As I suggested before, I think that a feminist is what a feminist DOES, so the best way to express what I think a feminist is is to talk about what one DID.
I have a friend I've known for some time. We met in the Rama cult, and both of us laughingly have no problem referring to it as one, and at the same time having zero regrets for having been involved with it for years. My friend is a very attractive woman, in great shape because she's an athlete, and funny and outgoing. When I first met her, she was in the process of walking away from one successful car- eer and starting another in the world of computing. And that's exactly what she did; within two years of "starting over" as a programmer, she was earn- ing $200+ an hour as a consultant. She then moved into the even more rarefied world of AI, and made enough of a name for herself in that world that one of the leading companies in that field, a company at that point staffed primarily by men, offered her a shot at being their Marketing Mgr. In a few short years she tripled the company's business. At that company, she was known far and wide as a remarkably effective "people manager," inspiring rather than intimidating. And for her, it never even *occurred* to her to ask whether the person she was working with was a man or a woman; she measured them only by the same criterion she used for herself: Do they DO THE JOB they've been hired to do? One of the most fascinating things about my friend IMO is that she is gay, but I think I'm the only person in the company who knew that. It is NOT that she was "in the closet." Far from it; she's been openly gay since she was 15. It's just that the issue of her sexuality NEVER CAME UP because she didn't bring it up. She was as comfortable in a group of guys making crude jokes about women as she would have been in a group of lesbians making equally crude jokes about women. Her sexual pref- erence was irrelevant to doing the job. *Everything* was irrelevant except doing the job. Back in the Rama cult, when it came time to DO THE JOB there, when our "task du jour" was to teach people how to meditate, it was within a strange and, to me, badly-conceived-of environment. Fred Lenz, for whatever reasons, had set up the teaching thing as kind of a "competition" between the men and the women students. Some of the women (and interestingly, few of the men) really got into the gender competition, and used it as a way to "act out" their unresolved feelings for the other sex. My friend "stayed out of the misery" and just taught; I think she wound up teaching more people to meditate than anyone else in the group. And she did this while earning $200+ an hour as a full-time consultant, paying for all the teaching expenses herself and teaching for free. Lately, with the success of having transformed a computer company under her belt and the Rama cult a decade behind her, she has found another outlet for her spiritual aspirations, another teacher. I honestly don't know who it is. All I know is that when that teacher offered her a chance to "put some energy back into the system," my friend didn't hesitate for a moment. She took a well-deserved leave of absence from the company she works for and went to India to teach computer classes to men and women students of this teacher so that they could become self-supporting, and not have to rely on donations. And during this whole time I've known her, I have never heard her badrap either men or other women for "keeping her down" or hindering either her career or her expres- sion of her sexuality or her spiritual aspirations. People DID try to hinder her success; that's just life. But she never for a moment focused on the obstacles, and she never for a moment bitched or whined about those who became obstacles. She just DID THE JOB, whether it was in the world of business or the world of spirituality. That's the kind of person who I think of when I hear the word feminist. Someone who presents the EXAMPLE of a strong, successful woman to the world, not some- one who can only whine that there aren't more of them. I once was with her as a number of women I would char- acterize as "feminists" (very much with the quotes) were whining and bitching about being "held back" by the men in the small computer company they all worked for. My friend just rolled her eyes and went back to work for the guys the other women were calling male chauvinist pigs. A few months later she bought the company from them. It's not about talking the talk. It's about walking the walk.
