Fall Nights on the Porch

Fall is coming. It's here. Tonight was chilly and I rocked on the porch while having a conversation I only have remember because I was sleepy. I said out loud tonight for the first time that I thought we were forming an intentional community here. It seems so real. All of the sudden I'm not willing to think of myself as a loner who might not fit in. I will make this a place where I do fit in. I refuse to not feel at home in my own home anymore. It's my home. I'll make it what I want it to be and I want it to be a home, a family, a place where we each belong.

Tonight I had a breakthrough in explaining to myself and others why certain statements and terms make me uncomfortable as a woman. A male friend of mine called the neighbor a "trophy wife," not in anger, but just as a way to refer to her. He doesn't know her, though, has never met her, and knows nothing about her except that she's young and beautiful and lives in a nice house with a nice car, and appears to not work outside of the home and she's a woman. It made me feel disquieted, but it was hard to make him understand why.

Then, I finally understood why. And it finally made sense why I don't like it when the guys I live with, the guys I work with, the guys I'm friends with, and even the women in my life make such comments. It's because it's a dismissive and marginalizing label based solely on one obvious aspect of the person - her sex, and it makes me all of the sudden wonder what does that person think about me, because I'm the same as her. It's the same as if I were a racial minority listening to a white person call some passerby of the same race by some slur. I'd feel marginalized and uncomfortable. They may not mean it that way, but that's how I feel.

I pointed this out to my friend, thinking that I had finally come up with a way of explaining why those comments are upsetting, but he said it was different. And I think anyone I try to tell this to will not be willing to listen to a comparison between racism and sexism. As a society, we are willing to tolerate sexism where we find racism abhorrent.

But why? It's the same thing. It's the marginalization of a person based solely on a physical aspect that they cannot change and did not choose. It's the assumptions we box them into upon first glance, that we use to pin them into a pattern that we will not let them escape. And I'm finding it within myself as I write this. I feel challenged to deal newly with the prejudiced things I do and say, to understand them and see them for what they are, recognizing the ugly thing inside me that says them, and changing that mindset that translates into an unfair behavior that disempowers others simply because they are not identical to me.