I really would like to have some kind of pat answer for that question. Trouble with that is that it seems to change with the extent of the living I do.
I have no interest in forming anything beyond work interactions and maybe friendships with men. I suppose that in some way that allows a man to define me. But, mostly I see that as my own reaction and preference for the company of other women.
Do I want some guy to 'take care of me?' No, why would I need that? Haven't had it since I left my father's house at 18. Except for car mechanics, postmen, road-builders. Okay, so I do need men and am happy that they do care for me, even though they don't know my name.
Do I want some other woman to 'take care of me?' Not financially. But I do share my life with another woman and we do communicate and commune rather intimately and in that regard, yes I do want to be cared for by her.
I enjoy 'being-in-relationship' with other human beings. I am very pleased that our current cultural model provides women with 'nurturing' responsibilities. I am also glad that more and more men are being allowed to be 'nurturers' as well. My personal take is that absent social pressure and standards all people are basically nurturers; that it is a biological imperative within us.
Each of us is 'me + at least one other' and, generally speaking, we are me + many others. If life were simply me I would have died almost immediately I was born, and most assuredly long before now.
I think Natasha is spot-on when she says that women are generally given the burden of both provision and nurturing and maintaining relationship within our current culture. It's an almost impossible task, but one that circumstance causes many of us to have to fulfill. We have children and partners and families.
I would like to be able to walk a street at any hour without having to be alert to my vulnerability due to the simple fact of gender.
I refuse, simply because I find it the ultimate foolishness, to say that I am some sort of abstracted 'ego' who can live totally independently from others. Neither do I believe that anyone else can either, regardless what they may think.
I think that the discounting of 'women's ways of knowing' has made a world in which 'ego' thrives, but only because there are those among us who maintain and cherish relationship and connection and ease the way to community, whether it be employment, personal interactions or any other aspect of society and culture. That, in my mind, allows some to extol their own sense that they can live without others.
The disconnections we are taught to make between ourselves and others generally allow us to gloss over the profound interdependency we are all living in.
That is me as a person. That I am a woman possibly lends itself to my being comfortable with that fact. As a man, I think that I would have had to deny that fact in favor of being 'successful,' i.e. self-made. (Which is a nice trick if you can do it. I have just never been aware that any human has done it.)
The trouble with 'patriarchy' is that it has consistently, persistently and implacably insisted that humans are exactly like its "God," one-with-no-second. One born from itself from nothingness. Well nothingness is nothing. Nothing engenders nothingness, not God.
That is the 'big lie' of patriarchy that requires being exposed for what it is: a ridiculous and impossible possibility that has created untold suffering and sorrow and probably was born from a profound feeling of unimportance and second-bestism by some priest (whose name is lost in the dim mists of prehistory) who couldn't have a baby on his own.
I simply think it's time we all awoke to that realization and make the changes necessary to have a bit healthier society and culture. One that, unlike Kronos and Moloch, doesn't eat its children.
It seems to me that Feminism is just another name for Humanism and striving to realize the importance of us all.
Please remove the soapbox. I'm done. *smile*
Nichole
