When life is okay.

The ultimate fuel behind my feminism, behind writing and protesting and taking to the streets, is not anger. Certainly there are flashes of anger--when I'm told, in code or straight up, that as a woman I am less than a person or some other kind of person than the usual, I am angry. But though that's often what gets me talking, that's not what keeps me going. If life were nothing but a mountain of offenses, I'm not sure I'd bother to fight.

What keeps me going is the joy in life. It's the times when everything goes right--or even just most things go mostly okay--and it's wonderful.

Last night was not special. I went to a munch and talked with a bunch of other kinksters, had dinner with Sprite and Rowdy, and went home with Rowdy. At home we listened to music and talked and played around but didn't have sex and fell asleep. It wasn't amazing; it was simply an ordinary evening in which nothing bad happened. Nobody insulted me or kept me from doing anything or tried to hurt me. We rode on the bus looking at the lights of the city and we talked about bicycles as we walked home.

So what really motivates me is the wish that all my evenings, and everyone's evenings, could be this simple. Could be sharing a plate of cheap Chinese food and listening to Journey, safely and peacefully and without pain or obligation or self-doubt.

A lot of feminism is talk about ways in which the world is hard for women, and that's important talk--without exposing injustice, it's hard to fight it. But it's important to remember that this isn't an end in itself. Even fighting injustice is not the end of feminism.

The end is a world in which being a woman is okay, and all the days and evenings of all women are okay. The end is a quiet night in a quiet apartment, a place where I will not be harmed or shamed, am not hated or made to hate myself, am not any less nor more nor different of a person than the man by my side, quietly singing:

"Don't stop believing..."