From this theoretical basis, it is an affront to women everywhere to derogate, betray, or exclude another woman. When women direct hostility at one another, they are participating in the oppression of a member of their own (target) group – and, by extension and group membership, of themselves.

All this is very well and good, and I’m sure I’m not the only feminist who enjoys the warm fuzzy feeling of refraining from saying something nasty about a friend or colleague. Many of us have probably refrained from pointing out negative things about other women, even when they’re accurate, in the name of sisterhood. Even women who are widely regarded as untrustworthy have been covered for by their sisters’ complicit silence - in the name of sisterhood. We’re so dedicated to maintaining the sisterhood that we’ll put whipped cream on a pile of shit and proclaim it a treat (to use one of my mother’s colorful expressions – except that she doesn’t say shit, she says crap). 

But. The shit is still there, steaming, under the (by now melting) whipped cream. Even if you’d added a cherry and sprinkles, shit is still shit.

Shit metaphors aside, I’ve observed an interesting phenomenon in my salsa dancing community. I’m not talking about blatantly horizontally hostile behaviors in the genre of nasty gossip and adolescent popularity contests; I’ve noticed that some women lack boundaries in the way they relate to men who are in relationships with other women.

Let me first set the stage a bit: When we go out to our usual salsa night, the overall atmosphere is lighthearted and friendly; there’s a lot of good-natured flirtatious energy in the room. Most folks in our salsa community tend toward the demonstrative. Everybody hugs and exclaims over everyone else; the guys do those truly-affectionate-but-still-manly hugs, and we women do a lot of oohing and aahing over how hot the other’s outfit is and the relative prominence of the other’s breasts. (I keep my sexiest third-wave hat firmly in place when I go out dancing.)

Although my partner and I do tend to happily monopolize each other, by the end of the night, we’ve generally danced at least one song with the other people with whom we enjoy dancing; our post mortem conversation usually involves being disappointed that we didn’t get to dance with so-and-so, or that we danced a particularly good song with a certain person.

Given that this friendly openness is one of my favorite characteristics of our scene, why does it bother me so much when certain single women interact in a certain way with my partner? In one particularly memorable incident, a woman came bounding across the room and brushed past me in her eagerness to hug him, but the way it generally works is that we’ll be sitting out a song together, talking and often touching in the intimate way that heterocoupley privileged people have, and a woman will come over and ask him to dance.

While it felt like jealousy at first – and, frankly, it was driving me crazy because I really hated the thought that I might be a jealous partner - I finally realized what was bugging me. It wasn’t the hugs or the dances that bothered me per se, it was that these women were seeking male attention from an unavailable man.

In contrast, my partnered women friends are perfectly happy to dance with my partner, and I am perfectly happy to dance with their partners, but we would never, ever go up to a couple standing together and ask the guy to dance. It simply wouldn’t occur to us. The vast majority of our single women friends have the same unspoken code; they might dance with or drink with a partnered man, but they have finely drawn boundaries regarding their interactions with him. They respect the fact that he is in a relationship with another woman, and they aren’t trying to infringe on that.

Yes, before the frantic arm-waving begins, I know damn well when I am flaunting my heterocoupley privilege. I get that it is easy for me to sit up here on my high horse and condemn other women’s infringement on my territory. However, by acting as if my partner is an appropriate source of male attention, these women demonstrate extreme disrespect for me – and, by extension, all women.

I’d very much prefer to not be bothered by this. Perhaps someone more mature than I would not be. I wish I was more sympathetic to these women, because I understand the need for male attention. I do. Although I’m inclined to question the socialization process that brings women to that state, I was single for five long years and I recognize the craving. I really do recognize how tempting it is to try and establish intimacy with any man who happens to be handy – I just refuse to excuse it in the name of sisterhood.

Let’s call a pile a pile.

Big surprises.

What I could not have predicted was the discovery that Virginia Woolf was absolutely right; in order to do intellectual work, one must have a measure of financial security. Before this past fall, I would have said that a period of near-unemployment would be a welcome opportunity to finally have time to do the things that didn’t seem to happen when I was in grad school – I could submit some articles for publication, design a few syllabi, apply for teaching jobs all over the world, get some major sewing projects done, touch up the paint on my kitchen ceiling, remodel the bathroom, etc. Basically, I’d have called this extra time a great opportunity to get shit done.

Popular mythology would have agreed with that. Society expects that if one is under-employed, one has plenty of time to look for additional work. If one can get by for the time being on being under-employed, one has plenty of time for other things. Thinking is free. An individual in financial crisis is able to think just as well as the next person. And so on. 

I am here to testify that this is not so.

What I have realized is that the mental and emotional strain of living on credit cards and not being sure if one can pay the mortgage saps one’s energy to the point of rendering one barely able to function. I now know, in a real way, that it’s impossible to even think if one cannot pay the bills, rendering academic production a moot point. As a middle-class white woman, I knew this to be true intellectually, and I’d read a few articles explaining how academic work is a manifestation of class privilege, but the experience of learning something for oneself is vastly different from reading about it.

Obviously, I am not the first to observe the injustice here. Our current social/economic structure ensures that many (or most) people will remain indefinitely in the precarious financial situation that I found myself temporarily experiencing, which ensures that an enormous group of people – regardless of how intelligent they may actually be – are prevented from doing intellectual work.

The irony, if you have not noted it by now, is that someone in my position is pointing this out. Here I sit, tapping away at my computer, drinking tea, getting ready to hop in my car and drive to work. I have a graduate degree, employment (albeit in the form of two part-time jobs that do not add up to full-time pay or benefits), electricity, a house, a car, and the time to write this blog. I’ve escaped (for the moment) the paralysis of financial stress, so I now have the freedom to think, and therefore, to write, about it.

It’s something to think about – for those with the privilege to do so.

At the same time, the only people who seem to be talking about compromise in a serious way are conservative “Christians” who want women to seriously compromise themselves to play their assigned role. Clearly this is not the kind of compromise I’m considering. I’m thinking that it’s impossible for any two humans to maintain a relationship for any period of time without one or both of them realizing that, a) the other one is not as perfect as s/he seemed at first, and b) that they need to either put up with the imperfection or break up. Obvious, yes? Sure, it’s obvious when it’s either hypothetical or somebody else’s life!

At what point, I ask myself, does an appropriate amount of compromise (i.e., that which is absolutely necessary to any functional relationship) become too much (i.e., resigning myself to living without something that I think should be present)? Now, before we all go to a frantically arm-waving place, I am not talking about serious problems here. This is not about emotional unavailability or physical abuse or infidelity or any of the myriad reasons that we would probably all agree are automatic relationship enders. It’s also not a question of why women stay in abusive relationships. This is about fundamentally decent people (in my case, a fundamentally rather fantastic person) after the initial excitement has abated and reality – i.e., the question of compromise – rears its ugly head.

I’m talking about things in the neighborhood of “S/he didn’t do something special for my birthday” or “S/he never brings me flowers for no reason” or “Why don’t we ever just cuddle up on the couch together anymore?” Things that, if one is pursuing perfection, one should not have to live without (damnit!!), but things that, if one wishes to remain in the relationship, one may have to resign oneself to living without (humph). Granted, it’s important to mention one’s dissatisfactions to one’s partner, but what if s/he is simply not the kind of person who thinks ahead to make romantic gestures? What if s/he is under a lot of stress at the moment and cuddling just doesn’t occur to her/him?

That last one’s an easy one. If s/he’s anxious and stressed, let’s chalk it up to situational factors and wait it out. Let’s be supportive, care for the person, and just hang in there. But, wait! What’s that we’re saying? We’re going to just live in a no-touching zone for the forseeable future? We’re going to be a doormat? No, no, we point out to ourselves. That’s not being a doormat, that’s being a good partner. Wouldn’t you want her/him to do the same for you, under the circumstances? Yes, yes, that’s a good point, we reply.

The romantic gestures thing is a bit trickier. If s/he is not the romantic type, why didn’t we notice that in the beginning? When we fell in love with that person, why did this fact not register? Perhaps it did, but in the thrill of new love, it didn’t seem to matter. We vowed to love her/him just the way s/he is. After all, we did – and we still do! Perhaps, however, the uncomfortable truth is that s/he DID those things in the beginning, because it was so exciting, but the excitement has worn off. Of course s/he still loves us, just (apparently) in a different way. So – either way - it behooves us to enjoy the fact of our being loved and deal with the non-romance. Not hold it against her/him. It’s simply not who s/he is. We’re not going to break up with someone we love over something so trivial. But it’s NOT trivial! We say. No, you’re right, it’s not, we reply. And so it goes.

The bigger, question, though, is this. Do my experiences fit into a pattern of women’s experiences as an oppressed people, or are they a manifestation of a universal human experience of relationships? Does it matter whether or not my (male) partner experiences similar dissatisfactions with me? Would it be okay, from a feminist perspective, only as long as he’s compromising to a similar degree? Am I being oppressed if he’s completely happy with our relationship? (Which, not incidentally, isn’t exactly the case. It’s complicated.) Or am I exercising a free choice in deciding to be satisfied with our relationship as it is?

I’d much rather explain the situation as a universal human one; compromise is always necessary, and nothing is ever perfect, at least not for very long. I’d definitely prefer to leave the question of systematic sexism out of it, and deal with it as an individual person might. I’d very much like to freely choose to just love this guy and say to hell with the feminist theoretical paradigms which point out that I can’t. And, since feminism is all about having choices, I think I’ll do just that. Hang on just a second while I find one of my third-wave hats.

We know that beauty standards for women are total bullshit – yes, that is the official academic term – and, as conscientious feminists, we want to rise above allowing such crap to influence us, but we often (or, perhaps, usually) can’t help ourselves. We know exactly where we rank on the Likert scale of physical appearance, and that knowledge affects how we feel about ourselves. Let’s face it - if we aren’t pretty, we feel like crap. If we aren’t thin, we feel like crap. And on the other side of the fence, if we are pretty, we enjoy it. If we are thin and/or busty, we enjoy it. Feminist women who approximate the feminine beauty standard enjoy it just as much as the next gal (even though we know that the privilege we enjoy as a result is absolutely at the expense of those who do not) but the mental gymnastics involved make for interesting discussions.

It’s all very well and good for us to excoriate the capitalist media and beauty industries as the villains while exhorting women to ignore the propaganda and love ourselves. The tricky part for me is that I am white and tall and thin and attractive, and I experience a certain degree of privilege as a result, whether I like it or not. However, I can adjust the level of looks privilege that I receive by altering the changeable aspects of my appearance, like clothes, jewelery, makeup, body hair, and the hair on my head.

For several years, I kept my hair above chin length, not as a matter of feminist principle, but mostly because it was practical and attractive, although I very much enjoyed the fact that I was refusing to buy into the whole long flowing feminine hair nonsense. However, when I got into salsa, I realized that I liked having a little more length swinging around on the dance floor, so I decided to let it grow. Since I have “good hair,” and I knew that having it long would increase my looks privilege, I justified this choice on the grounds that I would chop it off and donate it to Locks for Love when it got long enough.  

A year or so later - with hair plenty long enough to donate - at my last haircut I had a bit of a trim and some layers put in. Yes, it still feels good when it moves, but I’m not going to pretend that’s my full motivation. Sure, I still enjoy it, but the part I don’t usually discuss is that I am just not quite ready to give up the cachet of having achieved this feat of femininity. In my salsa community, there’s a very subtle, unspoken hair hierarchy, and it’s kinda nice to feel like I’m up towards the top.

This, I think, is one of the deep dark secrets of attractive feminists. Maybe we should check with Gloria Steinem, who in the height of second wave feminist movements worked undercover as a Playboy bunny. I wonder if she, deep down, enjoys being beautiful or feels guilty about it.

But that’s the thing. We’re supposed to be enjoying our bodies! For attractive feminists, though, is enjoying our bodies is equivalent to participating in our own oppression? Hair is just one tiny aspect of this question, of course, and that’s why I think my imaginary anthology is so fantastic. We’ll cover as many angles as our publisher will let us cram into one volume, and acknowledge in each subsequent edition that we missed a whole bunch.

And perhaps by the seventh edition I will be able to report in a sheepish preface that I finally figured out what to do with my own hair.

A few examples: Radical feminist ideas – MacKinnon, Firestone, Morgan, Dworkin – deeply resonate with me, yet I’m in a heterosexual relationship and I’m a salsa dancer. I acknowledge the danger that global warming poses to the fate of humanity AND I have both a bicycle and a map of my local bus system, yet I drive a gasoline-powered car whenever the heck I feel like it. I recognize that “owning” a piece of the earth is a ludicrous notion, yet the mortgage held on the house in which I live is in my name. I know darn well that the Western ideal of women’s beauty is culturally and commercially constructed bullshit, yet I enjoy the fact that my appearance fits it pretty well.

Granted, there are many ways in which I enact my principles and/or have justified breaching them – I chose a feminist partner, salsa dancing is just plain FUN, the bus line doesn’t go to my child’s school, paying rent indefinitely wouldn’t challenge the status quo, and I don’t wear makeup, shape my eyebrows, color my hair, or shave very often. Also, if necessary, I can always just select an alternative thread of feminist thought.

Ultimately, though, I don’t think there are any resolutions, but I definitely think the conversations are worthwhile. And they’re interesting, besides! Join me, won’t you?