Can you imagine this wee thing asking you tough questions about your feminism? Disarming, indeed!
As Jessica Yee posted a few days back, the Toronto Rape Crisis Centre / Multicultural Women against Rape has been hosting a series of herstory (instead of history) events designed to recount our stories, remember our common purpose, embrace the activist in all of us, and to redefine feminism on our own terms. All of these reasons to get together sounded noble, so off I went.
Plus, it was just fun to see Thea Lim get interviewed by a lovely, well-worn pink plushy pig with pearls, who spoke from the comfortable position of Thea’s right hand. And this puppet piggy asked some tough questions! Only Thea Lim would dream up interviewing herself in such a way. I laughed so hard I almost dropped my Bundt cake. Here are a few highlights from Thea’s irreverent take on her developing years in feminism as a novelist, blogger, waitress, and cultural activist.
While I love Thea’s silly style, I really love how she connects her learning about feminism to everyday life. “I learned the most about feminism from working in a bar,” she explained, where she saw how women were treated, or ignored by customers, and was once told by someone that he and his friends had a bet going on her ethnicity. At her cocktail waitress job, she also spent a great deal of time watching television. Although Thea expressed some misgivings about the medium (“If TV is to be trusted, women would only be interested in rich hunks and clump-free mascara”), she also told of her love for pop culture as a way of connecting to feminism.









