It's been an absolutely amazing week.

Tuesday I presented my slides of dead women in advertising to the feminist theory class. To preface the horrific display, I quoted Ynestra King, who describes western patriarchal attempts to control nature--as if men aren't nature--by attempting to control human females (along with other non-human animals and the environment in general).

Of course this desire to transcend woman and nature cannot work, writes King, and thus "develops a love-hate fetishization of women's bodies, which finds its ultimate manifestation in the sadomasochistic, pornographic displays of women as objects to be subdued, humiliated, and raped--the visual enactment of these fears and desires" (The Ecology of Feminism and the Feminism of Ecology.)

Cue the advertising images, all of which depict females as corpses, trussed up, collapsed, raped, humiliated, and silenced. These horrific pictures didn’t emerge from some serial killer's imagination as he awaits the needle on death row; they come from our beloved Madison Avenue, for the express purpose of getting people to buy products, dead objects juxtaposed with the dead objectified females positioned alongside them.

And now that it's the Christmas season, our materialistic shopping frenzy is supposed to kick into high gear. Praise the Lord and pass the American Express card. He is Risen!

The images shocked and outraged many of the students in class, as they should, even though we have all seen them before. There's real power in collecting them, explaining their ideological underpinnings, and, in the case of feminism, resisting their message, giving women permission NOT to see themselves as objects, giving men permission NOT to see women as objects, NOT to accept dominance as their only form of self-expression.

Powerful stuff indeed.

It is for this very reason, the profound explanatory genius of feminist theory, that I knew when I first encountered it that I would never, could never, see the world the old way again. I knew I would no longer view myself and other women through the artifice of the male gaze, that constructed perspective from which the vast majority of our narratives are positioned.

This male perspective dominates everything from the Ten Commandments (“don't covet thy neighbor's wife,” hmm I don’t have a wife, I AM a wife, guess this isn’t addressing me) to the ad for an ovulation detector one of my students brought to my office yesterday, which shows a man watching his wife in the kitchen as she dances on the counter and he waves money. She's forced to prostitute herself in her own home and we are to find this a charming encounter, watching him watching her, accepting the reality that power and money are in the hands of men--literally in this ad--and our job as females is to ingratiate and humiliate ourselves in order to curry favor with the master class.

BAH!

So even though I am often overwhelmed by the pervasiveness of sexism, the genie's out of the bottle. I cannot stop working and praying for peace and justice any more than I can stop breathing or sleeping. I get fed by the work that I do, watching young people learn to think for themselves after they encounter these brilliant theoretical works and learn how they apply to our everyday lives, every second, all the time, allowing them to truly choose as opposed to being coerced into going along with an agenda that they don't even know is in place, aren't even allowed to identify as ideological.

Then after that stirring and inspiring class I got to go vote. Luckily no one tried to stop me as various conservative organizations have tried to stop voters with whom they disagree from voting ever since the beginning of the democratic process in this country. I placed my votes last Tuesday for those people and laws that I believed in, not really expecting change, but hoping, as I always do, that we can move the country back into a kinder and saner and fairer place.

And then Wednesday morning I awoke to found out that indeed millions of other people want the same things I do. They want us to stop killing innocent people in Iraq. They want the American kids over there to come home. They want women in South Dakota to have control over their bodies. They want young women in California to have control over their bodies. They trust the party that would appoint a female as the Speaker of the House for the first time in U.S. history.

And they don't like Rumsfeld neither!

My friends and colleagues all over the country found ourselves in an unusual position, one that permits us to see our vision recharged, to see the possibilities for positive movement become not only real, but inevitable. When the brilliant forceful Nancy Pelosi was asked by a reporter what differences could really be made, she said a change in the civilian leadership at the pentagon would be a good start.

Well said, Madam Speaker.

And two hours later, Rummy was out of a job.

Now I don't kid myself. The guy's a vampire. He'll re-emerge in some other context before too long, sucking life blood out of some program somewhere, but it was certainly lovely to see a woman in a position of power calling for--demanding?--some sanity, and getting it.

Then Carol Adams arrived! I have to pause here and breathe a sigh of gratitude and thanks to the stars that brought us together, first allowing me to encounter her and her work in 1997 while I was teaching at the University of North Texas, and that continue to allow us to be in contact. All those years ago her slideshow changed my life, caused me to see the same world differently, made obvious the link between the degradation of the non-human animal and the human female. Obvious.

It's right in front of our faces every day, in every Carl’s Jr. ad, but we don't see it, don’t have the vocabulary to describe it, at least not until someone like Carol has the courage and the vision to stand up and call it what it is, in her case "The Pornography of Meat."

She gave her presentation last night at USC, following by a reception with life-giving raw foods, and I was just thrilled and gratified to see so many of my students there, not just from the Feminist Theory class but from Writing 340 as well. I give no extra credit, do no infantilizing bribing of them for attending; I simply told them the truth, that her work changed my life and if they want their lives changed, they should go. Many did. These are young people taking advantage of the opportunity to grow as human beings. This gives me hope.

Beforehand I dined with Carol and two amazing undergraduate women, Anjali and Erinne, and we spoke at length about female wisdom, about health and healing and knowledge and inequity and the possibility for change. Periodically we'd all reflect back on the Democratic sweep of both houses, of the failure of the anti-abortion fundamentalists, of the bestowing of Speakership on a female--finally--and it was hard at those moments not to believe: in a future without starvation; in a future without cruelty; in a future without sexism; in a future without racism; in a future without homophobia; in a future without toxic substances in our air, water and food; in everything I believe would make this absolutely gorgeous planet even better and would fulfill our mission as moral human beings, particularly in this resource rich nation where we have the power to effect so much change for the better.

I turn 45 today. I plan to spend the next 45 years doing everything I can to be of service to the planet and its people, and it's gratifying to know that so many people want to be of service too, that so many people have faith in women, a faith I have learned not through sexism but through feminism.

Is everything going to be o.k. now? Oh please.

But do I have hope?

Oh yeah.

Big time.