Charlotte Roche is thirty-one, quit school after eleventh grade, and is known as a VJ and moderator for a music channel. Today’s Wikipedia article on her contains the paragraph “She is famous for her hairy armpits.” Perhaps she can be forgiven for not knowing what feminism is.

I know better, though.

A couple of weeks ago when we were out for a walk, H stomped off in a huff for the usual reason (he needed me to follow his agenda and couldn’t cope with the fact that I had interests of my own). I took the opportunity to check out a feminist gallery on East Cordova, across from a tent hamlet. I nearly cried when I got there.

The artist had illustrated some iconic (para)-feminist texts, which I had mostly dismissed at the time. Stuff about women being dependent on the love of a man, and men not generally being inclined towards feminism, putting women in a difficult place. Silly, I thought this stuff was in the seventies and eighties and nineties. Why be dependent on the love of a man? Why love a man who requires your subjugation? All this hand-wringing could be so easily solved by just walking away. Unless of course you are a mother and economically dependent: then the problem becomes interesting. But if women aren’t dependent on a man’s love, then they cannot be enthralled. Any man who wants them will have to learn to deal with it.

And now I am one of the idiots who is the author of her own destruction. I have made myself dependent on the love of a man who requires my subjugation, and all I do about it is whine.

This is so old.