This is me on the steps of the Womens Studies house - a low wooden house with a porch on a road at the edge of the campus - refuge, ghetto, side-ally. I think that like most of the students, faculty, hangers-around, I love and hate this place. It is past its prime, when women were so full of fury and the enemy was so easily defined that a great loyal following made it the center of their lives. Somehow it flounders on all fronts, still trying to fight the good fight. But there are many interior resentments - resentments cloaked as issues, or issues obscured by blind resentments - that bog us down.
At this meeting we are talking about aggressive women. Halley - a pink-fleshed Rubens with a bandana-covered shaved head flings herself back on the vinyl couch.
"It's absurd - we have become the worst at holding each other back. We stop each other's aggressiveness- or assertiveness, we limit each others potential - because if you're too loud, or too voluble, or too successful, you'll frighten off the others."
Laeila - El Greco's Black Madonna with carefully set hair.
"That's from your point of view."
"Of course it is!" explodes Halley but is hushed.
Laeila makes a head movement denoting courage in the face of an aggressive woman "...But when I first came here I was scared. I'd never heard anything like the things the people said here before. I felt stupid. I needed some process that would allow my voice to be heard."
"I'm not saying that that's not important too, but what I don't see is why one should preclude the other?" Says Halley passionately.
"But what if it does?" Asks Laeila.
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