I think the human body is beautiful, and I don't really have a huge problem in dealing with it, but it's the context, the environment and what I feel about it that that makes the difference for me.
The only difference between the Bel Air of the '90s and the Bel Air of my childhood is that now the nannies are Latina instead of British, and the cars European instead of American.
Many a person has held close, throughout their entire lives, two friends that always remained strange to one another, because one of them attracted by virtue of similarity, the other by difference.
Somehow you can tell the difference when a song is written just to get on the radio and when what someone does is their whole life. That comes through in Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Willie Nelson. There is no separating their life from their music.
The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.
The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.
