An E-mail to my Women's Studies Professor

I’m trying very hard to keep today’s readings in perspective. I’m trying very hard to keep the link between women’s studies and these religious struggles, but I’m having a very difficult time. I’m an atheist. I understand the importance of acceptance, no matter what you believe. To say that atheism should be forced down people’s throats is the very same thing as having religious people demand conversion of other’s to their views – it’s just as wrong. It’s just as much of an invasion on people’s rights to happiness, to live their lives freely. Nevertheless, I can’t help but see these women complaining and kind of laugh. To me, it’s all the part of their submission to this mythology.

This is why I’ve chosen not to come to class today. Part of me feels like a coward, but the other feels like a mean critic, who will do more harm than good in my participation in this discussion. My purpose is not to insult a group of harmless, young women (and possibly two men, though I think David might share my sympathies to an extent). My real issue is religion as a whole, with those in power who string people along like puppets to war – to die for a religious, or somehow moral, cause. My issue is with the hate toward the “different” in this world, and those who stand with groups who hate. I can’t take the hypocrisy or the death or the oblivion of their followers. I can’t stand the rationalizations.

You write in “The Black Ewe Syndrome”, “I’m lucky because so many people remain in the herd, just another sheep in the flock.” Already I fear I will insult you, and I don’t want to do that. I am a person before I am an embodiment of some kind of religious or anti-religious idea. You are a professor who I have enjoyed immensely in class, and who I respect (which really can’t be said for all). Nevertheless, when I read that quote, I thought “well, you’re half-way there. Now protest the entire establishment all together, the entire basis of fear on which all religion derives its power, and then perhaps you will lead the flock as a Sheppard instead of just the sheep in the front row”.

I have flipped through the entire Religion section in WIR and SF. It’s evident that, just like anywhere else, Atheism has no place is discussions of religion. The closest thing I could find talked about “secular” feminists, “secular” is the nice, non-threatening word they use. “Interestingly, secular feminists have begun to ask questions about religion. The historic approach of feminism has been near total rejection of religion, as well as some suspicion of women who are religious. Yet growing interest(s)….[combined with recognition]….have opened the door for real collaboration between secular and religious feminists.” (483, SF). Further “The Inner Space” talks about alternative religion, but religion all the same.

It is not that I can’t make connections to these struggles. I nearly cried when I read “Revelations” on page 298. I too have experienced the onslaught of people telling me I will go to hell, almost with a smile on their face, my own father included (my mother is even worse).* I too have had people “quote-at-me”. I can empathize with the struggles of a woman trying to break into a power structure comprised of only men. And I can understand the frustration, anger, and injustice of having to sit back while someone dictates the right way to live – who has control over all these people, and they follow him, and you try to speak out but no one hears you, they don’t want to hear you.

Religion is Jenga, pick and choose the issues you want to deal with, but enough come out and the whole structure falls – so no one wants to take out the pieces, not for a moment.

As a woman and an Atheist, my troubles are not as distant as they seem to the ones in our reading. I share the same biology of women. I share the same pay and same sexual repression and same issues of beauty and violence and how that all gets mixed into the “ideal girl”. I get just as frustrated when I hear “men” talk about “girls”, “hoes”. I am just as angry as all other women. The difference is that I am part of the most “untrustworthy group in America.” I am the ultimate infidel. I am hated by every religious group in the world on one level or another. I cannot say, well I’m a feminist, but don’t worry, I am redeemable because I go to the same church as you. I am not even included in the religion section of the bookstore downtown, because it might insult those who purchase other texts there. People are scared of me – pity me – want to convert and change my mind - and yet I’m the one who will not be in class today, because I see no greater purpose in insulting your point of view.

Universal human rights or everything is bullshit. 

 

*6/13/25 edit 

The Lake

Her hair was golden, illuminated through the deepening twilight by a few soft, pulsing lampposts which marked the edge of Winnetauk Lake. Her gloves, and scarf, and long, wool coat vanished into the depths of that starry surrounding darkness, leaving only the sharp white of her figure skates to pierce through the winter night. Slowly, the young girl scratched her silver blades through the ice, weaving from side-to-side as a form possessed by the enchantments of moonlit snowfall. Circling, drifting, she watched her chilly breath join the current of some invisible breeze which kissed her cheeks pink in its passing. Absorbed in the world of her mind, time was measured only by the thin, looping cursive she wrote upon the surface of the lake. There is a moment which exists just before a child learns what loneliness is, before she loses the imagination to be so solitary, and so free.

The medical gurney blasted into the ER, ramming the steel bed frame through the swinging hospital doors and vibrating the lights passing overhead; each bar of fluorescent yellow seemed to tick above her like the small red hand on a clock. Several itchy brown blankets were wrapped around her body, but she still shivered and heaved, unable to move her eyes from the ceiling. Her lips were blue and drooling. Her limp hair lay wet on her shoulders in a tangled mess of darkness and dirt. There was blood. All around, people shouted orders in loud voices, and all she wanted was for someone to whisper; for someone to stop the rushing of movement and blood and to reach down for her hand and whisper pretty things into her ear.

“Stop the ride, I want to get off”, she thought. With a tiny pang of fleeting memory, she saw a carnival, and being too scared, and crying until Mommy had said it was okay to go home. Crying until Mommy had scooped her up and carried her back to the car; back to her bed with cotton candy colored sheets, and tucked her in, and kissed her forehead, and she was asleep before her Mother’s lips had left her. Now, all she wanted was to drift away like that again, but every few minutes or seconds or less than that, a man or woman would loom over her, telling her not to sleep – to keep her eyes open – she mustn’t sleep. She knew about white lights at the end of tunnels from movies she wasn’t supposed to watch late at night, but now she figured those people were just mixed up, confused by all the bright things people had kept burning into their faces too. Confused by all the pinching needles, and smelly staleness, and the way time keeps blowing through doorways, following the screams and the crying.

“There’s been an accident”. He poured some more water into a glass of clinking ice, his back to her. “Your Mother was driving and she flipped the car over a snow bank, and the car rolled into a lake.” The kitchen seemed darker than usual, as though a light bulb must have burned out. Mommy was coming back from the supermarket now though, and she probably had some more or knew where they were. Daddy was always asking Mommy where stuff was. “This time of year, the lake is usually pretty solid, but the car broke through.” The little girl tried hard to listen, she knew what Daddy was saying was important. She looked down at her feet; her thick white shoelaces had come undone. “Can you tie my shoe Daddy?” His silence startled her. Maybe she had not been polite enough, “Please? Pretty please?” He turned around to face her. His whole body was rigid and seemed to stretch light years above her, untouchable. “Don’t you understand?!” – He began, she winched at the cut in his voice, and he sunk to his knees before her, “Mom is dead. Mom is not coming home, baby. She’s never coming back home.” He stood and went upstairs, and she understood. She cried for a long time, alone, on the kitchen floor.

Now Dad was sitting in an uncomfortable blue chair, next to her bed. “Hey”, he tried to speak softly as she opened her eyes toward him, but it was just turning the volume down on a lion. He waited for her smile apprehensively at him – a tiny, weak slant on either side of her mouth - before he asked, “Why?” Why had she gone ice skating of all things, alone and in the middle of the night? Why had she been so careless; exposed herself to such danger? Why had the ice cracked and dragged her down into a frosted hell? Why had she gone to the one place he had specifically forbid her from going to?
She turned her head away from him. “I’m tired. Can we talk about it later?”
“What - where you trying to join her?”
“Daddy, please don’t be mad.”
“Tell me what you were doing out on that lake!”
“I just…” She hated looking weak in front of her father, but tears stung in her eyes.
“I told you never to go to Winnetauk, and you know damn well what it means to us – how I feel about it. You’re lucky to be alive. I’m severely disappointed.”
“I just miss her. I’m sorry. I just miss Mom.”
The soundlessness that followed pressed on both father and daughter like a cobra filled with bricks. This was a conversation, one of many conversations, he was never meant to have with his daughter. Of course he loved her. He had also loved her Mother, but she was taken by the very same force, the very same goddamn lake, that had tried to take his little girl tonight. How could he possibly lose them both? How could his own child betray him like this – leave him like this? Life might go on, but what’s the point if the greatest, most important things in your life exist only in the past?

She watched him stare at his feet. She watched him stare at the door. At the television on mute. At the bedspread. At the nurse who came in and out of the room like the tide. Her mother had loved the ocean. Actually, her mother had loved everything that involved water. She had been the one who insisted that they go to the beach each summer, despite how badly Daddy would sunburn. And even on the bitterest February day, she had held both her little hands and inch by inch taught her to slide across the ice. Maybe Dad couldn’t understand, but skating on that lake was like skating with her again. Just being where she had been, when her last breath escaped into that gentle breeze, was like reliving every moment before that day.

There is a moment which exists just before a child learns what loneliness is, before they lose the imagination to be so solitary, and so free. Once that moment passes, no matter their age, the child cannot return to the peace of pure, white snow. Fairies die in the garden. Mermaids wash up on the shore. By witnessing the destruction of life, life gains the necessity of meaning. Under the stress and responsibility of such meaning, the imagination breaks like a treasured object, smashing under the terrible weight and forcing the child to live their life in the reflection of those glass shards. We may try to stick the pieces back together for only a moment, to see a whole person looking back in that sparkling sheet of ice, and yet, these remain just simple moments, strung together along the soon broken path of an endless line etched on the surface – just waiting to break and drown us all.