I grew up on Tank Girl. Tank Girl was a freedom fighter who led the boys to battle and won. Her image and comic book life taught me as a young girl that to be a liberated woman, I needed to fight harder, better, and badder than any boy around. So, I hung with the boys because liberated girls are bad bad girls. But she did nothing to teach me how to love and be loved.
She walked softly, but she carried a big gun and so did I. I shot vile grenades from my mouth. I still do, probably. She was the kind of girl who could hold her own in any battle. Just because I wasn’t living a comic book life didn’t mean I couldn’t make her strength relate to the realities of being a girl. The hardest part to learn was and continues to be the fact that women bear the brunt of love and war. Oftentimes, love and war are truly indistinguishable from each other.
Of course, all the pop images of women that came up in the 80s were hard nosed bitches who fought hard to gain some equal footing with men. That’s just how it had to be in the second wave. Feminists often talk about the first, second and third wave, but truth be told, I’m not even sure what that is supposed to mean or how women are supposed to identify with these theories. Theories explain what has already happened, but they don’t instruct us how to live today. All I really wanted to do was to learn how to live unencumbered and unafraid of myself.
I can identify with the underpinnings of this third wave that embraces all aspects of humanness, rejecting the gender binary we are trying to free ourselves from. I believe that in contrast to the criticism, third wave attempts to unify us as people rather than according to genders. But while the theories explain a philosophy, I’m still lost in second wave struggles to gain equal footing. As the third wave came up, it left the second wavers who straddled the two movements without skills to adapt. Instead of fighting, we were asked simply to love. That sounds great, unless most of the country is still living on the cusp of the beginning of the second wave.
Most social movements take years. Civil Rights took nearly 60 years to come to fruition–not that it’s even completed yet. First wave feminism started at the turn of the 20th century, but the second and third wave swooped in within the past 20 years. Social movements take time, not just to organize, but to bring everyone along with us. It’s a collective move toward liberation. I am one of the women who learned how to fight in second wave. Third wave left me behind as I reached the age of maturity to allow me space to use my skills and develop new ones. Third wave very quickly imposed polyamory on my take no prisoners second wave doctrine.
I haven’t hopped on the bandwagon of polyamory of third wave; I can’t divide myself up to different people. I love the images of the 1960s strippers and housewives because it reminds me of what women did in the sexual revolution. I’m multi-racial, so it is difficult to self-identity, but I can look at the women who came before me in this country and see my heritage. I still believe, like the housewives of the 1960s, that there is one person to love intimately, closely, and tightly. I embrace the part of me that really needs the security of a best friend who I can love completely, without hesitation, and with whom I can share the parts of me that don’t love as easily as the third wave wants me to. But I’ve been taught how to fight first and maybe love one day, if it’s suitable to my liberated schedule.
Second wave taught me how to fight and now I don’t know where the war is. So, I brought the war home. To every relationship I have had, I brought the war home to my house and duked out my liberation with my lover. I’ve been enslaved by a relationship because I wanted it and never really understood how to nurture it and make it the vehicle to my freedom. Instead, I fought for my relationship. I always thought fighting is what I was supposed to do because if he doesn’t understand me, a woman, then he’s just a man and never will understand what it means to be a woman. I have been taught to be self-reliant, to depend on no one, to hold my own, and be independent. I have been taught how to be alone. Now, I’m tired of being alone, especially when in a relationship.
Maybe now I’m just angry. I can’t hang with the boys anymore because I’m a woman now. It may be a false binary, but it’s a real sense of the world I live in and interact with daily. I have been fighting like hell to be seen as “just me” absent gender and race, but I’ve only been fighting to ignore myself. I’ve failed many radical feminist politics and simultaneously failed mainstream society, too, because I’m a fighter, but I’m a fighter who cries. I don’t remember Tank Girl ever crying. Even she finds love in the end.
I’m angry that I don’t know how to love and be loved. I’m angry that the third wave blowback is that women like me grapple with how to love while carrying a big gun. I’m angry that radical communities require endless love, but daily world living requires fighters. I’m angry that men have so easily hopped on the third wave polyamory because it suits them sexually, but fails women who are still fighting for equal footing. I’m angry that I have destroyed the one thing I ever wanted, if only I could have known how to love and be loved.
Third wave, I don’t believe in you; what theories call third wave, I call human rights. I still believe in second wave. I don’t believe second wave is over. If anything, third wave was co-opted by men who love polyamory. I believe in monogamy. My wave of feminism is still working on being equal and loving at the same time.
I’m scared of loving because I’m fragile. I fight because I’m fragile. I’m at war with myself
Tags: BOOYAH, feminism, fighting, gender constructs, girls, identity, love, polyamory, second wave, tank girl, third wave
