Yes, You Are
October 3, 2008Erin 2 Comments »It’s powerful. Go read the whole thing here, at Tomato Nation.
If you believe in, support, look fondly on, hope for, and/or work towards equality of the sexes, you are a feminist. Period. It’s more complicated than that — of course it is. And yet…it’s exactly that simple. It has nothing to do with your sexual preference or your sense of humor or your fashion sense or your charitable donations, or what pronouns you use in official correspondence, or whether you think Andrea Dworkin is full of crap, or how often you read Bust or Ms. — or, actually, whether you’ve got a vagina. In the end, it’s not about that. It is about political, economic, and social equality of the sexes, and it is about claiming that definition on its own terms, instead of qualifying it because you don’t want anyone to think that you don’t shave your pits. It is about saying that you are a feminist and just letting the statement sit there, instead of feeling a compulsion to modify it immediately with “but not, you know, that kind of feminist” because you don’t want to come off all Angry Girl.
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Posted on October 8th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
I so, SO disagree with this.
Nobody gets the right to tell me what I am. If I say I’m a feminist, then fine. And if I don’t, NOBODY gets to say “Well, you believe this, so you ARE a feminist.”
And that’s yet another reason why you’ll never see me referring to myself as a feminist. I refuse to be lumped in with a social cause that, for the most part, doesn’t match my values, regardless of my belief in equality of the sexes.
Posted on October 8th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
Ok, I can see your point.
However, to play devil’s advocate, if you were to continually make racist jokes and lived your life in such a way that you made your preference for or against certain races of people obvious, I would call you a racist, whether or not you personally believed that you were.
So, if you believe that there should be equality between the sexes and make choices based on that (not taking a job with a company that openly paid men more than women for the same work, for example), then I would call you a feminist.
But then, I don’t believe that there is a unified social cause for feminism. There is a lot of schism within the movement, between so-called second and third wave feminists, etc.
If it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck … it’s probably a duck.