I am working my way, quite quickly, through Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own." I just may be becoming a feminist. Well truthfully speaking that's terribly unlikely, but this is the second book of what can be considered "traditionally feminist" writing that I can say without a doubt I agree with and thoroughly enjoy. Perhaps to be fair I will clarify that this isn't considered "traditionally" femenist. It's a sort of niche femimism which is markedly unique from the psychotic bra-burning-corporate-power-frau types. Anything I write to summarize Woolf's position would be a horrific oversimplification of what she has to say about women and their place in "modern" (circa early 1900s) society, but her tantalizing idea of a room of one's own and a living allowance coupled with the idea of the "Society of Outsiders" presented in "Three Guineas" makes for an interesting thought experiment. These two books are definite gems. I can't say I much enjoyed her fiction (any of it...I've hacked my way through "To the Lighthouse" and "Mrs. Dalloway"), but her rapacious wit and razor sharp logic really carry her non-fiction works through. I think I will pick up a couple of other non-fictions, namely "On Being Ill" and both volumes of "The Common Reader." Before more thinking happens, an excerpt from "A Room of One's Own:"

"And I began thinking of all those great men who have for one reason or another admired, sought out, lived with, confided in, made love to, written of, trusted in, and showed what can only be described as some need of or some dependence upon certain persons of the opposite sex....But we should wrong these illustrious men very greatly if we insisted that they got nothing from these alliances but comfort, flattery, and the pleasures of the body. What they got, it is obvious, was something that their own sex was unable to supply."

Perhaps in this day and age, it is all too easy to forget what it is the other sex "supplies." We live in an age of Condoleeza Rice (a highly respectable individual, might I add) -esque women who have clawed their way to the top of the male-created corporate food-chain. I suppose again that it is from this vantage point the "need" for the opposite sex seems diminished if not altogether annihilated. The fact of the matter may indeed be that one sex does not "need" each other in the strictest sense - as evidenced by the increasing number of women turning to sperm banks to start families in lieu of "Mr. Right," and men who are able to adopt unwanted children without a mate - but it takes Woolf's gently arcane politicized writing to alert us to the fact that life is simply "sweeter" with the opposite sex around. In a society where it may seem that we have progressed "beyond" the need for Woolf's calculated defence of a true feminine integrity, we are sternly shown the folly of our own ways by Woolf's strikingly pertinent observations of what one sex does to ignore or belittle the other. You're guilty of it and I'm guilty of it. Fuck this woman was smart. I conclude: Boys. Dumb, but I can't live without them.