Why It's Been So Long

A year is a long time to be silent. Essentially, I told you all I was going out for a pack of cigarettes, and never came back*. So...why?

The reasons I left off blogging have a lot to do with the reasons I started in the first place. So let's deal with that:

When I moved back to New York there was a bit of a culture shock when I realized that, outside the bubbles of small liberal arts colleges and tight-knit regional theatre communities, not every nice, smart person had the exact same outlook on feminism and gender roles as I. Yeah, you heard me right: that came as a shock. To me it had always been Dumb Sexists versus Smart Feminists, end of story. But, we grow up. We discover that color called grey, we learn that the word "spectrum" applies to more things than rainbows and sexual identity. This blog was a good way to explain and exemplify my principles to the new people in my life, and to express my various frustrations with the world. I had also become sexually active again after a two-year period of abstinence**, which really brought sex into focus for me, making it an important part of my life and, I found, a rich field for exploration and analysis. And my friends seemed to like reading about all that, so, bully for me.

Oh, and also there was this little election going on, during which the subject of gender arose once or twice. You probably wouldn't remember.

Then I moved to London. To a drama grad school. I knew exclusively artists, who do not, for example, give a fuck how many people I sleep with. There were more women on my program than men (though at 3-to-2 it wasn't what you'd call statistically significant). The election was over, my friends and readers were far away, and for various reasons I didn't feel like writing about sex anymore***. I was very busy, and not feeling particularly oppressed. And things petered out.

So why now? Excellent question class. The reasons are, as I said, not entirely different this time around. As I've gotten to know the people around me a bit better, I've repeatedly been shocked by the clashes in worldview--perhaps even more so than before. I'll get into this more in further posts, but the main thing is that I myself am having to think about these things from new angles, because some of my basic assumptions aren't shared. All of which is starting to sound a bit histrionic--I'm in ENGLAND after all, not the uncharted Amazon Rainforest. But perhaps that's whence the shock.

So, here I am, once again trying to work out how I feel about the world, about myself, about the constant negotiations between the two. Please enjoy.



*Particularly deceitful as I don't smoke.
**The first half intentional, the second half not so much. I think I just got rusty after a year off.
***Fodder for another post.