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POWER I was yet to feel my own power If power arrived in my letter box I'd think it was another catalogue But then power found me I was bathing my child I was healing my spirit I was working to stop rape technically I was still in disgrace male-identified, dependant, depressed. Power moved so close to me I could smell cotton and sweat I wanted to dance I wanted to exonerate myself I wanted to respond for all I was worth Undo all my closed bits, shake my hair, move about feel her energy and my own strength. LYNDA M.RUSHTON 20.3.91 (As previously published in Heartland). GIRLS CAN'T DO ANYTHING -by Shannon Adams ----------------------- GIRLS CAN DO ANYTHING proclaims a bumper sticker which is a popular feature on the rear end of West End cars and bicycles. Important though this assertion may be it always prompts me to consider how real is the range of choices facing women and men in everyday life. Are we truly able to walk through life like a supermarket and pop our chosen activities in our shopping trolley? Is what stands between us and freedom just a choice of which lifestyle to consume? I suspect not. As a member of a West End group of women interested in anarcho- feminism it appears to me that an understanding of power is essential in extending the ways in which we can experience empowerment and real choice. This power is not a simple door to a wide world, a door which women (and men) can open and then take their chosen direction. The power oppressing women is not a simple glass ceiling preventing career advancement, a ceiling which could be shattered to liberate women to become managing directors and presidents in turn. Neither is it only that violence which might wound us in our home, or that violence which could force itself into our bodies. For I perceive us to be entwined with delicacies of power which are far more insidious than what society does or does not permit women or men to do. The power is inside our bodies already. Painting our pictures, influencing our words and absence of words, judging ourselves and our bodies, and present in our most deeply considered choices. And so I do not think girls can do anything, any more than men can. Choices are far more complicated. Girls could do anything but so many anythings are outside our current imaginings, or are rendered impossible in the current culture. Even words are unable to frame many thoughts and so thoughts are charged with vague sensations. I have a quickening of my pulse when I sense the possibility of what I could do. But I do not do it because IT does not exist as a choice. IT does not have a place. IT does not have money attached to it. IT does not have a name. Yet how many of us have similar desires and imaginings of relationships and lives less warped by the abuses of hierarchical power, less constrained by the demands of an economy in which money equals self esteem and success is measured by rising through the pyramid of control. And so I consider that we must continue to give thought to the making of new ways and new choices ,and also to create relationships with those who might imagine a world as different to this one as we do. Because none of us are pure. None is unshaped by the experience of Power Over us, through us and in us. Men who chose to become anarchists can no more purify themselves of sexism by wearing the ANARCHIST label than they can in swallowing a bottle of detergent. Their words grow louder in the face of domestic activity. Neither are women suddenly free from the constraints of the standard stories of what it is to be a woman when they encounter feminism. Our old desires do not fall from us like a cocoon. Instead we might hide our impurity more closely, or deny our sexism with more sleight of hand. Politics and personal change begin in our everyday lives. The grand plans which we lay take their first step before we leave our beds, in our sexual politics. The shape of our lives is not an individual responsibility but a continual feat of choosing among limited possibilities and admissible dreams which are shaped within the power structures of contemporary Australian societies. We cannot make ourselves suddenly new. I do not believe in mystical rebirths (or I should be dunking myself in the Brisbane River) but we might become different parts of ourselves in the community of others with similar desires. All of us might do anything, among those committed to freedom and change in our everyday lives. Without support and commitment, it is more likely that we struggle individually to make a confined but, possibly, comfortable nest, in the corner allowed us. In such corners one can certainly not do anything!