True story, but I want to write about this, because I think this is a painful, heart-breaking reality for many female feminists. It’s something we need to talk about, hard as it is.

My fiance of over one year has stated that I will never be compatible with any man if I continue to be the way I am, because the way I practice feminism isn’t good for a relationship with a male. We’ve called it quits.

We were engaged. We wanted to have children together. I saw all my future with him until I was old and gray and withered and wrinkly. I imagined knitting sweaters while sitting in a rocking chair with grandchildren running around our feet.

Then I read Andrea Dworkin.

Wait, back up.

Then I suggested that maybe part of my self-loathing, depressive, agonizing pain could be associated with the experiences I had had in life very specific to my being female. I’d already been some version of “feminist” up until this point: the liberal, sex pozzie and perfectly compatible with even sexist men type of feminist. Misogyny is sneaky in that a liberal, sex positive feminist can get along with a sexist, woman-hating male very easily as long as:

a) No one ever talks about her gender role as female in the relationship beyond a passing nod to “yeah, you’re equal and strong and can have a job and stuff…”

b) She remains open for servicing his male needs aka le boom boom.

It started by accident. I became involved in a group called We Blame the Patriarchy on Facebook and began having interactions with radical feminists (my first ever). Through my conversations with these women, things started to make too much sense. Way too much. Everything started to make sense.

I started looking at myself through a new lens. I actually started to see a light at the end of the tunnel.

As a woman, I have been subjected to a laundry list of male violence of various kinds, with the climax being my highly abusive relationship with a psychopath in Turkey–a relationship that I barely escaped with my own life. As many women are after experiencing male violence, I was a walking shell. The essence or sense of humanity that I may have once possessed, but couldn’t remember, was bombed out, silenced, stuffed down, choked half to death…actually completely to death. She was dead. What was left was a shadow of a human being that followed cues in her environment with the intent to remain breathing. Survival. That’s what it is. It didn’t matter who I was, how I felt, what I needed, what I wanted, or if I had any wants, feelings, or needs at all. What mattered is that I kept placing one foot in front of the next foot until the cells in my body stopped reproducing themselves.

Feminism woke something in me. Deep down, she wasn’t dead, no, SHE WAS ALIVE!

My ex, who has no tolerance whatsoever for what he considers my application of feminism, has likened this to a religious awakening. He means to say that it’s a form of delusion and that the person experiencing it is having a mental lapse.

Hmm.

But that’s not it.

You see, when a human being is degraded, dehumanized, tortured, violated, and quite essentially destroyed for the better part of her life (or for her whole life), the discovery of a way to live that restores a sense of humanity is not a religious experience at all. It’s healing. Religion is about transcending this mortal world into an abstract plane that is experienced solely in the mind of its believer. It’s an ethereal, metaphysical, somewhat magical concept at its core which focuses on something out there, in the universe or other plane that one cannot directly access or prove the existence of. Feminism, for a woman, is about living in your literal body on this literal planet in a way that doesn’t literally drive you mad. Not because females are inclined to madness and need some story to make them feel better. No. Because the world is inclined to madness that most squarely points itself in the direction of females with monumentally destructive power. There is a very tangible reality that results in a massively disproportionate number of women experiencing depression, complex traumatic stress syndrome, anorexia and bulimia, self-harm practices such as cutting, and a general sense of misery. Millions upon millions of women are being raped, beaten, killed every day by men. And EVERY woman has experienced at some point in her life varying degrees of discrimination, belittling, harassment, hate speech, disrespect, and neglect because she is female. Specifically because she is female. In a way that is unique to her being female. In a way that a male will usually never experience–and if he does, it’s never going to be as concrete, since he doesn’t live in a world with social structures built up around these experiences which bind them into place and exponentially increase their damage by way of context.

“WOW!” I thought after learning more about feminism. “It’s a utopia, a perfect world. A world where females, males, and everything in-between can live a life of love, respect, harmony, and a sense of well-being. Wow!” I thought, “wait till I explain some of this to my mate! He will be thrilled to know that he can toss all that masculine crap aside and join me in the quest to embrace the full potential of our humanness. Wait till he sees how much better our relationship can be! How much happier we both can be! How much more complete we can both feel!”

Some of you know what is about to happen…

My mate had seen me, over the past year, in the throes of my pain. He’d seen the panic attacks, the dissociative states, the fits of tears and rage over the memories and scars of my past abuses, and he even noticed that I seemed to miss having a strong, centered sense of myself in almost every aspect of who I was. I was generally fearful, defeated, tired, listless, and down-trodden. My dreams remained in my head, where they couldn’t fail, for they were never attempted. Though I always had a big, warm heart, he would say, the rest of me was, as I mentioned before, a bombed out shell that followed cues to survive.

Boy did I have another thing coming. Masculine crap….don’t use that phrase with a male–ever. Like ever. Unless they are seasoned and very accepting of feminist thought, and even then, be careful.

Everything was war. Right away. The theories were “nonsense”, the views were hateful. Heck, he called ME sexist and a man-hater. All intimacy evaporated in an instant–though there hadn’t been much of it to begin with across this massive male/female divide we’d spent our relationship inhabiting, like two planets always on completely different orbit paths, destined to pass each other but never actually make contact.

I watched my relationship disappear overnight.

Becoming a radical feminist means:

1. Learning to love yourself as you are and embracing your body, not hating or hurting it

2. Challenging your assigned role (femininity) and how it effects your well-being

3. Challenging the assigned role of males (masculinity) and how it effects theirs and your well-being

4. Seeking to identify root problems within male/female dynamics in order to create a better relationship between the sexes, especially in a way that liberates the female from sex-based abuse

5. Allowing yourself to be angry, really angry, at being oppressed. In general, learning to feel emotions again after numbing them to the appropriate level for our assigned gender

6. Changing how you participate in sex, how you define sex, and how you allow yourself to be treated in sex

7. Working to analyze and change institutions and the cultural practices that hurt women

8. Learning to view yourself from your own perspective, rather than through the eyes of men. In other words, to decolonize your mind from sexist perceptions of self imposed by misogynist and patriarchal norms

9. Empowering oneself

10. Joining and embracing other women and forming a community with women. This is important because women are usually disenfranchised and pitted against each other in patriarchy

Basically, radical feminism is not just an idea. It’s a way of living. If you grow in your feminist journey, you will change your lifestyles. Its unavoidable.

Off with the bra.

Out with the razors.

To the trash with the make-up.

To Hell with high heels.

Good Riddance to tolerance of sexism and misogyny and…

BOOM with the power, self-confidence, love, trust in oneself, and retraining of our passive, submissive habits. Outspoken nature erupts! Opinions, views, and thoughts are actually SAID!

Hello Sisterhood!

These are all quite tangible changes that a woman goes through when she becomes feminist.

What this means for her mate is: Brand new woman in his life.

She’s hairy and bold. She’s reading all the time and isn’t paying as much attention to him. She’s not too into having her vagina rammed anymore. And she’s spending a lot of time with women, ignoring males.

What man could hold on to this?

To the women reading this, I don’t have a perfect answer to that.

But if a man stumbles on this bit of words, then I would say this to him: She’s not a brand new woman. She’s the woman you always had, but never could see. That was her, all along. But she was stuffing herself into a role. Do you see what we mean by oppression now? Look at the woman you called your love and realize that she’s removed the stains and dirt from the glass you looked at her through. Now you see who was always there, afraid to show her face, afraid to BE. Told not to exist. Told to change. Told she wasn’t good enough, or pretty enough, or smart enough, or worth enough. Told she shouldn’t exist as she is. There she is now, standing in front of you. All the pain, the emotion, and the raw, genuine beauty staring back into your eyes hoping that you will not be like them. That you will love her for herself.

To all the feminists out there who took this risk and received the hardest heart-break they will likely ever experience, one that is too sober not to hear through and through–No, you are not good enough just as you are; I liked you better when you were faking everything–these quotes are for you:

For women, getting angry is socially unacceptable, even when the anger is over violence, discrimination, misogyny, and other forms of oppression. Anger is unacceptable because angry women are women in touch with their passion and power, especially in relation to men, which threatens the entire patriarchal order. It’s unacceptable because it forces men to confront the reality of male privilege and women’s oppression and their involvement in it, even if only as passive beneficiaries. Women’s anger challenges men to acknowledge attempts to trivialize oppression with “I was only kidding.” And women’s anger is unacceptable to men who look to women to take care of them, to prop up their need to feel in control, and to support them in their competition with other men. When women are less than gracious and good-humored about their own oppression, men often feel uncomfortable, embarrassed, at a loss, and therefore vulnerable.“ - Allan G. Johnson

“Woman is not born: she is made. In the making, her humanity is destroyed. She becomes symbol of this, symbol of that: mother of the earth, slut of the universe; but she never becomes herself because it is forbidden for her to do so.” “She will try to find the nice way to exercise intelligence. But intelligence is not ladylike. Intelligence is full of excesses. Rigorous intelligence abhors sentimentality, and women must be sentimental to value the dreadful silliness of the men around them. Morbid intelligence abhors the cheery sunlight of positive thinking and eternal sweetness; and women must be sunlight and cheery and sweet, or the woman could not bribe her way with smiles through a day. Wild intelligence abhors any narrow world; and the world of women must stay narrow, or the woman is an outlaw. No woman could be Nietzsche or Rimbaud without ending up in a whorehouse or lobotomized. Any vital intelligence has passionate questions, aggressive answers; but women cannot be explorers; there can be no Lewis or Clark of the female mind.” - Andrea Dworkin

Be. Powerful.

Never. Stop.