Feminist of the Week: Halle Berry

After reading this latest interview excerpt with Halle Berry, I'm pretty much in love:

Berry says, "You know that stuff they say about a woman being responsible for her own orgasms? That's all true, and, in my case, that makes me responsible for pretty damn good orgasms.

How refreshing is it to see a woman publicly talk about 1: orgasms, 2: giving herself orgasms, and 3: that she actively enjoys it.

"(They're) much better orgasms than when I was 22, and I wouldn't let a man control that. Not anymore. Now, I'd invite them to participate.

"I've learned my tricks. I know what I like. I do not wait around. I initiate. And I'm not all about frequency; I favour intensity."

Calling into the Oprah show in America on Friday, Berry revealed she felt inspired to talk openly about her sex life after Esquire named her their sexiest woman.

She said, "I was astonished. I was like, 'I've just had a baby. Don't you guys know..? This isn't the year to pick me for this.'

"I thought, 'Well, you know, it might be a really good year to talk about some things and talk about what sexy really is.'"

And she joked, "When I mentioned the big 'O' I'm sure when people first read it (article), they thought I was about to talk about Oprah."

Berry admitted that if her romance with boyfriend Gabriel Aubry ever ended, she wouldn't be looking for a toyboy to satisfy her sexually.

She confided, "Men in their 20s? Forget it."

Halle Berry: proving the importance of women's pleasure in her sex life since 1966.

Womanist of the Week - Alice Walker

Alice Walker's _The Color Purple_ is pretty amazing, as is the woman herself. I didn't know this, but apparently she was in the first multiraical marriage in Mississippi. She also coined the term womanist which, as a movement, has had profound effects on individual lives and the naming and reclaiming the experience of women of color.

But I'm going to let her speak for herself.

How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers names.

It's so clear that you have to cherish everyone. I think that's what I get from these older black women, that every soul is to be cherished, that every flower is to bloom.

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.

The quietly pacifist peaceful always die to make room for men who shout.

No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.

Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.

I think we have to own the fears that we have of each other, and then, in some practical way, some daily way, figure out how to see people differently than the way we were brought up to.

Feminist of the Week - Letty Russell

As a student at Yale Divinity School, I've heard a lot about Letty Russell, leading feminist theologian and one of the first women to attend Harvard Divinity School. She died this past summer, so unfortuantely I never had the opportunity to meet her, but students who have taken classes with her speak highly of her, both personally and academically.

"Women in patriarchal culture are surrounded by messages that negate or trivialize their existence. Their bodily sexual presence is regarded as a dangerous threat to male purity and, at the same time, as a justification for constant verbal and physical abuse. They experience their bodies as constantly vulnerable to assault and are told, at the same time, that they deserve such assault because they "cause" it by their sexual presence. Similarly, women find their own viewpoints and judgments of events trivialized, and this trivialization is justified on the grounds that women are inherently stupid, uninformed, lacking in authority, and incapable of forming significant understandings. Thus they are alienated from their own minds, from being able to trust their own perceptions. These judgments upon the woman's body and mind are, in turn, used to justify women's exclusion from cultural opportunities and leadership. Women are asked to accept this, too, as normal, natural, divinely sanctioned. "

"The critique of sexism implies a fundamental principle of judgment. This critical principle of feminist theology is the affirmation of and promotion of the full humanity of women. Whatever denies, diminishes, or distorts the full humanity of women is, therefore, to be appraised as not redemptive. Theologically speaking, this means that whatever diminishes or denies the full humanity of women must be presumed not to reflect the divine or authentic relation to the divine, or to reflect the authentic nature of things, or to be the message or work of an authentic redeemer or a community of redemption. "

"Frequently, women with strong religious backgrounds have the most difficulty in accepting that the violence against them is wrong. They believe what they have been taught, that resistance to this injustice is unbiblical and unchristian. Christian women are supposed to be meek, and claiming rights for oneself is committing the sin of pride. But as soon as battered women who hold rigidly traditional religious beliefs begin to develop an ideological suspicion that this violence against them is wrong, they react against it. "

As a leading feminist theologian, she worked to bring about liberation for not just women, but liberation for all, tieing together strands of poverty, racism, and sexism to create a better future.

She said this at one of her last public speeches: "Our struggle is to overcome the fear of difference and to break the bars that keep us apart. [Others] want what we want. They want to work, they want to change the social structure. They want hospitality with justice."

Letty truly was an amazing woman. At her memorial service last October at YDS, her portrait was hung on the walls of the Common Room, becoming the second woman to have her portrait hung at YDS. It's an amazing portrait of a smiling woman - one that reflected her positive nature. Right next to her portrait is that of H. Richard Neibuhr, another YDS emeritus professor and one of the leading theologians of the 20th century. The contrast between these two is immeasurable - Letty's portrait positively glows while Neibuhr's casts a shadow, showing a white man dressed in black against a black background standing imposingly in front of a Bible. It's no wonder that Letty's theology worked to support the fullness of humanity.

You can find the wide array of her books here.

By the way, if anyone has any suggestions for feminist of the week, leave it in the comments.

Feminist of the Week - Alan Alda

Last night while I was reading Alan Alda's _Never Have Your Dog Stuffed_, I came across the chapter where he describes going around working on the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. I didn't know he did that, and I'm guessing lots of other people didn't as well... Thus Feminist of the Week was born.*


"A woman in Illinois told me about an encounter with a legislator who had refused time after time to vote for [the ERA], saying it just didn't matter to his constituents. After she had made every argument she was capable of, he finally said, 'All right. I'll vote for it if you come up to my hotel room this afternoon and give me a hand job.' And he wasn't joking. Something like voting for the 14th Amendment in exchange for a couple of good slaves.

'Why are you working so hard for equality for women?' I was asked a little suspiciously sometimes. In fact, I was asked this so many times, I began to realize I didn't know myself what the answer was. At first, I tried flip answer. 'I come from a long line of women,' I said. Or, 'Well, I'm from a mixed marriage. My father was a man, and my mother was a woman.' But these jokes didn't explain it. Why was I spending so much energy on it, even willing to get some people mad at me?

Partly, it was that I knew it could be helpful if a man spoke out in public about these things, and I kept going out, trying to help. And there's no doubt that I loved getting up in front of audiences and making speeches. There certainly was that. I could hear the nun behind me chuckling again. But mostly, I think, it made me angry that we were refusing to guarantee half our citizens equality under the law.

Finally, though, with all the efforts of hundreds of thousands of people, the amendment lost. These few words never made it into the Constitution: Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex."

- Alan Alda, Never Have Your Dog Stuffed (177-178)


*I don't want to hear any crap about how I picked a man to be Feminist of the week. Lots of men are feminists and lots of women are feminists. So there.