Blogging Block

Alas, for the past couple of weeks, I've not been able to summon up the energy to write. Every subject feels a bit dry and repetitive - not that I'm competing to be original, but I would like to feel that I'm not spewing out complete crap every time I make an entry. So there've been no posts for a while.

I put it down to the end of exams - without them, I feel somewhat directionless. And jobless. The encroaching vision of overdrafts and high interest rates are a little scary, so I'm doing the grown up thing of doing absolutely nothing about it. Hah. I've also been robbed of the opportunity to read interesting feminist literature under the pretense of revision. And of writing long feminist rants about the comparitive merits of Marx and Mill as 19th Century (apparent) feminist thinkers.

As a feminist, I guess I'm more academic than activist (which will probably not come as a surprise to some) but I don't necessarily see this as a bad thing. I will, and do, protest and write angry emails etc, but the theorising keeps me sane. When the nitty-gritty gets too much and there are endless circles around something that is ultimately rather trivial(oh jesus, you know this is coming out wrong!), being able to think about what it would really *mean* to have the kind of society I want is a blessing. And after three years at Oxford, I'm rather good at the academic stuff.

It also keeps things in proportion. The oppression that middle class women in London suffer is different from that of women in China etc. It doesn't mean that middle class oppression is not worth fighting for (we have the means, after all), but that it needs to be remembered that it *is* different. We may all share the fact that we are women, but what it means to be a woman is different in all of these places, and within the same country, in different races, classes, status groups etc. No wonder feminism rarely seems like an united front. Admittedly, thinking too much about this will mean no-one can ever do anything, but it is important. I guess the point is that academia can feed into the activism without detracting from it, as many people seem to believe. I don't see that 'academic' always has to be a pejorative term within radical feminism.

On a lighter note, I really hate the new adverts for anti-wrinkle cream that are aimed at men. Really, women have enough trouble without men buying into this crap as well. For any men out there, we do not notice your wrinkles. At all. We don't think about them. We have more important things to think about, thanks. Christ. And this should show women that men think exactly the same thing about their wrinkles - i.e. they don't.