I've been seeing a lot of articles about how people who now have the freedom to do things are failing at those things. Marriages between gay couples ending in divorce. Women unable to hold marriages or careers together at the same time. Women who fail to become president. Ariel Levy just wrote a book about how she blames her miscarriage on herself and her ambition. People are overworked, stressed out, and feeling like they haven't accomplished what they needed to accomplish.
Okay, fine. You failed. It's also possible you may not get the chance to correct or change it. There are some things that are beyond our ability to fix. We get too old. We lose our uterus. We are too tired to try again. We're too tired to handle another marriage. It's over and it didn't work. You did fail.
The problem is, some people are taking these failures to mean that the whole idea of people being allowed to do these things is failing. Oh look, gays can't stay married. Clearly, that whole thing was a bad idea. Oh look, some women are failing at their jobs or failing their marriages or failing to be parents or failing all of it. Oh look, some of them are failing to amount to anything. Clearly, feminism has failed.
No, feminism has not failed. Gay rights have not failed.
This has never been about success. This is about freedom. This is about having the opportunity to make your own decisions and take your own risks. Or not take risks. if that is what you want. Having rights means having the chance to decide what moves you will make in your life. Not all of those moves will work. Many of them won't, honestly, because that's just how things go.
The point is, you get to be the one who decides. You get to be the one who makes the decision. Ariel Levy lost her baby when she was 38. She delivered him prematurely in a hotel room in Mongolia. She was by herself and there was nothing she or a doctor could have done to make him live. I know that is painful for her and I know it sucks.
You know what would have sucked more? If she had not been allowed to make any of those decisions. If a husband had decided she would wait until she was 38 before having a baby and would have taken her with him to Mongolia when she was 5 months pregnant without even asking her how she felt about the idea. It would have sucked more if she had to deliver that baby and watch it die all on her own while he drank in a bar with 'the boys' and then looked at her in disgust when he returned to the room, commenting that she made a mess, that women were weak, and that she had failed HIM.
She may have lost her child and I know she feels horrible and alone, but I doubt there is anything as awful as the loneliness one feels when one is subject to someone else's decisions.
Folks, we are going to fail here. Even with feminism, there will be women in poverty. There will be women who make shitty choices. There will be women who make what others would see as the best possible choices who still end up with nothing because our choices are not the only thing that determines our success. There wil be gay couples who wound each other and harm each other and fail each other. There will be people who end up alone and who end up unhappy and who end up broken. We will fail.
Always, always, always, however, it is better that we find failure in freedom than even complete success while subject to someone else's rule. These are OUR lives and OUR experiences and OUR moments. We're not here to play a secondary role to someone else.
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