>>Tien, very nicely said...a neat little synopsis of our history...and I agree...so WHY do I feel so crummy then?

Umm...because it's really depressing to realize that as raw a deal as women get now, it's STILL better than anything we've ever gotten???

A quote from Diane DiMassa, artist/writer of the comic book Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist--

"For now, my lesson is one of focus. Focus on what makes you nuts, and you will rage. Rage until you are nuts, and then remember that you can change your focus."

I find that that's a lesson I need to remember often...I'm very outspoken, and activist in nature, and I find a LOT of things in society that piss me off. If I let it, activism creeps into my life and takes it over completely, and I spend so much time filled with rage at what goes down that I spin totally out of emotional control and can't stop thinking of anything but what I want to say to the last asshole who made a joke about battered women or women's place....which means it's time to walk away for awhile, and change my focus.

So I go off, and work on my quilt, route all my mailing lists to the "deleted" box, and actively avoid sources of social outrage for awhile. Walk around the stream that's built around my apartment complex, watch the hawk (yes, we have our own resident hawk, here in suburbia!), sit by the koi pond, under the pine tree, do nothing. Eventually the thoughts settle down and become a bit happier.

I figure that taking time to do crafts and create beautiful things that have nothing to do with activism or feminism or any of the shit that goes down is an act of defiance: if I let that rage swallow my entire life, or my creativity, then misogyny has succeeded in destroying me. It's an important thing to remember--to save a little time for yourself, just to be you and no one else.

And I like to think that all art is, yes, also a work of protest: it says, "You can give us a raw deal, you can hurt us, you can kill some of us--but still, somehow, we survive. Here is a corner of us that you can never touch, no matter what you do."

To quote Alice Walker:

when they torture your mother
plant a tree
when they torture your father
plant a tree
when they torture your brothers and your sisters
plant a tree
when they torture you
too bad to talk
plant a tree
When they begin to cut down the forest they have made
and torture the trees themselves
start another.

(From Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful.)

Me, I think it's important to do both: work to stop the shit, AND refuse to let it get you completely down. Yeah, a lot of shit goes down, and yeah, we've got to stop it, and yeah, it's the sort of thing that fills me with outrage and grief....and yet....

...and yet, there are hummingbirds.