#michfest

songsforgorgons:

“When a collective member asked me when I feel I am most outside of patriarchy, I immediately answered, ‘At Michigan.’ I wrote an article about the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival during September 2001, and that month, it seemed appropriate to title it ‘Another World.’ The experience of the festival is to me the quintessential experience that tells me that another world, a world outside patriarchy, is possible.

“I realize when I return to the festival each year that experiencing a community created and run on feminist and egalitarian values changes me inside. When I first started attending the festival in the 1980s, I sometimes thought that part of the transformative feeling was because I was on vacation. After all, vacations can remove you from the workaday world and give you a sense of perspective and a feeling of relaxation. But for many years now I have worked nearly full time at the festival, running the off our backs booth and doing the requisite festival work shifts. Yet even when I am working, the festival does its magic.

“One part of the magic is the feeling of safety. With no men on the acres of land there is a lifting of the constant, subliminal fear of rape and harassment that I walk with all the other days of the year. In my everyday life, I rarely feel the effect of the constant worry or fear, yet I am immersed in it and it is part of me. When I walk my dog at night near my home I am worried. I look twice into the shadows by the school building. I listen for footsteps behind me. But at the festival, I often walk down the path or road in the dark with no flashlight, surrounded by moon shadows that contain no danger. Footsteps mean women are approaching, and I look forward to a friendly greeting. The tension that I have become inured to at home releases its grip on my chest and shoulders, and in its absence I finally feel free.”

—  From “Women-Only and Feminist Spaces: Important Alternatives to Patriarchy,” by Jennie Ruby, Off Our Backs (May-June 2003).