Confessions

Confession 1: I am thoroughly domestic. I obsess about hospital corners, I harass my roommate to reline the trash cans, I can recite the recipe for home-baked bread, I fanatically obey cleaning tags on my clothes and you could eat off of my swept, mopped, polished floor. Once, I churned butter. Basically, I secretly yearn to be Homemaker of the Year.

Such heresy from an intelligent and liberated woman, a beneficiary of the feminist movement! Shouldn t I hate anything that smacks of the unenlightened era when men brought home the bacon and their wives cooked it? Domestic tasks are the enemy: they trick perfectly capable women into stay-at-home-mom-ness. To be a strong, complete woman, I am supposed to eschew all housewife-ish activities and pursue the rat race. Why? Because in this day and age, I can.

Feminism freed women from the confines of the home and set them loose to fix the world made faulty by men. Ironically, somewhere along the way, being feminine became evil. We have been taught that to infiltrate the ranks of chauvinist men, women must be like them. The pursuit of beauty, which separated (and still separates) the sexes, now means selling out. Which leads to Confession 2: I like to look pretty. I gleefully wear short skirts and tank tops, the blow-dryer and lash curler are my friends and I spend way too much time on my cuticles. I ve even planned ahead: I religiously apply eye creme and sunscreen so that at 35, I won t look, uh, 35. I guess I m just not ballsy enough to walk around au naturel (read: crusty).

It s sad what counts as a confession. Women can be Janet Reno or Monica Lewinsky (for argument s sake, we ll say she s pretty). Everyone understands the concept of not pretty equals intelligent equals better than men, while pretty equals dumb equals slave to men. We categorize women into butch or airhead, prude or slut, dim-wit or smartadivisions with little gradation in between. Men, on the other hand, have the liberty of wearing pretty much anything and still having their intelligence and ability determined byasurprise!atheir intelligence and ability. The unfair smart-or-dumb distinction for women looks like it ll stick around for a while, so all I can do is bitch and moan at the men for creating such a terrible society.

Then I remember Confession 3: I don t hate men.

Poor men. A woman can bash men as loudly as she wants (as recent endpapers have so aptly demonstrated) or make as many vulgar statements as she wishes, while men stand by stifled by the gods of political correctness. The one female professor I ve had at Harvard peppered her lectures with innuendoes that would have crucified a male professor. For centuries of oppression, we can say whatever whenever and blame our lack of complete happiness and all inadequacies of society on men.

In the meantime, men are supposed to figure out what won t piss off women. Which seems sort of difficult since half of us practically throw a fit when a man holds the door, and the other half expects to be the first off the elevator. First-year women are not placed on the first floor of Yard dorms for security reasons. Is this sexism or consideration for women, who on the average are physically weaker than men and thus less able to fend off peering tourists?

I know that to be a competent and modern woman, I need to resent gentlemanly behavior as merely another attempt to turn me into a useless blob; I should think of all women as goddesses and all men as devils via penis. But I can t. I appreciate it when a man lifts my carry-on up into the overhead bin, and I refuse to blame men for every fault in the world.

So it s official: I m a really bad feminist. Odd, since I sincerely believe in the equality of sexes. This equality still fails to show up in the gender ratio of faculty or even of section assholes. Feminism does and did a lot to banish such inequality (understatement) and I m grateful that I can pursue whatever catches my fancyaexcept, considering my petite stature, maybe wrestling or basketball. Not to say that there aren t women who can do those pretty darn well.

Despite my appreciation, I don t know what to do about the awkward ambiguities feminism left for me and a couple other billion women: what to do if I m not the perfect feminist? So if you know, let me know. I ll be vacuuming or plucking my brows.

Yo-El Ju is a sophomore neurobiology concentrator living in Adams House. She crocheted her first doily at age 5.