COLUMN: Why are women afraid of the f-word?
If you’ve ever been at a party and told someone you’re a feminist, you can probably understand the awkward silence after the person you’re talking to spits back that word as though it’s the cause of the bubonic plague.
That’s why when I’m at parties I make sure to tell everyone that I am an anarchy-feminist who works to bring destruction to the patriarchy and other social institutions that uphold the heteropatriarchal white power structures. I make sure to do this all while drinking my Oberon because I like to be as pretentious as possible. It makes men queasy.
I don’t believe feminism is about equality. Why would I ever want to be equal within a society that was built on gendered oppression?
But generally, feminists believe in the social, economic and political equality between men and women, at least that’s what the dictionary believes.
Since I am in the minority of feminists, I wonder why women are so afraid of the “f word”. Feminism is about empowerment and the freedom for women from oppression. It’s difficult to understand how anyone could disagree with that as a starting point.
Identifying as a feminist one day does not mean that the next day you’ll have to be cast as the “Angry Vagina” in the Vagina Monologues. It takes time to come into one’s skin – especially when you’ve had years of oppression holding you down.
I am a feminist because I believe a person’s body is their own. I am a feminist because I know too many women who have been sexually assaulted. I am a feminist because I believe in the right to access medically-accurate sex education. I am a feminist because I will fight to end oppression.
I know most women believe in these ideologies, so why be afraid?
Being a feminist means that you recognize the social ills that influence gender oppression and you work to stop them. A feminist will not just look out for those of a certain class, race or any other marginalized social status, and they will also be aware of the privileges they hold in society and recognize the intricacies of the oppression.
I hope that soon, the disdain for feminism washes away. As a result, I hope there will be new baby feminists running all around looking to get started and rolling back the damages that were done in the mean time.
Careful though, baby feminists tend to bite.
In a society that works tirelessly everyday to halt the progress women have made, “the f word” might be more important now than we could ever had imagined before.
