Of course, I'm a white woman. I think that's pretty important to the Barbie discussion - but I'm going to put that aside a moment and focus on my experience. I'll get back to the race question. [And yes, I know that the very fact I can put it aside and get back to it is, in itself, part of the race question.]

There were a lot of confusing things going on when I was little. If you went to a public school kindergarten in the early eighties, you'll know that a lot of time was spent with Officer Friendly, McGruff the crime dog, puppets with morals, stop drop and roll, et cetera. If you remember these things, do you also remember how scary they were? Kindergarten-level safety training leaves one thinking Please, God, whatever you are, don't kill me tonight. It's scary as hell.

Many things are scary as hell when you're five. Things like being able to find your way home, playing with other kids, doing homework - they're all easily amplified into crises. Being a kid is just plain frightening sometimes.

So. I had Barbies. I mostly had ten different Skippers (Barbie's flat-chested kid sister). An assortment of Strawberry Shortcake dolls, some He-Man action figures. And one, largely ignored, Ken. My Barbies had housefires and were kidnapped when I was five. They were in abusive relationships when I was six. They were Pocahontas, Helen Keller, and Abigail Adams when I was seven. They were lesbians when I was eight. I think one of them may have had a drinking problem.

They were, essentially, whatever I needed to think about at the time.

And they were always adults. Even my baby-shaped dolls were adults. My mother wrote in my baby book when I was two or so that I had a bean-filled doll who was "twenty-two". Sounds like I grasped at a pretty young age that being an adult (like my parents, who were conveniently turning twenty-two that year) was the goal.

None of this is being told for the purpose of cuteness. In fact, quite the opposite. My Barbie play wasn't cute at all, it was solemn and serious. It was important stuff.

I'm fairly certain the same is true of just about anything kids, especially very young kids, play at. I remember doing similarly serious things with the jungle gym, trucks, GI Joe, sandboxes. But I think the magic of Barbie is that she is such an obvious tool for this type of play.

That's valuable.

And of course, we as adults see play and toys in completely different light. We see gender roles (there may be some) and violence (some of that, too), but we get so uptight about what toys represent that I think we fail to see what is actually happening with play.

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This is not always accepted in the feminist community, and rarely accepted by new feminists [I think of the women blogger community as nascent feminists; whether they define themselves thus or not, they follow many similar paths of thought.]. Play is a means of processing. Children (and adults, to a slightly lesser extent) need to be able to play at aggression and violence, psychic or physical, in order to process life. People need play, whether they have leisure time for it or not.

There are certain camps that would disagree. That would argue that aggression is inherently bad, be it play or not. Or that women are inherently less aggressive.

Boys and girls tend to play differently after a certain age. This is fairly obvious. But why is it so? Why do boys and girls initially have similar preferences for dolls and guns, but split later? I personally think it's a matter of socialization - and that we're gradually steering both boys and girls away from all play at physical aggression. I don't think this is a good thing.

Nor do I think that women play less, that we are more concerned with things serious. I do suspect that women's play is more centered on the self and the immediate social group than men's play - which is often other-centered. I suspect that has a lot to do with the things men and women are expected to value differently.

Also, the way we socialize boys and girls (and the relatively recent quashing of violence and aggression in kids) tends to make us more sensitive to, and more focused on, things that can hurt our feelings. Is it because we don't get to beat up on things/people like we used to? Eh, I don't know. I do know from my personal experience that things like violent video games, rude humor and angry protests can provide a comfortable - and valuable - buffer between me and the things that anger me.

So, why don't these things come across in my blog? Perhaps simply because those aren't things I need to puzzle over - they're simply functions in my life. And that does relate, I think, to a significant difference among people who publish online - some of us are driven by a degree of exhibition or camaraderie, others by a need to puzzle things out. That also explains quite a bit about my taste in [largely female] bloggers - I like the ones who are figuring things out.

As always, I have a handful of books to recommend on the subject (getting back to the aggression/play topic:

Killing Monsters is a nice examination of our fear of play violence and power, mostly generalized for boys and girls.

Odd Girl Out deals specifically with girl bullying and girls' higher-stakes play at psychic aggression. Doesn't go far in examining the source of girl aggression, but worth reading.

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The internet has become my primary information source. Particularly for things political and newsworthy. Part of that is the post-US terrorism climate in the news - if we were domestically focused before last year, it was actually less disturbing than the biased perspective of US news sources towards global news that exists currently.

I have this ideal that the internet globalizes politics, while simultaneously encouraging real grass-roots activism. Of course, that isn't really what happens - partly because the population on the internet doesn't actually reflect the population as a whole. The working poor can't join the Green Party's internet activism drive, for instance, because the working poor doesn't have the free time or the money to spend much, if any, time online.

But. I do think that online communication is a critical part of politicizing us. It certainly politicized me.

I can, in fact, trace my activism along the path of my most frequently visited sites. I started with a queer community site called Paradox [Anyone remember it?] as a way to keep in touch with my friends during college and gradually evolved to an assortment of IRC discussions around queer politics. I'm pretty sure feminism snuck in at that point, too. It's the books that those people recommended to me in the early nineties that gradually galvanized me into leftism (having previously considered myself something of a libertarian. A lot of my political action continues to be online, with the support of communities like the collab group.

And even as recently as a couple of years ago, i was using the net to evolve my political perspective - the zine was born out of some questions I tossed around with new acquaintances at the now [sadly] defunct WHquestion.com and the third-wave feminist community at Diaryland.

That sort of site (the communities at Livejournal, for instance) can become a great forum for political learning. Yes, all of those places contain a fair amount of triviality, and yes, they come to be dominated by teenagers. But that's not necessarily bad. So much of the things we believe as adults are the things we came up with as teenagers in reaction to our parents - but what if we all had more access to real information upon which to base our opinions, and to a wide range of people with whom we could debate? How much earlier would I have grown into activism if I'd had access to sites like that when I was, say, fifteen?

And I guess that's part of my ideal internet - growing up in these extended communities has to effect you - and if politicians and activists were open participants, I think one effect would be to push people towards civic action.

I can imagine a future of kids who've grown up on an internet whose population actually matches the real world population. Kids who, as adults, can shift between cultures and are inherently skeptical of bad or biased information (the other thing the internet is great at - you can find information, factual or fictional, to support any crazed opinion you may have).

And wouldn't that be nice?

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I've always struggled to define for myself what bothered me so much about Adbusters. At core, all of their projects are really about information - making sure you have and consider information before you buy whatever. Right?

But. Sitting here on the left, thinking about anti-consumerism, I find myself echoing the criticisms most typically levyed at the left as a whole. Namely: that anti-consumerists are self-righteous without [communicated] supporting logic, out of touch with the average person's daily experience, asking too much at too great a cost with too little benefit for the world at large. Sounds familiar.

Though of course, as a feminist, the criticisms I'm most likely to hear have more to do with the assumption that my feminism is focused entirely on women, or that I have a secret desire to police your thoughts. [Actually, my desire to police your thoughts is not at all secret. Given boundless resources, I'd like to try an experiment in which all people were "strongly encouraged" (probably in the form of some sort of bribery by me and my "associates") to think essentially as I do for a year or two. I wonder what a culture composed entirely of liberal, similar-thinking individuals might do.]

Back to the point. The key assumption of anti-consumerism is the ability to choose pro-consumerism - that's what defines anti-consumerism as itself, and its opponent. And what makes that awkward, of course, is that the financial security required to make that choice available is almost invariably the result of someone else's rampant consumerism at some point in the past. That brings me back to the notion of left-leaners as children of privilege who have yet to mature, return to the fold, and embrace the values of the community (assuming you weren't raised in a liberal community to begin with).

So is my perception of anti-consumerists based, ironically, on this feeling that they're refusing to participate in the community as-is? Am I secretly thinking that the purchase is a key element of the semi-global community?

No - or at least, not entirely. I think what bothers me about Adbusters or versus, say, Clothespin is a certain level of hypocrisy that gets transmitted with their message: the glossy, non-recyclable magazine, the emphasis on shock value. These are the same things that bother me about PETA, Sierra Club, and all those anti-tobacco lobbying groups that advertise themselves as driven by teens and young adults but are actually managed by the same old lobbyists.

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Talk about witches rarely includes much discussion of the political and social climate of the Dark Ages. But it should. Widespread familiarity with the concept of "witch" postdates the start of the Renaissance. And that's no mistake - the common idea of witches as dark consorts of Satan was spread by a political structure with a vested interest in converting people to the new Christian social order, in part by demonizing previous religious practices.

Even the term "Dark Ages" echoes this notion. Were the dark ages, in fact, dark? Not necessarily. And certainly not if you were outside of the ruling class or the growing city environment. It was a time period relatively free of major disasters (in Europe, which, I should add, is the primary setting of this discussion) and not without artistic and spiritual development.

Various pagan practices continued to predominate rural spiritual life, but none of these religions were organized (by any definition of that term). While rural pagan groups may have been loosely connected, they shared a common element - healing and planting traditions - and were likely to be reasonably egalitarian as far as gender was concerned.

the sign around the graveyard says that satin lives in hell

they may love the devil, but his disciples sure can't spell

Written knowledge and practices were rare (all the better to eradicate and rewrite the history of them), and the people (often women) who came to be thought witches were generally responsible for passing this knowledge along. This wasn't radical. It was simply how things were done. Of course, the rise of organized Christianity and the written religious text would change that. [For more detail on the connection between writing and misogyny, try Leonard Shlain's Alphabet vs. the Goddess.]

Given that egalitarianism, do I think witches were feminists? Well, maybe. Certainly there are aspects of feminism in certain paganisms, but post-Christian, pre-Papacy Europe was still quite divided by class, and there were very clear definitions of what one could and could not do (based on a number of factors, gender included).

That said. There are certainly arguments for "witches" as early practitioners of civil disobedience, as simply continuing their daily practices was radicalized by the Renaissance and the Inquisition.

Given the rise of a religion-driven ruling class, teachers and healers become "witches". After all, what better way is there to gently control a populace than to control information distribution? That's exactly what new religious institutions did by first dismissing paganism as "superstition" and then by declaring paganism as "ungodly". And what else could they do? People weren't converting, and the authority of a monotheistic government kindof depends on people buying into the whole "one god" thing.

So, defying the newly powerful Church? Pretty darn radical. Feminist? Well, maybe. Of course, the Sapphists were perhaps "more" feminist - and predated the newly named "witches" by some hundreds of years. And matrilineal and egalitarian social structures predated even them. Were witches the first feminists? Not at all. But I can see making a case for the witch as feminist.

I do not, however, see the modern "witch" (whether you use that term to mean either a spiritual practitioner of Wicca or one who actively pursues a form of majick) as inherently feminist. Not that majick or neo-paganism can't be feminist. Rather, the basic premises of Wicca and majick are neither feminist nor anti-feminist.

As a feminist, I see problems with the biology-as-destiny implications of Wicca (the goddess fulfills nearly every feminine stereotype, with a great deal of focus on fertility), and I've known too many majick-makers who held anti-feminist, even anti-female, attitudes. That doesn't mean that people who follow those paths can't also be feminists, simply that being on those paths doesn't make you a feminist.

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