I am a 24 year old girl and my last boyfriend used to jokingly refer to me as a ‘righteous lesbian’ for my feminist tendencies. I don’t even think I’m that much of a feminist at all. However, when I’m told that girls are not as good at something as boys, I will take the bait and argue every time. I grew up with 2 brothers and 4 male cousins. I am smarter than all of them and they know it. I was smarter than most boys throughout my schooling. So don’t tell me I can’t do something just because I’m a girl. I’ll definitely do it better than you if I think you’re a bigot and I want to prove you’re wrong. Continue reading
Category: The Meaning of Feminism (Page 3 of 4)
Modern feminism submits that the problem is not making women and men equal, the problem is that women and men are false categories to work with. Some women exhibit “manly” characteristics, some men are “girly”. So making such a big thing out of the detail of possessing or lacking a Y chromosome is senseless – we could perhaps have a gender spectrum, but your biology shouldn’t enter into the matter.
So I, a member of the ‘other side,’ attended my first feminist d
iscussion group yesterday. All in all it was a fascinating experience, with an excellent array of speakers from all walks of feminism, from domestic violence charities to research into the philosophy of gender in sport. Yet the meeting really heated up when we began to ask ourselves what it was all about. ‘Gender equality’ was the boring, uninformative, obvious answer, but how to achieve it?
It seems like we’ve all become apologists for a brand of feminism that stands for anything as long as it also stands in opposition to such contentious issues as anger, militancy, bra-burning, hairy legs, lesbianism, etc etc. In this game, any expression of aggression or force is immediately put in a box marked ‘crazy militant feminist, run for your life’. When what I say can be seen as ‘in that box’, my opinion is necessarily invalid. It seems to me that people in the small ‘l’ liberal, middle-class circles that I inhabit believe vaguely in the equality of men and women, but any real attempt to address said equality in a feminist rather than broadly egalitarian framework is somehow identified with crazy militant feminism. It is therefore ignored. Continue reading