Girls, Grrrls, Women, Womyn, Amazons, Feminists, Feminazis, and Ladies

Sitting up tonight watching Family Guy and [adultswim] for the first time in years and oh, good lord, no wonder it's been ages!  I used to think Family Guy was hilarious, at least from season four on to season ten.  After season ten you can tell Seth McFarlane is trying to juggle three "different" shows and it's just...lame.  But the first ten seasons, they're not too bad, right?  Who doesn't love Stewie and Brian's repartee or the witty-yet-random cutaway scenes that are staples to the show?  Who doesn't love to see the whole family pick on Meg?  Well, me, apparently.  In one scene Meg announces to her father that she will not have sex until she is married.  Her father responds that this is a terrible mistake!  Why? Because sex is healthy?  Because it shouldn't be feared based on the teachings of an outdated religious dogma?  NO!  Because she's a "practice girl" and teenage boys need to use her so they will eventually be awesome conquerors of the female sex!  I used to think this was funny!!  I just cringed!  I'm still cringing.  Seth McFarlane, you used to be awesome.  Now I just think you're an asshole.  Did I grow up?  Am I just being too sensitive?

It's been more than a year since I finally started calling myself a feminist and I'm still struggling with it.  I'm talking about it more, I'm noticing how much we need it in places I didn't (practice girls??), I'm slowly seeking out other feminist communities, heck, if I do this right and don't chicken out I'll be marching in the 2013 DC SlutWalk come August and I might have a poster or two to wave.  My first protest!  If I don't get a panic attack and bolt before the seething masses of people first.  Really, I should feel empowered and brave, like I can conquer the world, but I still feel like a squeaking little mouse.  Me over here in my corner of the blogging world, squeak squeak squeak.

Right, get to the core of it, love.  What are you really talking about?
Some feminists still scare the daylights out of me.  Okay, if you ask my therapist I'm scared of everything.  I don't know how I expect to be an incredible feminist commentator cum media professor when I can't even squeak out an order for a latte at Starbucks.  Not the point.  I love feminism with all my heart and I love what it stands for.  I love the women who stand up in Texas and North Carolina and shout out against slut-shaming and rape culture and misogyny in all of the nerd cultures but oh my god I am so not one of them.  I don't know what I am.


I am a people pleaser and I absolutely want everyone's approval.  I want my fierce grrls to be proud of me, I want my non-feminist friends to understand what feminism (my idea of it, at least) is and to not shy away from it, I want my government out of my uterus, and I want my society's gender dogma out of my head.  I want my freedom.  Oh my god, do I want my freedom.  I want my freedom to speak, my courage to roar and to not worry about the shouts and murmurs that will echo back to me.  As it is now I can barely get my voice above a squeak, especially when I'm at work and I'm working with a male boss or male superiors.  I don't know if it's fair to blame my nervousness and my muteness on a patriarchal society, especially since I'm just shy in general.  However, since I was very little I have loved and feared and needed the opposite sex in the worst way.  My mother, my best girl friends, random women on the street could tell me I was pretty, smart, talented, and amazing but I refused to believe it.  It wasn't until a guy came along and validated me with his affection and approval did any of those notions sink in.

I am not fierce.  I'm a feminist, but I'm afraid to be fierce.

Maybe 6 months later

I wrote the above beginnings of an entry more than six months ago, when Wendy Davis went Mother-of-Dragons on Texas to stand against the horribly restrictive anti-abortion laws that Republicans succeeded in pushing through and women in North Carolina were fighting against similar laws.  I'm still tortured by the fact that, as an activist, I am not a shouter.  I didn't attend Slutwalk like I had planned.  I decided to take a work call instead, and that earned me some more money to pay for my PhD, so that's okay.  But you know the saying, "If it's important to you, you'll find a way; if not, you'll find an excuse".  I was too scared.  Like I said six months ago, I am so not fierce.  

But I am a talker.  And I can feel my confidence growing because feminism doesn't scare me anymore (some parts I take issue with, but that's another story.  Bloody TERFs.).  So maybe that counts as a sort of ferocity: I have enough confidence in my feminist beliefs that I no longer find myself equivocating my stance to appease the other person.  If I know they disagree with me on a fundamental level ("Women totally belong at home!  Their periods make them too crazy to have any power."), I walk away.  Hell, I won't date a guy unless I know he's a feminist full-stop.  So that has changed.  I'm proud of that change.  If I'm not a shouter and a protester I am slowly becoming a talker who stands for something important.  

So it's interesting to hear myself talk when a young woman tells me she is "all for women's rights but [she is] not a feminist".  I sputter and gape and I hear my heart break.  I feel the cogs in my head gearing up to try and open her mind because, to me, it's so simple.  Do you support women's rights and gender equality?  Yes?  Viola!  You are a feminist!  

I want to shake the girl who tells me this stuff and yell, "WAKE UP.  DON'T YOU SEE WHAT YOU ACCEPT AS NORMAL FOR YOUR GENDER IS UTTER CRAP?" but doing so would be incredibly alienating.  I am not out to convert people because that's not how activism works.  One must present others with the facts and allow them to come to their own conclusions.  Doing anything else would make me no better than the bigoted evangelical Christians that tell people they're going to hell simply for not being baptized into their particular faith.  It doesn't work.   

The reality is, we live in a feminist backlash.  After the incredible surge of women's activism in the 70s and 80s, people started thinking, "Whoa now, that's enough.  Men are no longer manly!  We must save our men from women's overwhelming new power!" (Okay, it wasn't so literal.  You get what I mean.). So people began saying the war for equality was won and those feminists who were still fighting, well, they were rabid and delusional, like they were attacking perfectly nice, kind men with their smelly arm pits or something. 

I grew up thinking this.  I still remember walking to school with a friend and saying, "I'm a humanist, not a feminist." (This was after I had spent an hour discussing the need for more information on female yogis and the discourse surrounding Draupadi and Sita in classical Hindu texts).  When I thought of feminists, I thought of Femme Fatale from The Powerpuff Girls or some insanely angry, man-eater that randomly harassed men on the streets for possessing a penis.  I still thought "feminazi" was a meaningful, relevant term to use because I didn't know Rush Limbaugh originally coined it to silence any sort of woman who wanted to leave the kitchen.  Of course I now know that I had it all wrong...

I'm posting this particular blog because I want to remember that I didn't always have the sort of confidence and awareness I do today.  It took many, many years and hundreds of conversations with friends, family, and fellow students for me to finally declare, "Hell yeah I'm a feminist!"  It may make me sad or frustrated or even slightly angry to hear "I'm all for equality, but...", but I have to remember: that was me at 18.  Heck, that was me at 24.  Everyone is different.  For now, all I can do is open my door to anyone who wants to pick my brain.