Yes, I am alive.

K so sorry for being AWOL for a while but I have been extremely busy swamped in work just generally out having fun.

I would promise to try and be a better blogger but I feel my connection with the whole blog world sort of dying so why not just a little wrap up of recent events?

I attended the all night art festival here in Toronto called Nuit Blanche

I bought the wedding dress on weekend trip in Ottawa.

I graduated from my Masters with an "Award for Academic Excellence"

I wandered through the "word on the street festival" and got some free books!

I even got in a fight with a guy in a progressive bookstore.

Yea okay, the fight in the bookstore probably needs a little elaborating.

I was wandering through the bookstore in the "political thought" section that just so happened to be predominantly feminist. I was wearing a plain old t-shirt when this guy, who must have been there under duress, says to me "do you notice that the label says 'political thought' but it is all feminist", now this is not my store and I have never stepped foot in here, I don't even look like I work here but this man wants me defend the views of the store. I decide to leave it alone and ignore him when he grabs Maureen Dowd's 2005 publication off the shelves and decides to try again to engage me, apparently I resemble Maureen Dowd (I wish). He went to the obvious and said "I bet if a man had written it and it was called 'Are women necessary' it would be considered sexist". I decided not to ignore this one and just said "yea probably" and moved back towards TFG in hopes he would leave me alone if I was no longer near the feminist section.
Now the whole thing was friendly enough and he smiled asking if he was "getting a rise out of me" but at the end of the day there was this underlying idea that as a feminist I must be expected to defend the thoughts of all feminists. Are feminists still that marginalized that we only have handful of ideas we all believe in? Are we still considered man-haters?
Like any arena of political thought, it is open to scrutiny (and should be scrutinized just like anything else) but unlike a political party with one leader and one voice feminism and feminists do not a have a leader or a single unified platform, and if we did our leader would not be Maureen Dowd.
For that reason I don't think we should be open to the same scrutiny as someone with a bumper sticker supporting the democrats or the republicans. It just isn't that simple.
Feminism isn't a simple philosophy, it is a means of engaging with other philosophies and I hope the next well meaning guy that walks into a bookstore hoping to get a "rise" out of someone can recognize that.