I don’t know if you know this, but I am taking a Women’s Studies class this summer and despite having to wake at 6am four days a week to attend, it has been a truly inspirational and enlightening class. This morning, however, class was abruptly canceled (For reasons unknown to me), which found me ten miles from home with my bicycle and nothing to do. My instinct was to ride out to Venice Beach for an impromptu breakfast on the boardwalk. I asked my dad for a breakfast loan (It’s come to that. Luckily, I have fantastic parents who have spoiled me in all the right ways) and went to my favorite restaurant. Breakfast after a bike ride has been the backdrop to many bursts of inspiration, and this morning was no different.

Can you find all the bicycles in this scene?

Learning about feminism in an organized academic way has helped correct the misinformation which mired my understanding of it in stereotypes and distrust and dislike (Of men). Now I sort of feel like I have to help everyone realize their feminism.

I am practicing with my father right now…who’s a feminist but doesn’t know it. Like myself in a much more naive time, he feels that aligning himself with a movement will limit his identity. What he doesn’t know is that it can be empowering, and whether he likes it or not, others, strangers, have already labeled him…so he might as well reclaim control over it. His very life is a political statement, a refugee from a country which took everything from him. By working, earning money, buying German luxury cars, he’s protesting, even if he’s an ocean away. Maybe that’s why he won’t take on the name feminist, because he’s grateful for the freedom that we do have in the US. What he needs to realize is that a lot of that freedom is afforded only to a certain few, a certain few who would see him as less than equal. To those few, I am even less equal than he. I know he’ll come around. Especially after reading this.

I was one of those weird kids who liked to read, enchanted by the magic of organized shapes to convey thoughts, stories, and art. I did – and I still do – ready anything and everything.

So one day I found myself reading one of my parent’s books about how to raise a son around the time my brother was born. I must have been six or seven or eight. I suppose I saw the book on a table somewhere and the subject intrigued me.

My parents were and are still not really religious, but they attempted it out of what I believe was an effort to assimilate and socialize. We stopped going to church because my siblings and I would complain and misbehave, and anyway, my mother always told me that the Bible was “written by men to control women.” Which is why it puzzles me that this book about boys seemed to come from some sort of religious or conservative viewpoint, advocating a couple of profoundly homophobic and sexist mindsets to boy-rearing. Even at that age, I was incensed by what I perceived to be – and rightly so – a condoner of injustice, and with a black marker I made some edits. If my brother turned out gay, so be it, and as his big sister he could never be better, bigger, stronger, or smarter than me just cause he’s a boy. I had changed his diaper, for fuck’s sake, and held him in my arms when he’d been so tiny I could have crushed his skull in my hands. I was and I still am his protector.

In my immigrant parents’ household, acts of dissent may not have always been celebrated, but they were always revered. So even though my mother was pissed about the book, I was not punished. “And anyway,” my mom added, “I wasn’t really going to read it.” She argued that, moreover, I had committed an act of vandalism, because the book was her property. My dad said that if I had issues with the book it was more productive to raise those concerns in discussion.

My kid brother is now an intelligent, articulate, feminist, and justice-conscious young man, who, when heckled by male classmates for refusing to name which girls he found “hot,” responded that he respects women and therefore will not reduce them to objects.

My parents have done a magnificent job, and though we may not have always known the words or the names, our hearts have always known when something is amiss, and we have always acted on it. I don’t know if that’s the exceptional privilege of being raised by parents not born with the liberties of this country, but it’s certainly a good instinct. The instinct of fair is intrinsic to civilization. The problem is that we’ve been lulled into apathy or socialized to mistrust our gut.

One of the most important lessons my father taught me – amusingly through the words of Yoda – is to “trust your feelings.” Even more amusing, the event which solidified this lesson was when I’d let my ice skating coach talk me out of choreographing a program to the Star Wars soundtrack. Skating to E.T.’s flying bicycle theme instead, I forgot my routine in the middle of the rink during a competition, and after crying to the judges, I was allowed to fumble my way through the rest into last place. The girl who won in my category had come out strong to – guess what – John Williams’ famously triumphant and epic brass fanfare, the one that is etched upon our modern collective conscious.

When my instincts tell me to do something, I do it. When something feels wrong, when I feel some injustice has been committed, I correct it. That book about raising boys into proper heterosexual figures of domination didn’t jive with my sensibilities, so I rewrote it to my mother’s exasperation. Trust your gut…whether it’s the song you want to dance to or the destiny you want to fulfill. Like the lioness who stalks her prey, my instincts have been honed through practice and encouragement from my parents.

The good news is it’s really that easy.

Writing July 1 2010