Yeah! It's
Ladyfest all weekend here in S.F. I'm so psyched! My neighborhood is just crawling with lesbians and wanna-be lesbians, all getting together to "bring feminist arts to the forefront and take back some cultural space with an event by us and for us."

Awesome.

Not fun enough for you? Here's what's scheduled:

"Beyond a presentation by Khazzoom -- complete with a reading from Consequences and a showing of the anti-harassment video War Zone -- there are workshops on anti-body fascism, gender identity, break dancing, being "fat as fuck," starting a record label, living like an "ethical slut," and more. For visual stimulation, the Pond Gallery hosts "Pow! The Power of Women in Illustrative and Sequential Art," an exhibit of female graffiti and cartoon artists such as Roberta Gregory (Naughty Bits) and Ariel Schrag (Awkward), and renowned New York film curator Astria Suparak delivers "Looking Is Better Than Feeling You," a compendium of the latest cool underground shorts."


Wow! And I thought Reign of Fire was fun.

Actually, today I'm not gonna get my snark on. I'm gonna take a different tact. I'm gonna try and explain why all this stuff drives me up a wall. Living where I live, in the center of Political Correctness, and seeing it every day on billboards, posters and in the papers I can't get away from it. It's even rearing it's ugly head in Buffy-land as there's a huge fight going on about the death of Tara and the "dead-lesbian cliche."

You know, one of the things about being unemployed is that it puts a lot of things into focus. You start seeing what's important and what isn't. You realize what really matters and what doesn't. Supporting yourself matters. Friends and relationships matter. Physical and emotional health matters. The reason why they matter is because they're are real. They're tangible, they exist.

On the other hand, things like "anti-body facism" or taking "back cultural space" aren't real. They're just thoughts, ideas, and theories. They're not even social constructs, really, but intellectual constructs- big, provocative words thrown together by over-educated Grad students who've read too many books on deconstructionism and have too much time on their hands.

Take "anti-body fascism" for instance. I'm guessing it's about body-image issues and how our society says one type of body issue is better than another type. Of course, I could be wrong because I must have missed that class in college. Yeah, the whole body image thing is kind of fucked, but you know what? It's not exactly just a women thing. Guys have it too, or haven't you heard about guys taking steroids just to look like they've pumped themselves up? And it's not exactly an -ism either. If some girl is pulling an Ally McBeal, she's got other issues than being put down by Patriarchial Society.

And I hate the language of it all, the throwing around provocative terms just to get a reaction. Like using the word "Fascism." You know what facism is? It's Hitler. It's Mussolini and Milosevic. It's people being thrown into jail for no reason and lots of death and no freedom. It's people telling you what you should do and say and punishing you for not following the rules. It's a real thing, a political ideology that's killed millions of people. It's not some girl constantly worrying about whether or not she's got a fat butt.

Fascism is a strong word, but it's turned into one of those words that's been thrown around so much- like Holocaust or Racism- that it's losing it's real meaning. Like when you repeat a word over and over again and suddenly realize that you can't remember what it means. It makes the issues seem important, but to compare society's beauty myths to an oppressive political system that kills millions of people is ridiculous. And that's not the only time I've heard stuff like that. The whole gentrification fight years ago was about "economic cleansing," as if an army was coming and kicking out poor people. And I once saw a poster up on Valencia months ago showed that famous picture of the Jewish kid being help up by Nazi soldiers and trying to compare Ashcroft's rounding up of hundreds of people to the Holocaust. Yeah, what Ashcroft did was kind of on the lame side, but it is, in no way, even remotely comparable.

Then there's another thing about all of this. Read that story about the girl in Pakistan, the one about the girl who got gang-raped by the townsfolks as punishment for something her family did? Now that's an awful, hideous thing- a serious, bad, violent attack against a woman. That's sexism taken to it's violent, worst extreme. It happened and probably happens more than we know. At LadyFest, they're discussing how to be an "ethical slut" and there's an exhibit about women in cartoons. A gang-rape is real, it's horrible. It's some serious shit. How to make feminist 'zines and how to have lots of sex without the guilt is not serious shit. It's, well, it's bourgeoisie. It's people without any real problems or issues making it up to make their life more dramatic than their poor, upper-middle class existence.

When I just graduated from college, I was down at my dad's in the Santa Cruz mountains hanging with him and the rest of his side of the family. One afternoon, I went for a walk with my aunts and their husbands through the Redwood forests. When I was younger, I kind of had issues with my aunts, mainly because of their Jerseyness, but as I got older, I realized that while they didn't come off like it (because of their Jerseyness), they actually have really good heads on their shoulders. As we were walking, staring at the huge, beautiful trees, I made a joke along the lines of if a tree fell in the woods- blah, blah blah, can't remember the rest of it and it probably wasn't really funny anyways. My aunt's husband, Louis laughed and told me it was something straight out of the mouth out of someone who had just gotten straight out of college. I protested and said that those were the questions that were important in life. You'll see, he told me, some day you'll have to work and make a living and you'll get too busy to wonder about whether a tree falling in the woods makes a noise or not.

And that's what I'm saying.