I have to make a confession: I too was once confused about what feminism really was. I grew up believing it was a movement by angry women who wanted all the things and blamed men for not having them. I remember as a teenager, I was sitting at the kitchen table with my mother, after reading an article critical of feminism. I asked her, "Mom, are you a feminist?" She replied matter-of-factly, "Yes." Shamefully, I wrinkled my nose and said "Eww, why?" She looked at me and, without being judgmental, said "Because I believe men and women should have equal rights and opportunities." The thing with snippet memories like that is that you don't really remember what happened next. In any event, as a teenager, I had misunderstood what feminism was about, and I didn't even know how it happened. I wasn't absorbing the criticism of feminism, but rather the misconception of it.
A few years later I was attending the University of Windsor, and in the student building there was a organization called the "Womyn's Centre" that advertised itself as a feminist organization. I remember wanting nothing to do with it, imagining sitting in a hippy-dippy bean bag chair circle-jerk with a bunch of Doc Martens and oversize T-shirt-wearing dykes making such a big deal over things that really didn't matter to me. Even the name felt aggressive to me: the removal of "men" from the name felt gender-exclusive, this (totally imagined) holier-than-thou I don't need men attitude put me off. I was away at university, for crying out loud. Sex with guys was an extra-curricular activity! I did need men!
I never walked into their office, or checked out their website in my entire four year tenure. When a floor mate was slipped a date-rape drug (thankfully we noticed she was not OK at the bar and left immediately), it never occurred to me this place would have been equipped to provide support and resources to her. Having said that, it also never occurred to me to find reasons to blame her behaviour for being drugged. She was the victim of a crime, full stop. Which is probably the way the Womyn's Centre would have put it.
Seven years after graduating, I've just popped over to their website and here's their landing page manifesto:
Our mandate:
- Advocacy of the fundamental rights of womankind
- To educate others on issues surrounding women
- To promote and enhance the status of women
Our objectives:
- To support all women, as individuals or groups, whose needs and aspirations are consistent with our mandate
- To advocate for an educational system free of sexual bias
- To educate our community on women's physical, economic, social and mental conditions
- To ensure accessibility to all women, especially womyn who face intensive discrimination
- To eliminate myths, stereotypes and ignorance about the Womyn's Centre, thus increasing participation and bridging gaps in the community
Putting aside the inconsistency of using both women and womyn (they're just kids after all), the last point really struck me. Their objectives are perfectly reasonable, even logical, yet they know lots of people think just like I did years ago, and they want to change that perception. Or perhaps sadly, they know the perception is their biggest obstacle, rather than the system itself.
Why do people like me (reasonably intelligent, well-educated, stunningly beautiful, gloriously witty), shy away from organizations such as this? How did I manage to reject it before knowing what it was, and even that it spoke directly to my experience as a woman? Is the anti-feminist movement really that well-oiled that I was absorbing and regurgitating their message without realizing it?
At the risk of sounding fringe-y, I do believe the media plays a role in this. The types of feminists they portray are the types of people I didn't want to associate myself with: angry, bitter, ugly, loud, making an issue out of nothing. I remember the Toronto Sun, a conservative tabloid-style paper, wrote about a law that recognized a woman's right to be topless in public, just like men, and the topless woman they put on the front page was older (ie, over thirty), not overly attractive (ie, not like the women they put on the third page of the very same newspaper), and had small, saggy breasts (ie, not Page 3 breasts). It's a frustrating duality, isn't it? An ugly woman with an opinion (bad) versus a beautiful woman with no opinion (good).
Believe it or not, during my time in university I did experience a feminist education. In a media class, I saw sexism like the example I mention above. In politics and history, I learned almost exclusively about the accomplishments of men. Despite what some anti-feminists would have you believe, I wasn't unhappy about learning about them. They had shaped our world (for better or worse) so of course they should be included in the syllabus. The greater question is not whether women shaped history - of course they did - it was the fact that in the course of history, women were so often marginalized that they seldom had the opportunity to make change in the way that men did, and how on that basis their contributions are all the more impressive.
I read about feminism and, more importantly, I read about its significant advances in a few short decades. I listened to women explain what it was like before: glass ceilings, maternity leave that was too-short to non-existent, domestic violence, sexual harassment, reproductive rights, income inequality. Basically, discrimination in virtually every space. Having been born in the mid-80s, there was so much I didn't know. So much I didn't appreciate that feminists did for me.
Having been a self-identified feminist for a few years now, it disappoints me to see women my age (not stupid teenagers like I was) who rebuff the term feminist without understanding what it means and how it has affected their lives before they started. They are happy to absorb its benefits without appreciating the fight that won them, or even that they had to be fought for in the fucking first place.
I also believe that as a political ideology, there always needs to be a contextual flexibility. With every victory comes a new battle, just as with every defeat comes a re-evaluation of goals or a re-calibration of strategy. And the movement must respond to the climate in which it exists in order for its objectives to remain relevant. In that sense, I don't have an issue with people rejecting the movement. At its core, feminism is about women being empowered to make their own choices, and if a woman's choice is to reject feminism for what it is (or isn't) to them, then it would be hypocritical of me to demean that choice.
But in our age of information exploding out of our handheld devices, it's frustrating to hear starlet after starlet misunderstand feminism. Refusing to call themselves feminists because they "love men" (Shailene Woodley), or because they're "not interested in pretending to be a man" (Evangeline Lilly), or because "they believe in equality" (make sense of that gem from Salma Hayek), or so you can "love yourself more" (Meghan Trainor).
I appreciate the argument of getting hung up on the word "feminist" when it's the work that matters. Of course I respect anyone - male or female - who seeks to destroy the inequality of the sexes. It's just that so many people shy away from the word because it's been bastardized by those who either oppose its values (ie, don't believe in gender equality) or don't understand it. I don't want to give into that. I don't want people like Rush Limbaugh to win and let the word feminist be shamed out of public discourse because he feels so childishly threatened by it that he has to lie about what it is. A cat can have kittens in the oven, but that don't make 'em biscuits.
