Wanderlust

In DC, hanging with some kick-ass women

May 23, 2007 at 9:49 pm gvblog 1 comment

Today is the Choice USA Anniversary Gala and Generation Award celebration, so I have had the privilege of spending time with some really amazing activists. There are the women who make Choice USA a reality – Crystal Plati, Kierra Johnson, Rebecca Wiegand, and the rest of the staff, the other awardees, like Melody Nelson and Marvelyn Brown,  who are living examples of using their strength in the service of their vision, and, of course, Gloria Steinem, the founder of Choice USA and a woman whose passion and vision inspire me to think bigger, to radically reframe my ideas about what I can change.

 

Gloria spoke at our lunch today, and she enncouraged us to not be nostalgic for the past, but to look at how far we’ve come in the last fifty years – from the days when if a woman was raped, it was 100% her fault, when women had to lie and pretend they were married to get birth control, when having a child out of wedlock (or even too soon after the wedding) was often grounds for ostracism from the community.  She compared the arc of this work, of the efforts of activists and agitators to enable women to make their own decisions about sexuality and reproduction, to a course charted on the map of our history. If we have come this far in the last fifty years – to a country in which single motherhood is no longer stigmatized, where sexual assault is prosecuted and emergency contraception is offered to victims of assault in the emergency room, where birth control is available and accessible to women who need it – imagine where we will be fifty years from now. 

If we are able to make even half of the gains in the next fifty years (and there are certainly concentrated efforts to prevent us from doing so), I can only imagine how fabulous it would be. Imagine a world where gender is always fill in the blank, where our health care system provides culturally competent, comprehensive health care to every single person who needs it, where children are taught in school and in their community about healthy sexuality and relationships, where magazines feature pictures of models who are height weight proportionate and not airbrushed into fantasy, where birth control is so widely used that there are no unplanned pregnancies.  

I’m inspired to make a fifty year feminist agenda – to envision the world that I want to raise my grandchildren in, and then work backwards from there, figuring out what I need to do now to make that world a reality.

One of the things I value the most about this adventure I’m on is the people I’m meeting and reconnecting with, especially the women who are passionate about the same things I am.  I’m reminded of the first time I really realized the strength and the power inherent in communities of women. I was facilitating Female Sexuality at UC Berkeley for the first time, and we were on a road trip somewhere or other.  We pulled in at a dusty gas station in the rolling hills of Northern California, and as we tumbled from the caravan I remember looking at the faces of the other people standing around, and seeing these looks of wonder in their eyes, and feeling unbelievably joyful and powerful, feeling the power of our community like a force field around us. 

I find that same feeling in my time with Natalie, who used to work at NARAL in San Francisco and who is both incredibly insightful and hilarious, with Amber, Jacq, Ann, Laura, and Tia, the activists and educators from Baltimore who are creating entertaining and inspiring sex positive spaces, and with all the current and former femsex facilitators I’ve had the opportunity to spend time with.  

My family is all in DC for the Choice USA Gala, so I’m off to drink some wine and get in some sister time.  

 

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