FEMINIST is NOT a Dirty Word

After an author event a few weeks ago where I spoke about the importance of women to give voice to their stories, a woman came up to me and said it was refreshing to hear someone speak who was an unapologetic Feminist. “I hope you’re not offended by that,” she said.

“Offended?” I said, “I’m flattered.”

No matter how bad the connotation of the word Feminist gets in our culture, you will never, ever hear me say I am not one. In fact, you will never hear me say that I have moved beyond Feminism, (honestly what is beyond the true equality of the sexes?) And please, don’t start with me about how being a feminist makes me a man-hater. I’ll just yawn in your face out of boredom. You want to tell me women have achieved as much as men in this country, this contienent, this world? Then I will seriously have to ask you to pick up a paper and read it every now and then.

The mere fact that feminism is a term men and women shy away from should be enough of an example of how bad things have gotten. It’s like saying the civil rights movement made everything okay for African Americans – oh wait, some people believe that too don’t they?

Feminism is a hot button topic for me. Consider yourself warned. It has been since I was a young girl. No matter what the world has tried to teach me, I fervently believe that I am second to no one and that I have an unalienable right to make the same amount of money for doing the same job as a man or a gorilla.

I do not believe that men and women are the same in the way they see the world, approach relationships, business or their feelings. I don’t want to make men more feminine or women more masculine. I want the same pay for the same job. Let me rephrase that, I DEMAND the same pay for the same job.

I want to live in a world where women and children are not repressed, are not trafficked, sold, abused, degraded, oppressed or killed simply because they are women.

I want to live in a world where girls are not bombarded endlessly with images and expectations of perfection which are not only impossible to achieve but not worth achieving. Feeling beautiful is the essence of beauty and any woman over thirty knows that doesn’t happen with the right mascara.

Being pleasing does not give you happiness, turning yourself into an object of adoration denies your own humanity – why are we asking our girls to do that?

The truth is women are assaulted, molested, raped and abused at alarming rates. When bodies are found in unmarked graves, chances are they will be the bodies of women, and most likely they will be women who worked in the sex trade and lived a few blocks away from any address anyone cared about.

Many of the plots of TV shows, bestselling novels and movies revolve around the mutilation and murder of women. As if all the pampering, makeup and primping we get from these so-called “women’s magazines” is just preparation for becoming an ideal corpse.

I am a feminist and will be one until the day I die – and if I have done my job right I will leave behind a new generation of feminists who know the fight is not over, it is just beginning.

Look, the math here is simple, take care of women, you take care of the world. That makes me a feminist – what does that make you?

You Treat Others As You Treat Yourself

Years ago my sister said this to me during a time I was struggling with a boss who was not very kind to me. This person was not compassionate, nasty, and was never satisfied by anything anyone did. “Imagine how he must feel about himself,” she said. “We treat others as we treat ourselves.”

At that point in my life and in my relationship with this person I was not able to understand the power of that statement. It took many years (and a lot of therapy) for me to finally accept this fundamental truth.

I have not always been kind to myself. In fact, I have always been my harshest critic. My personal bar of achievement has at times been so high you would need a telescope to see it. I viewed mistakes as something people did because there were not paying close enough attention. And failure was not an option. Viewing my past through this harsh lense, I often blamed myself for not knowing better, for not being more adept at preventing hurtful things from happening to me. I took the notion of personal responsibility to an extreme. I believed everything was in my power to control, so any hurt or injury was my own damn fault.

And yet, I also believed I was capable of achieving anything if I worked hard enough and was clear in my intention. I thought the secret to my success was a result of my high bar, critical judgment and unreasonable sense of personal responsibility.

As a manager, I employed this approach to my staff. I assumed everyone had a bar as high as mine and was not willing to settle for anything short of perfection. I could not understand how someone could give me a document that was misspelled or without page numbering and tell me it was their best work. At times, instead of stepping back and trying to see it from their point of view, I handled these transgressions with the same harsh criticism I applied to myself.

This did not seem unreasonable to me, why wouldn’t I be as hard on someone as I was on myself (in fact, I believed I could never be as hard on a colleague or friend as I was with myself – this was how I justified it.)

By the time I hit my forties I started to feel the effects of my self-judgment. It was exhausting to always have to hit a home run, to work harder than everyone else and still not be satisfied, to never, ever, allow yourself to fail or make a mistake and be okay with it.

As I began to work through the causes of these feelings, my perspective on my own life and self slowly started to shift. I began to see how important it is to fail, how much freedom there is in allowing yourself to be human, and how forgiving yourself is the greatest thing you can ever do.

And, as I began to make small changes in my own approach, I noticed how many of my relationships started to shift as well. As a manager, I got better at being able to tell the difference between my personal expectation and what was good work by “normal” standards.

Perhaps my greatest achievement was my ability to give voice my own struggle. I learned that sometimes the best thing you can do is just admit you are a hard ass and tell the truth about how tough you can be on yourself and others. And, when you go too far, apologize and move forward.

There is no downside to loving yourself more deeply, no excuse not to learn how. The love we give ourselves just ripples out into the world in the way we act, the deeds we do and the intentions we set. Let us treat others the way we treat ourselves and let that be with love and compassion.

Teri's 50 Sense: Everybody Has A Story

Welcome to the first entry to Teri's 50 Sense - 50 things I've learned on the road to 50.

I collect stories like some people collect stamps or coins. Chances are if I’m a passenger in your taxi, or seated next to you on a plane or waiting at the doctor’s office, I’ll get your story. Not just the one you tell everyone that covers the basics of who you are, what you do, and what your relationship status is…no I’ll get that one thing out of you few people know about. I’ll get you to tell me what your spiritual beliefs are or your secret wish. At some point during our conversation you will find yourself saying, “I can’t believe I’m telling you this…” and then you will go on because once you know you can tell me, once you see the glint in my eye urging you on you won’t be able to stop yourself. You will tell me you used to shoot heroin while you ran a successful consulting business. When I ask you how it feels to get high, you will tell me.

You will tell me about the time you cheated on your wife and how sorry you are…when I ask you when it was, you will tell me it was when you were in the war. I will ask you what war and you will say the big one, WWII. Your wife passed away twenty years ago and still you feel bad, “worse than killing a man,” you tell me. I don’t ask you what that feels like. I can tell you don’t want to go there.

Maybe you will tell me about how much you cried after you had your baby and how you didn’t feel anything for a long time and how you worried there was something wrong with you until one day the fog lifted and you thought your heart would break from loving her.

Or you will tell me about your debt and how you lost everything from wanting too much and as we drive down the LIE with the meter ticking, you tell me how good it felt to let that desire go…to only own what you have paid for…and to know your wife loved you no matter what.

People tell me these things because I believe everyone has a story…and most stories are more dramatic, interesting, funny and inspirational than any book you’ve read or movie you have seen.

I don’t start the conversation most of the time, but I am open to where it can lead and I’m not afraid to ask a probing question if I trust the willingness is there to answer it. My intent is not to pick at a wound or throw gasoline on a fire…it is to understand more fully.

My friends tell me I am like this because I am a writer…but I think I am a writer because I am like this. I am not in love with language the way many writers are, nor do I yearn for historical accuracy or mass appeal, I am a story junkie. I want you to tell me yours and I want to tell you mine.

I am honored to hear anyone’s truth…even when it is painful. I am willing to listen because the telling of a story, no matter how dark or tragic, is a triumph. There is no greater achievement than living to tell the tale.

That is the whole point isn't it? The joy of living is not just in the doing, it is in the sharing.

Everyone has a story and if you are lucky you might just get to hear it.