was like, right. I don't want to lecture you.

I know so many of us are doing as much as we can, and I think there's a lot of guilt in our cultures that say we should always be doing more. I think it is not always a question of more, but is sometimes a question of What can we do that will make us feel more whole, that will be fulfilling and sustaining and make us feel like our lives are worth living. What can we do that will not make us just want to smash our heads into wall of frustration and give up.

I want to talk a little bit here about why I consider myself a feminist and how I got there. First I want to say that this speech is going to be a lot about sexism, but that there are other forms of silencing too - racism and homophobia and economic silencing, and also that I love that people are working to end gender binary, and I love that some men are really trying to break out of the ways that patriarchy has fucked them up. Ok. I just wanted to get that clear.

Also I want to say that if you don't feel silenced, that is great!!! I'm serious! That is really great! But it's good to understand that a lot of people do.

I know a lot of people have a problem with the word feminist, and I don't think the word is totally necesary for people to define by, but I do think it can be helpful to clarify some fundamental realities of the world. And one of the realities is, most women experience sexism. And many, many women have experienced sexism in ways that are brutal and silencing. And our society is based on this and other forms of domination. It is totally necesary for the majority of people to be silenced in order for our society to run the way it does. And if you want to change it, which I'm sure we all do, then it helps to be able to see all this as clearly as possible. It is important to clarify what you are fighting for, and what lense you are looking through when you are looking at the world, and if you want to name it something other than feminism, that's ok, but just make sure you're being clear in how you're thinking.

The people in power depend on our cloudy thinking, so it is necessary to clear things up. and I don't mean dogma, I mean deep and clear and searching thinking. A lot of times when I'm talking to people now, part of my brain is doing the communicating, and part is watching what's going on, like am I doing things that may be silencing, did I just interupt her, did I acknowldge what she said, am I falling into a debate mode instead of an uncovering mode. What do I want to get out of the conversation I'm having, do I want to say the most and be heard and acknowledged the most and validated for what I believe, or do I want to have a real, mutual conversation.

I used to really try and pinpoint what it was that made me feel so silenced in this world in every aspect of my life - from simple converstion, to knowing my most simple needs, to not being able to say no. I was so silenced. Like, there is no way in the world I could have ever gotten up here and given this speech until probably about 3 months ago. And even now I feel like "what right do I have to be up here."

I'm going to tell a little bit about my story.

When I was a teenager, I was not a feminist. I thought feminism was stupid. I thought it was for women who were just not strong enough to be able to handle the world. I thought they should stop complaining and just deal with it. I remember going to a Take Back the Night rally when I was 16 and thinking it was so stupid, because me and my friends walked around those streets at night all the time. I was not scared of those streets. (I mean, that was a lie. I was scared all the time. Fear was part of being a woman. I walked with total alertness to my surroundings, carried a knife, and I believed that the knife would be used against me. This was what I had been taught to believe. No one ever said "Let's learn to use our weapons." they just said "don't carry a weapon and don't fight back". So, at the Take Back the Night rally, the other things I remember was I picked up this sign to carry and it had two women symbols, and my friend Angie said "That means you're gay" and I totally dropped it so fast. Also, I remember that I did not listen to the testimonials of women talking about abuse.

My reality at the time was that it was essential that I stay in denial about some things. That was part of my reality. I had to pretend that certain things did not matter. Also, my reality was, I did not want to be a girl. I wanted to have power and I was really shy and self-hating. I thought I had nothing of interest to say or to contribute to the world. I wanted to feel powerful, and I knew that girls and women did not have power. They were weak creatures. maybe there were some strong women in the world, but usually, if they were, it was through using their sexuality that they got power. or if they were just normal, good and strong women, it seemed like chances were pretty high they could have their power taken away from them. This is what I'd seen. I hated myself. I hated girls. I thought my only worth was sexual, and I also thought I was crazy for thinking that way. I was totally invested in getting male approval. I didn't have hardly any of my own opinions.

I just tried to figure out what other people wanted me to be, and I tried to be that. I did that so much that I really didn't even know, deep down, who I was or what I wanted. I think this is one way that a lot of women experience silence. A lot of us have been trained to say what other people want to hear and have been taught to put other people's needs before our own, and to value other people more than ourselves. A lot of people have a hard time seeing that this is what is going on with us. A lot of people think that if they're saying what they want, we should be saying what we want, and if we're not saying anything, then nothings wrong. It's important that people realize that this is a common dynamic and a hard one to break out of.

So, basically, I went from being a pretty independent and self confident 10 year old, with ambitions to be a marine biologist, to at 12, my highest ambition was to be Eddie Van Halen's girlfriend, and at 16, to just be able to be a super tough girlfriend of a super cool guy and to please just not be gay and to please just be able to stop crying all the time when I was alone. Also, I just wanted to kill myself. I'm not sure how it happened like that. How did all that get so deeply entrenched so quickly?

Do you guys remember that Velvateen rabbit book? About this little stuffed animal bunny that just wants to be real, but doesn't even know what real is because it's never seen a real bunny? that's how I felt. I'd never seen, represented anywhere, what I was or what I wanted to be. I felt really invisible, and I looked in windows when I walked by to see my reflection, not out of vanity, but to see if I was even really there.

I took my last year of highschool at college, and I took a women's studies class. This was when schools were still fighting to have women's studies recognized as a valid field of study. It was also when a lot of really great black and latina women were writing about how they did not feel that white women were representing them when they defined feminism.

I remember reading a book about fairy tales, and now it seems so obvious, but at the time it was very mindblowing. Like, no wonder I was so fucked up about love and myself. I'd been shown really shitty examples sinces before I could hardly think. I was encouraged finally to look at everything with this lense. To stop blaming myself and to look at everything about the way society molds us and brainwashes us.

I remember things that really struck me: one was a book by Bell Hooks, and she was talking about how Feminism was not about bringing a war between the sexes. She said that the war was already happening, and that feminism was a way to end it - a way to find a common language and a loving way of getting to the heart of everything - a way to start to have human relations be about cooperation and mutuality and not about competition and shittiness.

Another one that really hit home to me was a lot of Audre Lordes words about Silence, and how politically important it was for us to work to name the things that kept us from feeling alive and in our bodies, to name the things that keep us from being active in the world, the things that tell us we're worthless and can't change anything and so we should just shut up. Name the things that make it too dangerous to talk. And we all have our own things that make it dangerous.

For me, at the time, there was alot of family stuff. Actually, this is one of the things I think about when people say we are beyond the need for feminism, is just how most of us have been sexually abused and there still is not a real strong movement to end it. Like there was this thing I was reading about Norplant, and it was this survey of teenaged moms, and most of them said that they had sex where they felt coerced, and the solution was not to start a really vigorous educational campaign for teenage boys about consent, or for teenage girls about self-love and self defense, the solution was to give teenage girls Norplant to hide the evidence.

I think about my mom. Before my mom left my dad, I grew up middle class. my dad, I loved him very much and he was sometimes a really good dad, but he was very emotionally abusive to my mom, and beat her up on the holidays and was sexually abusive too, she had very little family or community support - she told people, but no one would help her. what she was experiencing was normal, expected, acceptable. she was economically dependent on him and was afraid of losing us kids if she left him. she started drinking heavily, and after she did finally leave him, she was still unable to face the ways he destroyed her.

This repression, this denial, made it so that when we (her daughtors) were being sexually abused,it was so triggering for her that she couldn't deal with it and wasn't able to take care of us or protect us. and in the end, she died from liver disease, from drinking. This is how my Dad's violence, and societies acceptance of it, silenced my Mom.

So when people say we don't need to think about feminism any more, I think they are just in real denial. There are a lot of really entrenched things I learned from my family life. There are a lot of ways that I learned self denial. There were a lot of things I had tried to confront or speak up about, that had been ignored. I learned that it was pointless to advocate for myself, and that my only real resource was to run, and also to pretend that nothing was happening. This effected every aspect of my life, and I think it is an important fact for everyone to get out of denial about.

Most of the time, when you are talking with someone or working with someone, they have been abused, and that abuse has effected them in fundamental ways, and probably in ways that are different from you. We're not all on a level playing ground.

Audre Lorde talked about how it was not that each individual woman needed to toughen up and speak their own experience, but that as a culture and as a society, we needed to work to create a world where everyone will be heard. I want to create a world where everyone is heard.

I remember this one quote, I don't know whose it was, but it said "What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The whole world would explode." Maybe it wouldn't really explode, but I honestly think it would really help. That's part of why I started writing my zine.

I want to live in a world where my reality is represented somewhere. This is where I'm coming from. I want a feminism that necesitates the end of capitalism, the end of racism, the creation of a type of socity that we can hardly even imagine.

There's this poem recently that said, "We have set our sights so low, that even the smallest among them is not realized".

I think this is true. We have to set our sights really high. We have to understand that to get where we need to go it is going to take a million different kiinds of tactics and projects and that not one of us can do it all, and it's not a competition to see who can do the most, or who can do the most heroic type of work. We need to rid ourselves of the individual fame heroics and just know that we all need to be doing something.

And the deeper you search, and the longer you comitt yourself to working for fundamental change in all aspects of your life, the more it will become just part of who you are and what you do, and there will be more ease and fulfilment, an you will be more effective.

I want to talk about some of the things I did to combat my internalized sexism, and to work toward becoming a more full human. First, there was a lot of simple things, that were not simple at all, like I started to try and be really concious of the details of life. I looked at how I took up space. I tried out different ways of sitting, like I tried to take up more physical space. I tried to sit with my legs out and to walk with my head up, and to take bigger steps.

I started to try and be really aware of where my attention went when I was in groups of people. I tried to make sure that I made eyecontact with women, and that I asked women questions, and not just gave my attention to men. After years of practice, it comes mostly naturally, but is still something I have to be aware of.

I started reading a lot of women authors. I get a lot out of fiction, and I really recommed that people read women authors. Especially guys. I've had guys tell me that they don't really like women authors, and the thing is, you don't have to like it, read it anyway. And if you're white, read books by people of color. It's discovery and education and a way to get insight into the inner worlds of other people, fiction is not just for escape and entertainment, it is a gift of uncovering that people work really hard to give to you.

I also read history and theory, and I think this is really important. And it's especially good if you can start study groups, even just one or two friends, and read and talk about books together.

I think there is this really damaging thing that is pushed on us that errases all history, and that says "Everything has always been this way." Everything has not always been this way. There are examples of humans living good lives, and they are worth studying. There are things people have fought for and won, and that is worth knowing about too. We have to know that the world is capable of fundamental change, and that the only way it's going to change is if we are working for it.

I think that for people with priveledge, like most of us here have, it is really important to not become complacent in the comfortable lives we can make for ourselves. So, reading history and theory really helped me to appreciate some things and to believe that change is possible and essential. and it helped me learn some strategies of ways to work for change, and to learn from historical mistakes and sucesses. And studying with other people helped me overcome alot of fear, like that I was stupid and didn't have anything to say. It is still hard for me to say in a group what I've been thinking or struggling with intellectually, but it is really rewarding to work with a group of people who want to know, and want to help eachother learn to articulate.

there were a lot of little, big things I did. Like to stop apologizing all the time. to try and accept my own confusing sexuality, and to stop judgeing myself so harshly. I started trying to have meaningful conversations with friends instead of just trying to have fun or talk shit. Actually, having meaningful conversations is pretty fun.

I started feeling like it was important to be public in some way, and I started making little flyers, sort of art flyers, that had poems I liked, and I put the flyers up on the telephone poles in my neighborhood. I also, finally found a good therapist. I know some people think you should just talk to friends, and that's cool, but therapy helped me in ways that my friends never could.

I did little protests, just me and my best friend at first, and then with a couple other people. And I think protest is good, and it's nice to have a group to do small, ongoing protest and street performance and education, and not to just save protest for when something really terrible is about to happen, like war. One was when there was an antiabortion march going through our small town, and we wanted to do this whole performance art peice against it, but ended up just making a flyer, and walking along side the march, and passing it out to people who were just bystanders. It felt kind of depressing and desperate, but also really good and important. We also did a little singing performance and flyer about Columbus. Things like that.

I also sometimes volunteered at different places, which I think is really great, but not always totally fulfilling. I still think it's important and good.

One of the really important things I did was allow myself anger. I had always thought that anger led to violence and was just totally unacceptable, and so instead of feeling angry I felt self-hate. Basically. So I read a book about anger, and started to allow myself anger. I became really, really angry. Like I could not even function in the world. I couldn't look at a bilboard without getting just so angry. I couldn't stand the way people were complicant. I ended up really removing myself from a lot of society, which has been really great. I didn't go to movies for a long time, and I stopped watching TV and reading regular magazines. I really think that stuff is poison. Like, now, when I've been removed from it mass media long enough, and I think I have some sort of immunity to it, I am still totally effected. Like, whenever I turn on my computer, there's this Botox add, and I really try not to look at it, but after awhile it seeps in and I start to worry about my wrinkles. Seriously.

I think this is sometimes anger is an important part of development that gets pushed away and denied. I mean, I think it makes sense that if you have been living with silence and denial, that when you start to open your eyes and let yourself feel, you might be really angry and really intollerant. I wish people would be more understanding of that.

When I was first starting to become involved in activism, I was with young people, and we really thought the older people were pretty sold out and just not doing enough. I think we were probably kind of mean about it. And I rememeber this older activist who I really loved, and she said that the role of the youth was to be on the front lines, pushing everyone to struggle harder, and that she respected that. She was glad we were challenging her complacency, and trying things again, not just listening to the old people who said "you can't do that, it doesn't work".

She told me that the role of the youth was to push at the edges and push everything further, and I think it would be good if people could respect that. She said the role of older people was to build and hold institutions that would allow social change to florish.

there's this thing about anger and pc and anti-pc that I want to say. I've never really understood the whole anti-pc thing. It's so belittling and weirdly simplifying. I mean, things like language are important, and if you say bitch and to someone and their experience with that word is it makes them feel like a worthless peice of shit, and maybe that is a word that was said to them when they were being beat or abused, well, why would you want to use that word? I mean, it's about human decency, not pc.

anyway. one of the really great things I did, was I learned to scream. I didn't do this in my extra angry time. Even when I was really angry I could hardly scream. It was much later. The way I learned to scream was by being in a punk band. At first, the first few times I tried, I couldn't even get my voice to raise. Like there was a physical block against it. I seriously tried to scream and what came out was a croak and I felt so stupid I cried.

I remember going to a self-defense class when I was 24, and I had to leave. First of all, I just couldn't scream. I felt so stupid and just couldn't do it. And also, I couldn't role play. It just made me so uncomfortable. I didn't really learn to scream until I was 26. I totally recomend doing it. Like, with other people. Learning to raise your voice in protection is really powerful, so I recommed driving around with some friends and totally screaming, and screaming things that you would say to defend yourself. Like "Get the fuck away from me!" and "no". I also really recomend starting your own self-defense class, because chances are, you do know something about defending yourself and it's a good thing to talk about and share.

I also started writing a zine, because I wanted to be able to explore my feelings and ideas and to break silences and talk about things that weren't normally talked about, and to break out of isolation, and to show strangers that we did not have to be so isolated. That everyone could tell their story and maybe it would be really helpful if everyone did, in searching and honest ways.