CasualTea

There are thousands of others like our tea group. Some are centered around reading, others around art, science or bugs. Everyone has a story and a reason for spending time absorbed in latenight musings at our New York-based meetups.  What follows is a somewhat brief rundown of our social anatomy as a continued introduction to the women who inspired me to write tonight.

Three of us have worked at UNICEF for over a year. Two of us are married. One of us is happily divorced. One of our long-time participants successfully runs her own media production company. One of the original tea timers graduated from college with a degree in women’s history. I graduated in May of this year from the Department of Culture and Media studies with a focus in gender and film.

As fate or social dictates or blind machismo would have it, none of us fully identify with feminism as a term, yet all of us feel uneasy when we hear the word “equality.” The girls at UNICEF know that the term is a safe cage to place our unflexibly difficult hopes for the future of our personal relationships and ambitions. One of the things that makes tea time conflicted for me is that I have no words with which to express my doubts and ingratuities to my so-called liberal social situation that have not been degraded. I would just love to develop a vocabulary for humanity the way we see it. I consider it an imperative that I test this vocabulary in as many and varied cultural situations as possible and absorb words so that the result is not only comfort but collaboration. I want to share tea, around the world, with anyone who has an exciting thought about humanity.