Rho Your Boat

Elizabeth Gilbert on redefining our discussion of creative capacity:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html

"Maybe nobody will ever chant God's name again, as he spins, and what is he then to do with the rest of his life? This is hard. This is one of the most painful reconciliations to make in a creative life. But maybe it doesn't have to be quite so full of anguish. If you never happened to believe in the first place that the most extraordinary aspects of your being came from you, but maybe if you just believed they were on loan to you, you know, from some unimaginable source for some exquisite portion of your life, to be passed along when you're finished, to somebody else. If we think about it this way, it starts to change everything."

Could there also be a little bit of a genie, a daemon, in such calculating gifts as spreadsheets? My husband is not a dancer or a writer, but there have really been times when I felt like his spreadsheets indicated a call to Eden like the Gardens of Versailles were meant to be. If you train and endeavor to do something with greatness, it seems like whatever it is, you can climb high enough that all the climbing and all the work you do is borrowed from God, to be returned to His glory.

Where is the crossover between being politically conservative and being a feminist?

I get so much satsifaction and growth from talking with other critically-thinking women about what it is to be a woman and to be a part of this generation. (What it is is perhaps only half of the usefulness of the conversation; the rest is what we will do with that information - what it will matter that we know what it is - but you have to know what it is to go anywhere with what to do next.) Ladies, I want to know why I can buy a shirt that says "This is what a Republican looks like," and I can buy a shirt (in a huge variety of colors and styles and with accompanying symbols) that says "This is what a feminist looks like," but the people who would wear a shirt that says "This is what a feminist Republican looks like" either aren't buying shirts or don't exist.

I tried to Google "conservative feminist" but was immediately confused by the terminology involved in most of what I found. I'm beginning to think that my feminism is actually deeply linked to my political conservativism - they're extensions of the same idea. When I try to identify which are the fundamental parts of being politically conservative for me, I point first to the importance and significance of property rights and a press that's as free as is absolutely possible; in a lot of ways, I identify as a conservative because I identify as a capitalist. And I'm a capitalist because I want, essentially, to exchange value exclusively for value. I don't want to be forced to use my income for anything except those endeavors which I think will yield value by my own measurement - I want to invest freely, and I'm willing to accept as a consequence that no one else will give me any of their income if I don't give them value in return. (This doesn't, in my opinion, preclude charity or support of the less fortunate in any way - but that's not really the point of this discussion.)

This idea, the exchange of value for value, is the same idea that motivates me as a feminist. I want to be a source of value to society (both through ideas and the generation of economic activity). I want to bring my ideas to the marketplace, and I want an opportunity to generate economic activity, and I want the value that I source to be, in fact fairly valued. I believe what I am owed is the right to an absence of preconceived notions. Take what I think and what I can do, and if it is useful, you may have it and use it if you compensate me. The market should not value what I bring on any basis except that which I am bringing - if the fact that I am a woman bringing it influences the valuation, I and my contributions are being wronged. Do not overvalue those contributions because I am a woman, nor undervalue them. Let us not even address my gender when we transact, let us be businessmen, even if what we exchange is ideas - that is still an exchange of value for value. And if we look around ourselves and see that there are women who have been wronged in the past by prejudgments such as these, or are being wronged right now, or if we identify a system which will wrong women this way in the future - by adjusting the value of their intellectual and economic contributions to reflect the fact that they are women - let us do everything we can to correct those wrongs. I do not need to be compensated for the wrongs done to other women - I need to be able to operate in a system which won't wrong me from now on. Because when I am producing for fair value, I will produce efficiently - not too much, not too little - and the entire economic system and intellectual body will benefit maximally.

Another critical element of my notion of feminism is the fact that there is a constant systematic threat of undervalue of me and my contributions, and a possibility of overcompensating in correcting for the threat, and to combat those tendencies, it's critically important that I not lose sight of the fact that I am a woman, that I not stop thinking about what that means when I bring my ideas or my abilities to produce to the marketplace, and that I engage with other thinking women about the choices we can make to ensure that our contributions are fairly valued as often as possible, and the choices we can make to build a system in which they are always fairly valued.

As I wrote this next part, I thought to myself, surely this goes without saying. But maybe not. So I'll state my assumptions: My feminism relies on the basic belief that who I am is of equal value to who I would be if I were a man, and who any hypothetical man is, such that our contributions to society can be evaluated from exactly level ground. If I am biologically different from a man - if my hippocampus is larger and if there are more connections between the right and left sides of my brain and if my levels of fetal testosterone were lower and so my body is smaller - it is not to a significant degree. Because I am human, I am enough the same as men to be treated equally.

And independent of ideas of the marketplace, how we can work together to eliminate the relational and social struggles we face because we're women - the things we'll do and tolerate that men would never do or tolerate, the apologies we urge ourselves to make, and the ideas to which we obligate ourselves to subscribe because we are women, and above all, the way all of these struggles begin when we are so very young.

This is not a complete idea, and it does not include practical application. Is it the case that I understand feminism differently than do most women? (Is there an "incorrect" way to understand feminism, and if so, is this it?) This is not my mother's feminism - this is not a feminism that requires aggression; I do not operate from an assumption that I am being attacked. (I hope I am, however, vigilant to recognizing attacks if they come.) But I can't be the first to have tried to connect these two ideas. Can we talk about this?