I have three T-shirts that people will consistently comment
on: 1. The green T-shirt that has the bloke riding a dinosaur; it says, “Real
life would be much cooler if we all rode dinosaurs to work.” 2. My Lost t-shirt
which is based on the show’s fifth season, so please don’t actually look at
that shirt if you don’t want spoilers. 3. My green Women’s Centre T-shirt, in
women’s medium size, which boldly and plainly says “feminist.” across the front
of the shirt.
Several females (*exceptionally off topic tangent at the end of post) on random
encounters commented positively on my Women's Centre shirt the various times I wore it. "Nice shirt!" said somebody I don't know as I walked through Central. So
far so good.
Where I ran into more skepticism with my shirt was with a
few (incidentally male) friends. “What IS feminism? Why do you feel the need to
tell people that you’re a...feminist?” As if my proclaiming that opinion was
the most outlandish thing ever. As tends to be the case with my blog posts, I
will now flesh out the response that I wish I had prepared at the time – one that
will show why I am an ally of feminism. This is why I believe in feminism, and
why it’s a topic that we shouldn’t shoot down without a second thought, but
rather, a conversation that needs to continue and be agreed and disagreed upon.
My first point is that feminism is a more inclusive term
then we’ve let it become. Women’s rights have been an arduous battle – for rights,
equality of opportunity, cultural recognition, economic standing, and fair
media representation, to name a few. In the US at least, these are indicators
that have changed for the better over the last 100 or so years. At worst, it’s
not unreasonable to think that these are important rights for women that we
should not forget. Assuming that the battle is completely over is wrong in my
opinion. Moreover, to not recognize these struggles is to forget an important
part of human history. I think many of us are too quick to say, “yes, feminism
did the job in the 60s. It’s done; let’s stop talking about it.” I literally
just asked my friend while writing this post what she thought of feminism. Her
knee jerk reaction: “um, pointless.” I haven’t done my research so maybe I’m
wrong and maybe everything’s okay. But I hypothesize that most of us have this
instinctive reaction nowadays that even if feminism is a relatively agreeable
thing, it’s nowhere near the top of the priority list of things to fix in this
world.
However, feminism isn’t done. The US debate on sexual health
policy on contraception and abortion is a significant piece of proof that
feminism is still needed. In particular, members of the US government who are
not only predominantly male, but also misguided, have been pushing for
unreasonable policies. There’s more that could be said about this topic, but I will
defer to the smarter and cleverer people – I just wanted to highlight one recent
issue in which it makes sense for feminism to continue to exist as a movement.
Feminism runs into the problem that the word itself connotes
a movement that is “too extreme.” Every movement has its extremists, but
feminism is all the aforementioned rights that we would mostly consider inalienable.
Feminism also certainly isn’t about making women better than everyone else. In my
personal conception of the movement, a big part of feminism is about removing
the barriers that we still hold over the women in our society. I arrived at
this conclusion in thinking about sports. It used to surprise me back in high
school cross country, the amount of girls who were faster than me. In my so
called glory days, I was an average to better-than-average runner. I will not,
however, try to tell you I ran a 2:50 marathon. Just like you can do with Paul
Ryan, you can simply search my name on Google to find out my running records.
(You won’t find a voting record though because the one thing I have ever voted
on so far has been Amendment 1). Anyhow, there were a fair amount of girls who would
be minutes faster than me – these crazy chicks who were doing six minute miles.
Three times in a row. This was always a point of macho-joking amongst the sophomore
boys on our team who were just starting to taste varsity racing and stop
training with our fastest girls. We were never actually “fast” until we were
faster than the girls. We’re men. We’re supposed to be better than them!
I do not mean to disregard that the average female is
biologically different from the average male. Male athletes are indeed stronger
and faster at many major sports (but not all of them!) However, our society has
interpreted the biological averages without also weighing the possibility for
humans to excel beyond those trends. Humankind has constantly outdone itself in
every possible field (or track, pool, etc.) Everyone can do better. However, I
would argue that on the whole, our culture assumes women will be less talented
or less well-equipped in life. We fulfill that prophecy, and there are actual
outcomes that result from this – the gender divide in CEOs of major corporations,
for example. I’ve now heard multiple times from my friends, “My adviser [at
Duke] keeps asking me if I’m really sure about biophysics because he says it’s
a lot of work, but he never says anything like that to his male advisees,” or “I
chose to study to be a nurse instead of a doctor because everybody told me
being a doctor would be too hard for a girl” or “I don’t want to go to Wall
Street because I always hear women can’t handle the stress.” By no means am I
saying that every girl should become a soulless premed or enter the
soul-crushing walls of Wall Street. Rather, we must remove the inhibitions and
voices in the heads of women everywhere that they should not try to do
something because their gender is expected to hinder them.
So, remember those shirts I was talking about at the
beginning of this blog post? One shirt that does not make that list is my green
Love = Love shirt. That’s an amazing thing really, that I have walked around
the Duke Campus and downtown Durham wearing a pro-LGBT shirt without getting a
single comment on it. When it comes to the LGBT community, defining a feminine
identity is another spectrum to consider. I won’t go into that because that
would mean trying to speak for too many people I don’t have the right to speak
for. However, one idea still applies here, always – there is more that brings
us together than drives us apart. Both feminism and LGBT advocacy are movements
that want to equalize the mainstream and the marginalized group(s). For
example, I especially believe that we should try to erode the pervasiveness of
heteronormativity because in the end, why should two blokes getting married and
adopting a kid be considered abnormal? Yet along the way, the LGBT community
and the feminist movement have forged their own identities and subidentities
through the persistence of their resistance to marginalization, or at least in
their escapism from the mainstream. These identities of course, lead to
stereotypes, you know, the flaming gay or the Femnazi.
Many of us have internalized the most extreme images of the
activists for our respective causes. We’re all guilty of it, but I’m not going
to try and point fingers and say that women have been wronged more severely
than LGBT individuals or that the subcultures associated with oppressed racial,
ethnic, gender/sexual groups should not exist. Instead, I want to put this out
as an open question to those who are reading this – is it somehow more socially
acceptable or fashionable to say you’re an LGBT ally than it is to be a
feminist? My impression is that because the legal gains of women and feminism
are on average, more advanced than those of the LGBT community, people are more
likely to assume feminism is no longer necessary. And for whatever reason, we
also think what is left of feminism are just vestigial extremists, caricatures
and stereotypes. As I hope I’ve convinced you about by now, there are still
reasons why feminism or something similar to exist.
“Well I’m an
equalist,” said a friend in the LGBT Centre, somewhat humorously. Equality is
indeed what we should be striving for, but there are only three ways to create
equality – A. bring someone down, B. bring someone up, or C. make everyone
better off through trade. Now option A. certainly is not optimal. I’ll also
note here that I believe affirmative action is a dangerous thing that has been
abused although the motivations behind such policies should not be disregarded
entirely given that people indeed originate from different contexts on the
basis of race, gender, and sexual orientation (this in itself is also another
talk to be had by smarter people than me). The need empowerment is why we give
the names we give to these marginalized subgroups – that’s why it’s LGBT,
feminism (referring to women), etc. This is why I’m not so quick to shoot down “feminism”
as an overly generic term and how I’ve come to rationalize the acronym LGBT as
a term that highlights some (but unfortunately not all) the groups that want
and need to be empowered.
So that leaves us with B. and C. Empowerment is a very powerful
force, but those who hold power in our society will naturally want to hold on
to their power. Feminism is in a transition state where the movement has gotten
oh-so-close in many ways but is lacking in others - making it particularly
prone to the pushback by those who might not necessarily want to see women
empowering themselves. Within the way I am talking about this, it’s hard to
really have any one-sided endowment of power. That brings me to C. When I talk
about trade, I’m not talking about meat and potatoes because I’m a vegetarian,
so let’s go with potatoes and beans. Bringing more women to the game means a lot
of things. The reality is that there are certain short-term sacrifices that
need to be made to accommodate for the empowerment of more people.
A friend of mine tells me that she’s afraid of medical
school since she wants to be married by 25 or 30 and having kids. Residency
would be a nightmare, no? There’s a brilliant article by Anne-Marie Slaughter
about the challenges facing women today in terms of the doubled expectations to
be successful as professionals and as family-starters. Some scientific
literature actually suggests the transition to two working parents has helped contribute
to a decrease in healthy eating in the US. In other words, we need a
multidimensional solution – labor laws and work culture need to change to
accommodate for a more gender - equal workplace and home setting and men in
mainstream heterosexual marriages need to assume some responsibility over the
traditional housewife realm, to name a couple changes that could help this
issue. Optimizing this scenario could potentially benefit families and couples,
allowing any young person to grow into a world where they don’t have to do
everything (get a job, save the world, have a family). If we can integrate this
type of thinking into our politics and culture, that we need to optimize not
only for profit, but also for resource allocation and lower social cost given
feminist considerations, then we can do what humans were made (evolved?) to do:
exceed everyone that came before us.
Feminism represents the new compromises and trades that we
need to make across genders to make sure everybody is empowered and endowed
with equal opportunities.
If nothing else, please give me more free shirts. They’re
more empowering than you’d think.
*Tangential discussion point – Can someone comment on what
the most neutral but also not-awkward-sounding words for “female” and “vagina”
might be? I find it rather telling that we have nice-sounding informal words
that are accepted for males and their genitals – “guy” and “dick.” Woman is too
formal, girl is too condescending, and lady just sounds off for some reason. There
isn’t really a word for vagina that isn’t an anatomical vocabulary word, a huge
swear word or doesn’t sound plain ridiculous. Why isn’t this a part of our
vocabulary? Are vaginas just that icky?
No comments:
Post a Comment