Yes, I left England. No, I was not happy about it. I'm looking for ways to go back. Anyway, enough about me.
I'm sure I've mentioned my Catholic upbringing. I was born into the Catholic church and somewhere around 13 I developed a deep, intense faith. Incidentally, this was around the same time I was entering my first full year in Catholic school - the first time I had attended Catholic school since I was eight. Like everything else in school, I wanted to be good and so I asked my school's priest how I could have more faith in God. He said just to pray for it, so I did. Apparently God answered that prayer because my faith, and my subsequent faith in the church's teachings, developed rapidly. I became a devout little Catholic, going so far as to write devotionals to the Virgin Mary and participate in virtually every service activity at my parish (Vacation Bible School, Sunday School, Youth Group, washing the linens my church used for Mass, and sometimes doing one of the readings at Mass). So, of course, the ideas of original sin and service took deep roots in my psyche. In Catholic school, we were taught that our baptism washed away our original sin but we were still left with our utterly human flaws. I learned that our flaws made us human and our humanity was incredible and beautiful but I still struggled with my imperfection in the face of God's complete perfection. This particular teaching made me feel not loved but worthless. I felt that because I was flawed God was the only one who would love me, kind of how only a father could love a retarded child, and no matter how hard I strived to be good, it would never be enough. I would always be ridden with sin and spiritual disease.
This leads into the second tenant of my Catholic faith: service. The only way to work towards the "cure" for my spiritual disease was to go out and serve those who needed my service. It's like in Spiderman: with great power comes great responsibility. I was born to an upper-middle class family who was blessed with more than enough of everything. Of course it was my responsibility to then reach out to those who were not quite as fortunate and help. It didn't matter if they might screw me over, my intentions were good (hence all the five dollar bills casually handed to any Joe Blow claiming to be working for a charity or, hell, the forty dollars donated to a random man in L'Enfant Plaza because he said he needed to get back to his family stranded on the highway). Yet even my generosity, my service to my parish, and all my efforts to follow the general tenants of my faith were not enough to wipe out my sin, at least not in my eyes. So today I'm left with an enormous sense of guilt: it's my responsibility to fix it because I can, but no matter what I do it won't be enough.
Fast-forward a few years and I've left the church but my need to fix everything or pay it forward or what-have-you still persists. Over the past year I've become keenly aware of my place in the feminist movement. In the US the evangelical Christian movement is injecting itself into the government in ways that work to deny women their basic reproductive rights and women still have to struggle for equal pay. In the UK, women are still protesting for equal rights despite the fact that they actually had a chick in the highest governing office. Stereotypes in so-called first world countries abound that still relegate women to a secondary status compared to their male counterparts. If my mom calls my cousin's toddler son "beautiful", his father (cousin-in-law) gets upset. I have to wonder why: is there something wrong with being beautiful? Does it, perhaps, have a distinctly feminine connotation? What's wrong with a feminine adjective? Does being beautiful make him less of a man?
The linguistic debate alone within the boundaries of gender discourse has already taken up thousands of pages written by thousands of scholars and I'm pretty sure there's plenty of room for more. I'm only trying to highlight the fact that, for women, the struggle for equal rights and equal standing isn't over. In the US and the UK we can vote, we can divorce our husbands without any huge legal repercussions (or, hell, without being stoned to death), and we don't have to get married or have kids if we don't want to! But as Youtubers thethrashlab point out in their video What Do Feminists Have Left? we really have a ways to go. Hell, the sheer fact that men in Myanmar feel it's a good idea to attack a woman by throwing acid in their faces just because the woman said, "No, I really don't want to marry you" or that in India and China the government would really rather not tell mothers the gender of their babies because they know the mothers will abort baby girls *...yeah, all of that...globally we really have a long way to go.
So where does that leave me? Here I am, waking up to a movement that needs me to stand up and help however I can; it needs me to be informed, aware, and active. But the very definition of this movement is so diverse, so divergent, that its very members can't even agree on what it looks like. For some women, like my one more conservative friend, it's simply the right to choose to be a housewife without any outside pressure or judgement. For other women, it's fighting for women to be able to participate in the spheres normally designated for men. And that's just within the first-world Caucasian sector. I'm not even going to get into the African-American Feminism sector where you have to factor in race as well as gender.
So what is a girl to do? Every day that I learn more about feminism and the basic rights we still have to struggle for, as well as the negative perceptions we still have to face, I feel like I'm drowning. I'm drowning first in my ignorance (because the glut of new information is insane), then in my impotence. Just like I couldn't solve the world's problems and suffering (or my own) through my service for the Catholic church, I feel like I can't or don't do jack for the women in the world who may need me. My guilt here is worse because I can't even point to any physical service like Bible School or youth group activities as proof that I've been a good feminist. I don't help out at any domestic abuse shelters or clinic, I haven't volunteered for Planned Parenthood, I haven't even gone out and stood in a protest. All I can do is point to a general attitude that has been growing over the past year.
I feel like my preference to keep calm and quiet, to not rock the boat, bars me from joining any active feminist protests or even engaging in the feminist conversation. Planned Parenthood in my area doesn't need volunteers. Sure I can donate money, but as I learned in the church, giving money is not enough to save either your soul or theirs. I realize that no one is asking me to be their saving grace but I still feel the pressure to be a "good" feminist in the same way I felt the pressure to be a "good" Catholic. This time, however, it's harder because, as I mentioned before, the very definition of a feminist is highly divergent and no one single woman can encompass all of its traits within herself.
It's led me to wonder if I even have a place within the feminist movement at all. I'm not the kind of girl to stand up in a protest and shout. I went down to the Occupy London protests in front of St. Paul's Cathedral back in October 2011 and even though I absolutely agreed with what they were fighting for, the massive mob of people all shouting for the same thing made me nervous. People shouting makes me nervous in general. I'm not a good shouter. I am a good reader/writer, two activities that certainly doesn't require shouting. But is that enough?
So, I have to ask again: considering everything I've said, as a feminist, where do I stand? Do I do enough as it is? Am I a "good" feminist?
* All information here is drawn from a Gender Politics in East Asia class I took back in 2009. Gross inaccuracies are likely.
* All information here is drawn from a Gender Politics in East Asia class I took back in 2009. Gross inaccuracies are likely.
