Third Eye-- Sexing the Political: A journal of Third Wave Feminists on Sexuality

third eye open

It is my going-away party, an intimate send off with three women friends with whom I’ve shared varying degrees of intimate friendship over the past ten years. I am moving from my homeland of central Iowa to the east coast, to Boston. Motivated by romantic passion, I am moving to be near a woman I met while on our summer vacations. It is an impulsive (and, ultimately, short-lived) move. I have known her for just two months. Even so, I am in dire need to break away from Iowa for a while, to take a leap out into the world, to grow some gnarly branches on the tree of my life’s experience even as the roots are deep and strong. This woman is inviting me to do so in Boston, in connection with her. And so, I say yes and begin the preparations to make this cross-country move possible.

My Iowa friends have not met my new sweetheart. She will travel from Boston to Iowa the weekend of the party and they will meet her then. I have told two of my friends about her, about how we met, about our nightly phone conversations and daily letters. I have told them about her walk, her body, her face, her gestures—all of which express a strong tendency towards the masculine. She is a tall butch woman who is a mechanic, who drives a pickup truck, and who is sometimes mistaken for a man. She is also multiracial, with short curly black hair, caramel colored skin, thick lips, and a nose dotted with freckles. To my third friend, however, I do not disclose these details. I feel unsafe with her, a woman who, whenever I date a man, seems especially hopeful that he might be The One, and who, whenever I date a woman, obnoxiously reminds me that I "swing both ways." She is also the friend who, whenever I tell her I have met someone new asks, Are they Black or White?

Of course, she insists she isn’t biased towards the men I date, and when called on her intentions with the race question, insists she is just curious. It’s hard to believe her. Her tone of voice always conveys a certain desperation. It seems she must know the answer before she can proceed any further into our conversation. Although, upon my request, she stopped asking for a while, when I dated someone with a name she thought "sounded Black," she couldn’t help herself. When I informed her that, indeed, the person was White, she was sheepish.

Because I know my friend well, I know her question is more than an expression of simple curiosity. It exceeds casual inquiry with the disingenuous intention of qualifying my affections. Most painfully, the question tells me that my friend chooses to ignore the truth about my life, that over the past fifteen years I have dated men and women from eight countries and five continents whose ancestors were European, African, Indian, Mayan, Chinese, Spanish, and Korean with skin the color of porcelain to dark chocolate; with eyes black as night to blue as an early summer sky; and with hair black waves to sandy blonde curls to dark brown dreaded locks to silky flaxen tresses.

Of course, it is this truth that spawns the question in the first place. Unable to place my attractions into neat categories of black vs. white and male vs. female, my friend uses her comments and questions to cut off the excess of my life that refuses to fit into her categories. For her and many others, the fluidity (not to mention the volume) of my dating history is problematic. Complicated by my bisexuality and a willingness to cross the increasingly fuzzy color line, my romantic choices cannot be contained in definable preferences. And so, taking the behaviors she finds most transgressive, my friend wields her words like a knife. Lopping off whole truths about my life, she assures herself that she does have a box for me. Sadly, it is only with this diminished version of me that she is comfortable being friends.

It is with self-preservation and the desire to claim the whole of my life that I do not provide this friend with the details about the person she will soon meet. I watch as she is introduced to my new brown-skinned, masculine-female sweetheart. Over the short course of several seconds, my friend’s face turns from surprise to smugness to passive aggression. She is not happy to be caught off guard with no chance to use her weapon of words. After all, her favorite question, Are they Black or White? has been rendered powerless with the answer of BOTH. And how can she offer the obnoxious reminder that I "swing both ways" when it’s clear that I am joyously in mid-flight?

My friend’s behavior reminds me of what happened in parts of the so-called second wave of feminism. Unable to cope with the real diversity of women’s lived experiences, many feminists lopped off whole truths about the collective of women’s lives for their own comfort and/or ease in organizing. The issues of lesbians, working class women, women of color, and others were discarded as more "universal" gains were sought.

It is this history, however accurate, against which much of feminism’s third wave has reacted.

Even so, I wonder how different we really are from the second wave and how different we will be in the end. What pieces of others’ lives do we ask them to leave at the entrance to a relationship with feminism? (And when I say "we," I don’t mean just White middle-class heterosexual third wave feminists because "we" are more than that, and as a result, possess a vast arsenal of devises that prevent authentic connection with women who are different from us.) For example, in what ways do we disqualify women who do not share our beliefs about abortion, welfare reform, or pornography? Do we believe that women who live in rural America are less capable of living dynamic feminist lives, that big city girls have the only keys to lives progressive and hip? Have we moved beyond addressing issues of race with tokenism and assumptions of White guilt? How often do we include—from the very start—the voices of working class women rather than speaking for them, if at all?

Although we may never admit it, I have a creepy feeling that many third wave feminists—myself included at times—are still camped out in isolated ideologies. We may be able to wear a foxy red Wonder bra purchased with the earnings from our career as a sex toy salesperson, but when it comes to building authentic and effective cross-cultural, cross-class, cross-sexual orientation, cross-whatever alliances, we stumble just as often, if not as hard, as our second wave mothers.

The real challenge for our generation is to allow the evolution of a feminism of which the centerpiece is the collective truth of women’s lives lived in a limiting, sexist culture. Rather than lopping off parts of each other or ourselves, we must insist on one another’s wholeness in order to have a feminism that, as bell hooks envisions, is for everybody.

Rhonda’s monthly column, Third Eye uses truth telling to Rhonda draw connections from women’s most intimate decisions and experiences to the continual unfolding of third wave feminism. Honoring that women’s lives reflect diverse realities, she seeks to illustrate how feminist truth telling can simultaneously embrace and extend beyond the personal and the political.