I can barely remember how to use this blog. Please accept my apologies for the messiness of it, the repetition of the pictures, all of it.
Writing from Austin, I love it here but I've been silent because I've been threatened. Seems on more than one level, my transparent life has become about keeping secrets for the benefit of others and, I've been told, for my own benefit.
This presents a huge problem for me. Absolute transparency has always been my ally. I believe in it. In the spirit of transparency, I have to say here and now, the conflict between who I am and who I love has reached the point where it must break something or be resolved somehow.
The subject of men and women has been brought into the foreground for me - this wasn't intentional but circumstances being what they are, I find myself being confronted with my own philosophy of life and looking pretty hard at the areas where I've accepted social and cultural restraints that run counter to my own beliefs. It's an interesting time. (and I can see why that's a curse.)
Most recently the issue of my value as an individual versus my social value as a spouse has been pressing at me. My father raised me to be married - my mother was so passive her influence meant nearly nothing. I was lucky enough to be given the raw materials to make me attractive to men and this "training" while it may have been rejected by me, given the choice, did take root.
Feminism is a noble ideal but the fact of the matter is, we live in a civilization where it is foolish to the point of being dangerous for a woman without an economic foundation in place to decide to live independently. I am that woman right now and I am increasingly aware of how the men to whom I am attracted benefit from that without ever having to make an appropriate reciprocal gesture.
That may sound materialistic or mercenary or worse - but it is still the truth that marriage provides a material benefit to women that it does not provide to men at the same time as it provides a social and emotional benefit to men that it does not provide to women.
To date, I have provided the emotional and social benefit with no expectation of the material security. That needs to change. I may think it is only right that I make my way in the world as a man but as Malcolm Gladwell points out in Outliers even that idea is more myth than reality and it is time I made my peace with it and acted accordingly.
That's all for now. More pictures later, this is something I need to hash out. I do so not only for myself but for any other woman who, like me, thought Virginia Woolf was no longer relevant to contemporary women and makes her way through life without a net.
