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Later, in college (at a private Southern university—I lasted a year before transferring back to New York), I would try to tone down the behavior I thought marked me as “lower class.” I tried to drop cursing so much, the Queens accent slowly disappeared, and I continued to hang out with kids who had gone to boarding schools and to pretend I knew what the hell “summering” was. But you can’t pass for long. I would later realize that a lot of the hellishly sexist experiences I went through in college were completely tied up with classism. I was called a slut not only because I had the gall to sleep with a guy I was dating, but also because I dressed differently, talked differently (no matter how I tried to hide it), and was seen as the trashy Queens girl on scholarship. So I know this is a little more personal than academic, but hey—the personal is political, right?

HOMOPHOBIA/HETEROSEXISM

In the same way a woman of color can’t divvy up her oppressions, neither can a gay woman—or a gay, black woman, for that matter. There isn’t a “double oppression” or a “triple oppression”; it’s just an intersection of oppressions that plays out differently in every woman’s life.

By the way, I know the word “homophobia” is used a lot—but the term “heterosexism” isn’t nearly as common. So, just a quick explanation: “Heterosexism creates the climate for homophobia with its assumption that the world is and must be heterosexual and its display of power and privilege as the norm.”5

In other words, when you see couples in magazines or TV shows, they’re almost always going to be straight. And if they’re not straight, a big deal is made out of said couple’s being gay. It’s not just posited as the norm. When a gay couple kisses in the street, or holds hands, they’re rubbing the gay in our faces, but when straight couples do it, it’s cool. I’d say that heterosexism is far more insidious than homophobia—because it’s more accepted.

Something on homophobia and hetereosexism that I always found interesting is how they’re so ridiculously related to sexism. In Suzanne Pharr’s essay “Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism,” she writes that when women are called dykes and lesbians, it is almost always because they are believed to have “crossed the line” in some way. Kinda why so many people label feminists as lesbians.

❂ To be a lesbian is to be perceived as someone who has stepped out of line, who has moved out of sexual/economic dependence on a male, who is woman-identified. A lesbian is perceived as someone who can live without a man, and who is therefore (however illogically) against men. A lesbian is perceived as being outside the acceptable, routinized order of things. . . . A lesbian is perceived as a threat to the nuclear family, to male dominance and control, to the very heart of sexism.6

So it’s not really women loving women that irks people—it’s that they’re transgressing, refusing to conform to societal perceptions of what women are supposed to be.

Just something to think about.

And yes, I realize there are a ton more “-isms”—ableism or ageism, for example. The same ideas apply to those, and to any number of women’s lived experiences. These are just the “-isms” I chose to focus on for now.

And now, bordering on obsession with Lorde, I’ll leave you with a quote:

❂ Our future survival is predicated upon our ability to relate within equality. As women, we must rot our internalized patterns of oppression within ourselves if we are to move beyond the most superficial aspects of social change. Now we must recognize difference among women who are our equals, neither inferior nor superior, and devise ways to use each other’s difference to enrich our visions and our joint struggles.

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GET TO IT

So what the hell to do now, huh?

While realizing that feminism is, in fact, completely necessary can be an awesome (though scary) thing, figuring out what to do with that information isn’t always clear.

I mean, it’s easy to get depressed about all of these obstacles that women are facing. Because it is depressing.