Red Cedar

Scratch the 22nd.

Posted on February 13, 2007 by Megan

Sex? Relationships? Liberation?

Posted on February 13, 2007 by Megan

Oy. It’s almost the stupidest day of the year, and I’ve been thinking a lot recently about gender relations, sex and the transformation of our society occurring through my generation and beyond with regard to the whole package. Seems like an opportune time to blog about it, though I’m not sure how well organized these thoughts will be.

I should specify that I am only writing from my smallish leftist-hipster worldview and that might not count much outside of itself. I think there are some interesting statistics that point to a more generalized experience for educated women and we’ll get to those near the end of this post – but I’m trying to reconcile my experience with some of these “facts” and my shifting political and economic position in the world.

As has become apparent to many in my life, I work a lot these days and I travel a lot as a result which means I often miss out on weekends and free evenings that lots of people seem to have. During one period last spring I worked 30 days in a row between my job and union – no days off, no weekends free – and at least half that time spent in hotel rooms in 3 different cities. Result? I have a well-supported life economically but I lack the energetic capacity to commit myself to another person at the moment. Or perhaps I should rephrase that – I lack the capacity to commit myself to anyone who won’t completely adapt to my schedule and lifestyle and be there when I want them – which I know is unreasonable and so I don’t even try.

Instead, I’ve been doing the causal internet dating scene – fun for a few nights or a few weeks – without any promise beyond a little instant intimacy. This format certainly has its downsides, but it’s working for me at the moment and has been good for breaking me out of my usual social scene. (Love my friends, but we don’t have many available men in our scene as has been hashed out in some of East Van’s finer establishments over the years). One of the fallout effects of this has been that I find myself talking about sex and dating a lot more these days, and with a lot of different kinds of people – which has lead me to observe a few things:

Men and women generally expect the worst of each other when it comes to sex, dating and partnering. If you can get either gender to talk about what they really think of the other, it turns out that both sides are disillusioned, depressed and generally wary of the opposite sex.
Unlike the experience of past generations where a mating partnership was looked to as salvation from our families of origin, or a place to start our futures – there are a lot of people who see commitment as a necessary trap only for the purposes of having children (something many people biologically desire). Thus many commitments are temporary inconveniences with a purpose.
There is a lot more cynicism about the concept of “love” out there. There’s a lot of wounded people walking around wishing they could find their other and denying it to themselves. I think men are more fearful of it than women – but I have nothing to back that up except personal intuition.
Although women are evidently thinking about sex a lot more (see this week’s Georgia Straight for proof), and are increasingly on their own and not having children – we are still not able to fully embrace our sexual selves. While it’s easy to get sex as a woman, there are still lots of *real* dangers associated with it for us (violence, disease, pregnancy) and additionally we are still socially condemned for it.
There’s a lot of kinky people out there. And the Internet is undoubtedly encouraging this phenomena through the ability to share experiences and learn about new things. Queer culture has also helped us straight people out an awful lot in this regard (yay for womyn’s ware and other female-empowering sex shops, magazines and sites).
And despite the generalizations above, there is no uniformity of experience in our generation vis a vis marriage, having kids, finding love, having sex, etc. because all the traditional rules are being broken.

Now, I’m not going to argue for tradition or a return to straight marriages or an end to kink, but I am going to argue that this is perhaps as confusing a time for both genders as any other transitional period in the history of relations between the sexes.

Because on top of all of the above – women are entering universities and high-powered workplaces in record numbers. Female university graduates have outnumbered men for the past decade or so, recent stats in the US show that more women are living outside of traditional partnerships than in them for the first time in history, and over 40% of female university graduates in Britain born in 1970 will enter their forties childless. That’s my generation of women – increasingly educated, economically self-reliant, and in control of their reproductive systems. Raised under the feminist banner of the 70s and 80s, women are still not exactly sure what we want – but even moreso, the men in our lives don’t quite know how to relate to it either.

On the one hand, we have biological drive to reproduce (which some feel stronger than others), but we live in a world which is increasingly environmentally unstable. Internet pornography and casual sex sites make random release easier to obtain than ever, but we substitute these encounters for real intimacy. Women are often making as much or more than men which gives them more freedom, but neither gender seems to act as though this is the case.*

I think, at root, the biggest problem I encounter is that people from both genders are afraid to be honest with themselves about what they really want. And because we can’t be honest with ourselves, we can’t be honest with anyone else either. I mean this in the most superficial sense (what’s your kink?) and in the deeper as well (what kind of partnering is really right for me?) – and while we’re programmed to live in one world (the one our parents grew up in), we’re living in a totally different one. We think our honesty has to reflect familial expectation, even though our economic and social and sexual realities are fundamentally altered.

It’s confusing. Yes. But sometimes I see a glimmer of greater liberation in people and it makes me hope that we can refashion our idea of what relationships should and can be. Monogamy for some, sure. But polyandry for others? Raise our children in a village or be single mothers by choice? Be honest when our partnering is economic and based on friendship rather romance? Ditch the notion that it has to be true love to be profound or spiritual? And godammit – can we all get over ourselves just a little bit and have some fun too?

Despite all my crappy experiences with men (and women for that matter), despite my failed marriage and the exes who were dishonest, a history of sexual and physical violence and all the other things that make me up – I am working these days to just what is and stop projecting the past into every present moment. I think it’s true that the worse our expectations of others, the worse they end up behaving – and that’s not liberating at all. The more gender equity we have in our society, the greater chance we can enter into liberated relationships – and now more than ever I think we are moving in that direction. At least I hope so.

* yes, women on average earn less statistically – but have more earning power overall these days.

The power of protest – revisited.

Posted on February 12, 2007 by Megan

1 Comment

“….If you were here with me now you would see that all of our struggles have meaning and are relevant not only to our world, but to the sound and humane progress of our planet. This country… is the future of a violent and sociopathic history. It would be foolish to think that somehow we could escape this except through struggle…. All we have done in our lives is acted on what we love, and when we go out in the world, the need for immediacy is obvious.”

Letter to an ex-lover and activist companero in prison, written in Colombia July 2006

I have been an activist since from the age of thirteen years when my friend Miranda and I stumbled across the annual peace demonstration in front of the parliament buildings of Victoria. Back in those days, these were big affairs – a couple thousand people in Victoria, tens of thousands in Vancouver – focused on nuclear disarmament and an end to the military stand-off that was the cold war. From that one demonstration, I was connected to Amnesty International, the fight to save Carmanah Valley, and a host of other issues both local and global, each experience building on the next until I was spit out into the city of Vancouver to do it all over again.

I was seemingly hard-wired for protest, and from that first time have always felt at home among demonstrations and pickets. Participant, organizer, and accused once of inciting a riot (though never charged) – I grew up a militant on logging roads and city streets along the coast of BC and down into the Cascadia states – and although I can’t claim to have been at every major event – the 90s was an escalating and exciting time to be a young radical as the mass protest movements thwarted meetings and blockaded logging trucks, and the underground direct actionists burned corporate infrastructure into ashes.

But as comfortable as I was wielding a megaphone, over the past few of years I have faltered in my belief of the efficacy of what I was doing. Some would say that’s just a natural evolution as I pass from adolescence into true adulthood – now being 34 – and it’s time to put childish angst away. Another cause for my shift might be found in the withering of anglo-North American protest movements since the fall of the twin towers in September of 2001, the re-cast of those seeking social change as a real threat, and the attendant repression that followed (a process started long before, fuelled by the success of demonstrations in Seattle and Quebec). Disheartening? Of course. The effect being to open me up to all the self-criticism and doubt I could withstand, tempering my activism away from vocal street-protest and into education, writing, and ultimately trade union leadership where I am now progressing at both the workplace and political level.

I, like most of my generation of activists, am trying to pay the rent while engaging meaningfully in the world. Too tired (or afraid of losing our jobs) to organize people into the streets. Frustrated by the fact that everything we fought for is being ripped to shreds by a war economy and right-wing governments. Astonished at how little opposition is being mounted in the face of global war, climate change, religious fundamentalism, and the continuing depletion of our natural resources.

Recent examples abound of sweetheart deals being made with corporations and attacks on public services by ideologically-driven governments – while nary a peep of protest is raised outside of the usual circles. Take for example the recent provincial government decision that will see 28,000 hectares of crown land on Vancouver Island transferred into the very private hands of Western Forest Products. Ten years ago I am certain this would have elicited some sort of public protest, at least a few people chaining themselves to bulldozers or a tree-sit or two. Today, the Canada Wilderness Committee is lucky to get a quote in a newspaper article and a few of their supporters to write letters of dismay (which is in no way an indictment of the Wilderness Committee – we’re glad at least someone is pointing out the problems with this process).

Not only do I believe that in the 90s there would have been a protest to this decision, but I also believe it would have made a difference. Perhaps not in the grandest sense – but I suspect that a little more pressure from the public could have produced some more conservation measures, perhaps a protected area or two, or a few less roads into sensitive habitat. As it is, the government has handed over free land to a major corporation, with almost no conditions at all. This is only one example, but with more space, I could cite many more.

And so, while doubts and self-criticisms will continue to exist, in some way I am heartened to realize that I have not been wasting my time for the past 21 years. Strangely, it is in the absence of mass movement organizing that I am finally understanding that protest does make a difference. My working theory at the moment is simply this: “Without an effective, grassroots protest movement governments can do exactly as they want and they will as long as they go unchallenged. Protest doesn’t change the world overnight, but it helps us to temper the worst excesses of a corporate hegemony run out of control.”

I am thankful that there are still organizations and trade unions who bring their members out on the street for issues of relevance to them – and in BC we can at least point to strong labour movement protests in the last few years that have forced the government to deal with public sector workers a little more fairly. Unfortunately, grassroots organizers under the age of 30 seem a rare breed at the moment – and spontaneous radical movement is at a standstill. Beyond my working premise above, I am also pretty certain that we need more than trade union bureaucracies – that we also need the vibrance of an evolving protest culture to push the envelope, and to sustain ourselves creatively and socially in the face of an increasingly harsh world.

In the closing to the letter quoted above, I wrote to my friend the following: “We are not wrong to want to make change – this desire is simply love manifested in struggle.” In Colombia this past summer I saw first-hand the cost of not standing up to oppression and violence, and the importance of fighting for a civil society the world over – one that values more than profits and power and seeks to redress the real hurts of the earth and its inhabitants. Protest is only one part of this re-creation, but essential to our survival.

The mighty horseman.

Posted on February 10, 2007 by Megan

The birthday post.

Posted on February 8, 2007 by Megan

2 Comments

I’ve been trying to get to this all day but jeez, I’ve been busy. Rest assured, I made it to my birthday, I’m dressed fabulously and I feel great.

And thanks to everyone who sent me birthday greetings. It makes me feel good. Dinner tonight at the horseman should be fine and I’m not even working tomorrow!

More reflective post on the way shortly. I really want to get out of this office though, and right now!