Nov 16 2006
Recently
I must say that recently I seldom have time to go online. Consequently, I dont really have much time to browse my friends’ blogs, especially at blog.co.uk. I still post some articles there, still enjoy some readers’ comments and reply them, including enjoy my own amazement to see the statistics of the visitors of my blog despite the fact that I am not as prolific as I used to be some months ago. If I am diligent to post daily, it is just understandable if many bloggers visit my blog. If not? Oh well … J
I pay attention that recently more and more visitors to my blogs are those of my friends’ friends in their friends’ list. When some of them invite me to join their list, I feel very glad. I believe it must be because the feminist perspective I use when analyzing cases, just as the name of my blog ‘A Feminist Blog’.
Some weeks ago, I got a personal message from a new friend in my list named Alice, she told me to join the ‘crowd’ of debating about whether feminists are just people who dont have anything to do in their free time; to attract people’s attenton, then they try to ‘provide’ things that are useless to provide, just criticize to things that have been established for many centuries, etc. Unfortunately, I didnt have much time to join Alice and some others to support the idea that feminism exist to make the betterment in women’s lives, to create more equal chances for women to make choices in their life.
Some days ago I downloaded an article from a blogger (male) illustrating that good men are now worthless, that women just socialize with bad men, therefore they get bad treatment and then shout to the world that all men are just b*stard. And yesterday I read an article from a female blogger that condemned a mother who just abused the daughter to get attention from the world. Gosh …
It made me remember my research when writing my thesis: why Charlotte Perkins Gilman became cold toward her only very own daughter; why in that era (the end of the nineteenth century), she wanted to make a name for herself—as Charlotte Perkins—not as a Mrs. Charles Walter Stetson (her first husband); she felt so enthusiastic to travel around America and also some countries in Europe to share her idea that women are to be economically independent so that they will live a better life, etc.
It made me remember my own life experience after my study in American Studies Graduate Program: why I become a feminist—even some good friends of mine here ‘crown’ me as a radical one because I really changed radically from my old self; why I become a secular after I was born and raised in a very strict Muslim family; why I prefer living alone with my own daughter to continue living in the marriage with her daddy; why I am still a romantic creature although I have become a feminist (a good friend laughed at me that there is no feminist who is a romantic, no (female) feminist who loves a man deeply). The answers of those questions are only one: my own experience since I was a kid, born and raised in a strict Muslim family that are also religous snobs, live in Indonesia where the majority is Muslim, married a man that eventually became a parasite in my life, my questioning and rebellious characters that are inherent in me, my study in American Studies Graduate Program, my getting to know feminism ideology by reading books, articles in scientific journals, newspapers, etc. And not to mention living in by the end twentieth and the beginning of twenty first centuries. All of them comprise into one complicatedly so that I become like this.
I am a kind of person that believes our background shapes us; it is our own choice to be good or bad person for those of us who have high self awareness—not to give in bad influence easily to harm other people, to choose to follow good deed. Each of us has tendency to be good or bad people: mature and responsible people will be of benefit to other people around them; on the contrary immature and irresponsible ones will follow the bad ‘whisper’ in their heart to abuse other people for their own privileges. When someone cannot decide what is good or bad for him/herself, he/she had better consult a psychiatrist without forgetting that the psychiatrist must be not mysoginist or anti male.
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