Tonight, before watching a show at UCB and reading Great Expectations, I read one of the most inspiring pieces of feminist non-fiction I have come across in a while.

It's called "To a White Male Radical" and it's from 1970. I feel depressed at how so little has changed in 38 years, but also empowered by the same words. Somehow, the word "feminism" has been contorted to carry with it a terrible stigma. The stigma itself only represents how inherently sexist American culture is. But as I read this piece, I realized it runs even deeper than that, and it may be the reason (not surprisingly) why I have always felt I was meant to live alone. And that is because the men I have loved refuse to give up their positions of power to women, they cling to them, they assume hyper-masculine identities to compensate for the threat to their power. And, in effect, women are left confused, broken, weakened, subordinated. We play this game without even realizing its underlying message of Powerful and Powerless.

"You probably do not even know how you oppress me, or other women. Buy you do. Each time we meet you spell out the business of your schedule while I am supposed to marvel at this important male world to which you belong? I sometimes see very little difference between a conventional bourgeois chauvinist who thinks that his work is his whole life and a radical activist who also escapes the risk of being known by another through his intensive avoidance of free time. ...

Why am I writing this? Because you don't understand yet what it means not to oppress a woman. ... I could love you someday if I stayed near you long enough. But then I would hate you as much. I would rather stay away and let others take your shit. You are the embodiment of male chauvinism and what is so sick about it is that you self-importantly deny it."