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Full Tree
When I was young, my mom rounded up my family to take us somewhere to adopt a cat. We ended up falling in love with a pair of cats, a brother and sister that I named Kimi and Chuckie after the redheaded Rugrat and his adopted Parisian (??) sister. As we were adopting them, some rando saw what we were doing and, being the white man that he was, felt entitled to comment on it. “It’s good that you’re taking both of them,” he said. “Alone, they could never become a full tree.” It was an honestly ludicrous thing to say about two cats, but the phrase “full tree” has been part of my family vernacular since. We use it to mean a self-actualized person, someone complete in themselves and operating at their maximum capacity. I now know that I, as a single woman, am a full tree.
Getting to experience romantic love is definitely a dope-as-hell part of existing, but it’s by no means a necessary prerequisite to being a full tree. Frida Kahlo said, “It’s not love, or tenderness, or affection, it’s life itself”’; some rando said, “You’re nobody till somebody loves you.” (Wikipedia says that rando is “Russ Morgan, Larry Stock, and James Cavanaugh” back in the year 1944.) They were all wrong. Or maybe Frida was partly right: love is a great and exciting thing to happen in the life of a tree, and excitement about ANYTHING is basically the point of life itself. But falling in love doesn’t validate you as a full tree and it doesn’t mean Oh my god, now I *finally know* what it is to be a tree! It’s easy to feel like love IS life when (a) you’re a woman who is told she NEEDS to find a man to be complete—because it serves the nefarious purposes of patriarchy, and (b) you’re a human in an increasingly secular age where you are less likely to draw your sense of self from religion.
Plus, anyone
The Bechdel Test is a criterion for judging films that was created by cartoonist Alison Bechdel in her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. It requires that a movie have at least two (named) women who talk to each other about something other than a man. The test is a quick, easy way to judge whether any group of movies (say: everything currently in theaters) is sexist. It’s such a simple metric, but it really snaps into view how many mainstream films (around 40 to 50 percent!) either don’t feature women or use women only as devices to further stories about men, to provide exposition or eye candy or cheap stakes (i.e., I’m doing this heist to get back my estranged hot wife, who had one line in the whole movie!!!). It’s not surprising that in real life men treat women as disposable, as less real, like their desires and preferences and consent matter less than a man’s, when films tell men that women are just props and that men are the protagonists.
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