Tucking my frozen fingertips in either armpit, I stopped abruptly in front of a spray painted sign that read: Do It Yourself (DIY) Festival This Weekend in Berkeley. A week later I showed up at People’s Park in Berkeley, ready to teach myself how to do everything Bush might later withhold.
A couple of days after the last presidential election, I bowed to a gust of piercing rain on Valencia Street. An early winter storm had moved in quickly, catching me without a coat during my walk home.
Freezing under an icy downpour felt like a metaphor for life after the elections. Bush was back and the democrats were out, leaving reproductive rights, universal access to health care and other women’s issues out in the cold.
An aging punk friend once gave me a book on the DI movement, but I couldn’t get past the notion of self made haircuts. I knew they weren’t obligatory, but participating in an ideology of complete self- reliance and independence from the corporate state felt silly if I was shelling out bucks every month on anti-frizz hair product.
That night, however, my narcissism was thin. The prospect of negotiating with Bush’s ‘mandate’ felt impossible, and anarchic, ‘do it your selfism’ felt like relief from the hopelessness and fear descending over me. Plus, DIY stunk of feminist potential.
A week later I showed up at People’s Park in Berkeley, ready to teach myself how to do everything Bush might later withhold. I hadn’t ever been to People’s Park, which I envisioned as a proletarian studded field the size of the D.C. Mall.
Instead, I found an acre full of muddy DIY’rs, mingling in front of literature tables and a makeshift accordion band. The division of the sexes was pretty even, with a heavy sprinkling of young dykes and a few cross dressing guys. The first person I talked to was a woman named Liberty, who self- publishes zines on DIY gynecology.
Liberty, who’s short cropped hair looked very self-cut, stood behind a table stacked with pamphlets called Stop Buying Tampons, G-Spot Health and Women’s Gynocological Herbal Remedies.
I picked up the Women’s Gyno zine and thumbed through a few pages. ‘What kind of women’s health issues do they talk about,” I asked, lifting the Gyno booklet towards her.
Stepping back, she scrunched her eyebrows to the sky and listed a few ailments particular to women. “Ovarian cysts, yeast infections, herbal abortions,” she said matter of factly. “Pretty much most things you have to go to a clinic for you can do yourself. We had a better, total zine on women’s health but it already sold out.”
I handed her fifty cents for the zine and flipped to the table of contents. Chapter five was herbal abortions. Bush’s Supreme Court nominees would have a hard time regulating those, I thought smugly. Two methods of achieving an herbal abortion were outlined, both for pregnancies under two months. One way is to insert a sprig of parsley into the vagina for four days, and the other method involves a series of motherwort infused teas.
“Everyone is so scared that abortion will become illegal, but if you know how to do herbal abortions you don’t have to rely on doctors or the state,” said a DIY’r named Amber from the next table over.
Unlike Liberty, Amber’s denim skirt and black hoody looked store bought and her hair was layered too skillfully to be self-done. “Do you consider yourself a feminist, then?” I asked.
Staring back at me with a patient, knowing look, she replied that, “gender becomes irrelevant when you can do everything yourself.”
But by the looks of the festival’s schedule, not everyone shared her post-feminist analysis. Saturday afternoon featured a ‘Gay Shame’ workshop and several gendered sessions on women’s health and safety were scheduled for the next day.
“I am only getting to the point where I can do everything by myself because of feminism,” said Liberty. True, learning how to build your own house, start your own pirate radio and make your own biodiesel are not activities that women were encouraged to participate in during the 50s.
But the most crucial element of DIY feminism is the underground exchange of reproductive health information. In an age when many lower income women do not have full access to health care, DIY is not only revolutionary, but life saving. And in light of the four Supreme Court slots that Bush may fill, DIY offers an alternative to depending on political whims for health care.
By the time I left the DIY festival, it has begun raining again. The accordion band was still pumping under the on setting shower, churning the mud beneath them into a sticky black pit. I headed home, clutching albeit store bought, bubble bath.
