There’s two problems with this.

1) The whole Halloween-scantily-clad-with-fishnets costumes.
2) The whole let me be Asian for Halloween. (h/t to Angry Asian Man)

The stereotype hot, sex-tipped Asian women in a kimono with a fan in hand are now available at Target.

I have no idea what to say except

WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?

About seven years ago, I began attending a discussion group entitled, “Voluntary Simplicity,” that incorporated a slim book collection of writings about simple living. I only attended a few sessions, but the energy and lessons of those thrice attended meetings lingers today.

A few months ago, the connection between feminism and simplicity began to knock around in my head. Simplicity, often confused with “going-without” and “cheap” terms, concerns itself with the center of desire, determining what is most necessary for sustainability and advancement, and then choosing that exact thing. It’s about mining toward the gold – whatever that might be – and focusing on that, without frills or whistles.

The companion workbook is excellent. Several authors rouse the readers with essays on consumerism, satisfaction, human need, and fulfillment. It’s spiritual in its essence, but it’s anything but light. What does that have to do with feminism?

Plenty.

To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is cooperation in violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes one’s work for peace.

The frenzy of the activist neutralizes one’s work for peace. The frenzy. The activist.

I have been meditating upon these ideas, these ions of brilliance and it leaves me wondering what kind of pupil for peace I have been. As a western-born North American, everything can easily become about production. More, more more, and better, better, better. Even in our strategizing for peace and equality, it soon becomes about awarding the most profound of the profound, recognizing the great art from the art, and advancing forward in our agendas.

The frenzy of the activist neutralizes one’s work for peace.

Choosing one, or a handful of commitments has stood next to impossible. Every time I read, my heart follows the author. In my mind I have been in raided factories with blood-stained walls, I have filled my mouth will soil to stifle my cries after my children were killed in front of me, I have wandered in the streests defeated by schizophrenia. How can an activist choose when there is so much that needs to be done, so many voices that need to be projected?

Then I think of my life, my one, singular solitary life in which I was given, like everyone else, only two hands, one heart, one voice. And like so many others, I am limited by circumstance, resources, and a culture of self-serving apathy regarding the poor and disenfranchised. To make up for what others do not care about, I become a promiscuous activist, wanting everything, but committing to nothing.

It’s a frenzy alright. A carousel of passion, fury, pain, and exhilaration. Activism, however, should not be a carousel, it should be walk. A never-ending walk of life that adapts to the speeds and slows of my life, of who I am. The frenzy can burn you out. The frenzy can haze and distort you. What I fear the most of frenzy, is what it can take from you. It takes away hope, potential, and the exchange of ideas.

There is nothing, nothing more sacred to activism than the safe exchange of ideas and honesty.

Simplicity, as outlined by Voluntary Simplicity, questions our human need to hoard and settle. It questions our constantly gathering arms full of berries, shoes, books, lamps, and shoestrings. It wonders aloud, “What do you need?” It asks this of our spiritual, psychological, and material worlds. It prefers a choice that endures through time and mood. Little to do with price, simplicity guides the Conscience to answer to the earth, the environment, the less fortunate, our neighbors. Money, time, technology, farming are all related in our quest for contentment.

As a Feminist Simplicist or a Simplistically Feminist writer, I question my choices. I question my inability to choose. I have taken second and third glances at how many frivolous news and reports ruffle my feathers and I allow myself to be taken away once again, by the carousel. I hve chosen, on numerous occassions, to minimially understand ten issues instead of mindfully engaging in one. There has never been a time where I considered myself to truly know and be known to one thing. Why is that? Am I afraid? If I am, what of?

Last night, I attended a lecture by Vandana Shiva, a stunning author from India who has written dozens of books about the mass food production, corporate globalization, and its impact on the farmers, women, children, the poor, and all of our health. Her latest book (which I have not yet read), Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed, is the most current tool in digging up the truth of where our food comes from, why it tastes the way that it does, and discovering who is growing our seeds. From the earth, into our mouths, Shiva delivers bone-quivering truths about the business practices of our leading nations, and the cost to our bodies.

She teaches, “To get rid of immoral laws you must creat moral laws. You must create laws of equality, law of stability. You must create laws that celebrate the eco-friendly and non-violating methods.”

I listened, pondering again, simplicity, the art of choice, the expense of peace and non-violence.

“It’s like Starbucks Chai Tea. ‘Chai’ means ‘tea.’ They just put words together to make it sound exotic. When you order, all you’re really saying is ‘Tea Tea.'”

The crowd murmurs. No doubt the Starbucks down the street will go down in profit this week.

Some other points Shiva’s lecture included is to get rid of convenience; understand the real price of things; ask where the farms have gone; get rid of convenience; question why you eat seasonal vegetables year round; support local growers; get rid of convenience; eat from your community and natural regional harvest. Get rid of convenience.

Somewhere in my path as a feminist activist, confusion of identity and placement clouded my vision. How often have I let myself get swept away by cheaper things like shoes and bananas; how much more often, however, have I let myself get swept away by ideologies that I do not agree with but do not engage in debate? Who have I let grow my feminist food? Who have I taken information from? Whose agenda have I swallowed and what has it done to my body? How many times have I forgotten what I, I want to work for instead of what the world insists is important? Even among, or rather, especially among, feminist circles, how have I supported and expanded my own feminism to be more inclusive, more deliberate, and more relevant? How many times have I stepped aside instead of stepping up because of my inability to reign in my emotions? Passion and emotion are two distinct, and necessary, qualities, but allowing the latter to run free distills the potency of the former.

Frenzy, no more.

No to More.

It’s a common known fact and an irrepressible belief that statistics are more than a bit screwy. They are. They serve nothing more than to be helpful guidelines to indicate a general perception is either true or false.

October is Domestic Violence awareness month, and, let’s be honest. The statistics are strewed because of underreporting. If there was a way to document the physical and sexual assaults, stalking, rapes, intimidation, coersion, threats, and abuse – the numbers would be out of this world.

And they are not numbers, they are usually womyn, womyn of color, women of poverty, womyn in incarceration, womyn suffering from addiction, women with mental illness, womyn with disability, transgender, gay, lesbian, transexual, and gender-questioning womyn. Approximately 1.3 million women and 835,000 men are physically assaulted by an intimate partner annually in the United States.*

I don’t agree. Those numbers are too low.

I once worked as a sexual assualt educator and advocate in Aberdeen, Washington. In just 11 months – 11 months – I had worked on almost a hundred cases of rape, incest, sexual assault, stalking, and domestic violence. Of those cases guess how many of those cases were investigated and went through an actual court with a real judge and attorney? One. And he was set free for molesting two young girls.

There are so many womyn whose stories are untold, whose mere survival is a damn miracle because no one could intervene or find resources for these womyn in a decaying town, ridden with poverty and secrecy.

One day, back in the spring of 2002, I received a phone call. A breathy whisper kept calling back to my agency, asking if there was a way to get her federal education loan money even though she plans on not going to class. I couldn’t make sense of the connections. “No one knows,” is how she describes his violence, his years of keeping her close with threats and beatings. She whispered in description of her background, how her husband will come after her, how he’ll twist the story and say she has problems and needs to be found and try to get people to help him find her.

A few weeks later she stopped calling.

A few weeks after that, I noticed fliers going up in the community with pictures of a beautiful young Latina women who was in school and went missing. I began to worry. The language pleaded, “Please help find my precious baby. We just want her safe back home. She is missed.”

Immediately, my boss, who had been taking some of her calls as well, recognized her as our caller, “She got the money. The loans came in a few weeks ago. This is her. She got out. This is her husband, trying to find her.”

“You don’t think that he did something to her and now he’s just saying she’s missing?”

She shook her head, “No, he wouldn’t go to that much trouble trying to put attention on her unless he can’t find her.”

I slowly began to understand the demonic mind of DV and the courage of the womyn who find a way to escape.

“She got out.”

My boss started walking in front of me with a soft smile on her face, a face once beaten down by her own partner, “Good for her.”

*Patricia Tjaden & Nancy Thoennes, U.S. Dep’t of Just., NCJ 183781, Full Report of the Prevalence, Incidence, and Consequences of Intimate Partner Violence Against Women: Findings from the National Violence Against Women Survey, at iv (2000), available at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/pubs-sum/183781.htm

Womyn of Color seeks sharp and stimulating Debater. Are you trying to cleanse yourself about your place in the feMovement? Are you hoping to share your rage, joy, findings with a curious stranger needing to debate the angles and finagling of feminism? Are you convinced in your position that the feMovement should be abandoned? Are you convinced that the feMovement is exactly where we ALL need to be? Do you have a self-def for your womyn-centered activism? Are you looking to convince someone of your stance and reasoning? If so, contact Sudy, an unusually deep sleeper who woke up, literally, screaming in the middle of the night, wondering, wandering, afraid she was lost. And upon further reflection this morning, decided that she is and therefore needs to find her home in or away from Feminism. Contact for further details.