From across the table in the coffee shop, the girl asks the boy, “Are you a feminist?”
The second time, at home, over the telephone, the girl asks the boy, “Are you a feminist?”
Both times, he answers: “Yes.”
In history, he genders himself male and all the nouns and pronouns match. But to answer “yes” to the word that starts with the letter “f” means surrender.
It means no power over another. It means no control. A feminist defies dominance. It almost seems like common sense.
Yet, the world is unequal. The world is violent. Nature is dying. Governments keep lying. And no laws can keep in check a culture of death. Laws exist to substitute the vacuousness of our value system.
Clocks and capitalism stand unmoved, like phallic monuments constructed in the name of progress and condemning the unprivileged to death. This is nothing but slavocracy in modern day disguise. The mainstream flows like a river that sweeps all dissent away. And the puppeteers of the masses produce the entertainment that keeps us on our asses.
There was something before this. This boy is sitting on the shore wondering what it was he came here for. He’s not really sure. He’s never been more unsure and is growing forward and backward at the same time.
That boy who answered “yes” to being a feminist once sat through years of philosophy lectures that catered only to his mind. Lectures that deny the existence of the body or try to separate it in the name of “reason.” Reason. For years, he went about constructing ideas that didn’t apply to anything but the paper he was writing on.
Still, the boy kept writing, until finally, some words began streaking off the page, mixing into life around him. Surrounding him. Melting subject and object into one. Basho wrote haiku this way, they say. He became the thing he was writing about it. He was not separate.
We are not separate. Words to describe this pale when this is actually felt.
So let these bodies be the site of revolution. Of revelation. Revolution, because there has never been one. Revelation, because this strange, patriarchal-arranged way infects all in its path. What will shake the thirst of this beast? Control is passé — let each body sing humble praise.
Let the body sing humble praise. It’s all we have left. It’s time to sing those songs about waking up again. Wake up and shake this waking death. Wake up and live. Wake up because it’s time to begin.