Empowerful!

The term 'empowerful', for those of you not familiar with it, was coined a few years back by the incomparable Twisty Faster, a heroine of the blogosphere, at her blog I Blame the Patriarchy. (Oh, and she so does.) If you follow that link it will take you to her own elaboration of the term, but in brief it refers to the anti-feminist line of what for want of a better word I'll call argument that women no longer need feminism because we are now already 'empowered'.

As I understand it, this 'empowerment' consists chiefly in exercising the right to choose: making, say, a choice to wear 'shapewear' (the new name for corsets) so that your body will look 'better' (ie more in line with male fantasy), or to stagger alone down a dark alley in the nightclub precinct at 3 am on a Sunday morning wearing nothing but a pink thong with vomit-clogged sequins on it, or to drift in and out of consciousness while being gangbanged by a dozen or so rugby players. Just look at the power being wielded by women in those situations. You can almost smell it.

Too old these days to qualify for any of the above options apart from the shapewear one, which would no doubt make me look marginally better but which I would be laughing too much to get into, I have opted instead for a night class called Home Maintenance for Women. Tuesday night was tiling, the main reason I'd finally got round to enrolling after years of meaning to, and although I would have been better advised to spend the evening in bed with Lemsip and a book, the prospect of learning how to re-tile the splashback space above the new bathroom sink properly (instead of the way the last person did it) was too enticing to pass up, and besides, the beautiful little tiles I have found, with stylised vignettes in subdued colours of the Tuscan countryside, deserve to be well and lovingly put up.

Not only did I learn tiling and grouting but I also did this:




Actually I'd already finished one, but our WEA tutor, the lovely Rose Squire, said no it wasn't good enough because I'd broken a few of the copper-wire filaments off short by getting too enthusiastic with the wire stripper, so I had to cut the whole thing off and start again. I predict that by the time I finally get it right, my home-made extension cord will be two metres long instead of the three I started out with. And yes there is a tool called a wire stripper, and there is also a tool called a tile nibbler which, like the wire stripper, does exactly what it says. (If you use it properly. Ahem.)

So I have useful information coming out of my ears. But the confidence and the demystification are even more important, equipping one to carry on one's researches independently and not feel like a moron in Bunnings. I won't call it empowerment, because I think it is too late to rescue that lovely word. But it certainly feels like power.