Sexuality Resources

On the Sexuality front, Michelle brought a section of a book to share, Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk About Sexuality by Deborah L. Tolman (If you follow the link, you can get a preview of that book and/or purchase it). Within the quoted portion of the article from that book Michelle read to us, there was mention of Jean Baker Miller's book, Toward a New Psychology of Women, which discussed notions of sexual authenticity.

Sally mentioned an important article, which I have found online in its entirety, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic As Power by Audre Lord.

Next Month's Meeting

For those not present at yesterday's meeting, next month's meeting was planed for
Sunday, October 21 at 5 p.m. at Lyz's house.

The topic for October will be Mothers.
So that's your own mother, your life as a mother, whathaveyou.

See you all there!

Why We Pursue Consciousness

I have spent some time lately reading the daily meditations in Sarah Ban Breathnach's Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy, a book which my aunt gave me when I graduated from high school. The entry for September 2nd resonated with me, particularly as it reflected much of what we're trying to do in our meetings.

The meditation opens with a quote from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke:

Somewhere there is an ancient emnity between our daily life and the great
work. Help me in saying it, to understand it.

Ban Breathnach goes on to write:

For we can't work well or live well if we don't life authentically.
Like Rilke, we need to acknowledge aloud the ancient emnity between Real Life
and work. It exists. It tears us to pieces every day. We need
to help each other understand it, because we will never understand it on our
own. We can start by holding one another's hands, by listening to one
another's concerns, by reassuring one another, today, that everything will be
all right.

Somehow, together, we will figure it out.

Just something to keep us on the road toward consciousness, even when life threatens to swamp us...

Here I thought I was Being all Clever...

Since I am a "Stay-at-home-mom" (SAHM in internet shorthand) by profession, I have a hard time coming up with something fitting to call my occupation that would be sassy, feminist, and more descriptive of what I actually do than simply, "mom." To that end, I put "domestique" in my blogger profile, only to discover that that's already taken. Apparently a domestique is the position of a player in a bicycle race. You can read the whole sordid, thunder-stealin' definition here. Sigh.

And I apologize if this is too far off-topic.

Regarding Sexuality Topic

My initial impression from the last meeting was that our next topic, sexuality, would be about personal experience of sexuality as opposed to sexual experience. What I mean is how we experience our own sexuality. This would of course veer into many different topics, but I am really attracted to the idea of coming together with our personal experience on the topic and seeing where the varying responses take us. I'm not sure if this is in total keeping with traditional consciousness raising or not, but it seems to keep the focus on what we know in our experiences as women, rather than what we assume about history and culture. This also helps, I believe, to keep us all on our expertise of ourselves as individuals and away from our individual areas of expertise (as in the fields which we study or work in), which can result in our invalidating one another.

I hope I'm making sense!

Activism on the Right and Left

I keep rereading Anna's post on activism, and while I have usually thought of activism in liberal terms such as protesting the war, demanding gender equality, or jumping into politics for the upcoming primaries--I have also been thinking a lot about how her descriptions also apply to the activities of individuals on the Right as well. In part, this comes from my having grown up in a very conservative church, one that was on the forefront of anti-abortion activism, and a strong supporter of movements such as Operation Rescue.

"Not feeling alone in our dissent" is an incredibly powerful thing--I feel somewhat sobered at the fact that this power applies not only to what I believe, but what I question as well.

thanks anna

sorry it took all this time to do this