Hi👋🏽 I’m Kat. I help navigate difficult conversations and teach women how to negotiate on their own terms. Welcome to my version of a newsletter where I’ll be reminding you how to be kinder to yourself. You may listen (above) or read (below). You’re doing great, sweetie. Remember you’re all you have. So welcome and thanks for being here.✨
Rage was my greatest motivator in my younger years. It motivated my ambition and fueled my feminist passion. I remember being enraged by patriarchy long before the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements. In high school I carried a backpack with the words “Girls Rule, Boys Drool” emblazoned in DIY gel-pen in bright purple. It was my youthful form of feminist resistance. I was often told that I was a killjoy when I called out sexist comments in the name of a joke. Lighten up, I was often told. You’re so serious, they would say. It is normal in machismo culture to find oneself hearing about rape jokes or gay slurs; where it’s tolerated as long as you are among friends, and that no one is openly offended.
When I participated in the Women’s March a few years ago, I expected that what seemed like a pivotal turning point for the women’s movement would have given me that momentous feminist orgasm. The release of a long awaited moment. I was marching side-by-side with other angry women, fed up with the system. Yay sisterhood. But unfortunately that moment didn’t come. Most of my peers celebrated and felt proud for being part of history and walked home with gratification very much like partners who turn over and pass out after sex. I did my part, they say. What came after was my sheer dissatisfaction of the movement. And since I never fake it, and frankly no woman ever should, I made it clear that the women’s movement disappointed me. I stopped paying attention. Anything that seemed performative lost my interest whether it was listening to the media or showing up in rallies. I simply ghosted that relationship.
I know that the simple act of tuning out is a privilege. But marginalized people do not have that option. We simply can’t afford to tune out these issues and go about our merry way. Frankly, I don’t think I too could afford it, especially as a woman of color. But I argued that I did this as an act of self-preservation and self-care. I needed a break from this relationship. Mainstream feminism became like the abusive boyfriend that you keep defending even though you’re clearly seeing a hundred red flags. He’s not perfect, you say, but he has good qualities. For instance, we can argue that feminism helped bring sexual predators down. Feminism also shed light on the wage gap. And feminism is the reason why we now have more female leaders. But just like that unreliable boyfriend, mainstream feminism seems to step up their game only when it suits them. Nothing gets their attention until it challenges their status quo. The feminism I grew up in was simply white feminism. When I look at the younger version of me stomping around with my self-righteous values, hurling feminists rants, mostly at macho, sexist men and the women who enable these behaviors, it never occurred to me that the idea of feminism that I supported was very much classist and racist.
It wasn’t until 2016, when the women's movement brought me more upset than any breakup. I learned that men may break my heart but women, in the women’s movement, broke my spirit. And a broken spirit, I learned, is that much harder to mend than any broken heart.
It was then, for the first time in over three decades, feminism finally disenchanted me. Because of that, I learned to question my beliefs. Everything I know and everything I once had known to be true. I decided that to hold ourselves accountable we need to reflect on our life and exhaustively question everything about our existence. None of us are exempt from participating in our shared human experience. None of us walks away unscathed or excused for not doing our part.
Like author Mikki Kendall says, “We are part of the society that we are fighting to change, and we cannot absolve ourselves of our role in it.” If you haven’t read Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot read it now. She will turn your world upside down.
Whether we choose to see it or not, we are all guilty either as the perpetrators or the participants. We need to question everything about ourselves: from the things we own to the values we hold. Where do they come from? Who has influenced our beliefs? Are any of these at the expense of another human being? And is it possible, that what we believe to be right and true our whole life, could be a lie? Because social oppression takes so many forms. And the most insidious are the ones that have been embedded within the fabrics of our society as normative.
I know it’s easy to feel disheartened these days and it’s also easy to feel helpless when we don’t know what to do. But a key thing that we’re all undervaluing is our individual agency, being part of the collective whole. Our personal responsibility at this time is to take action on the very things that we can actually control. Our daily actions. The decisions we make. The investments we take. The businesses we support. Waking up each day, making conscious decisions that hopefully are not at the expense of another human being. Do we always get it right 100% percent of the time - no. But at least we keep on trying, every single day.
Kat✨
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