How Do You Feel About Feminism (or Anti-Feminists?)

Hey Mibba!

I hope people still frequent here because I've been kind of stewing on this question lately and I have no where else to branch out to strangers about it, so, hello! Thank you for joining me! Glad you could make it!

Honestly, I'm just wondering what you guys think about girls who don't identify as feminists? Are you one of those girls? If so, why? How do you identify with feminism? What are your thoughts on it?

Now, I guess I should preface with yes, I do call myself a feminist. Now, I hope that isn't an immediate click-away to a lot of you, but I've been doing a lot of exploring lately and thinking a lot about it. I used to immediately cringe away when girls said they weren't feminists- I'd be like why not? Why would you not want to be a part of this movement that hopes to benefit you? But I've really opened up myself lately, I've been listening to a lot of different perspectives and so on, and now I can see why there's a lot of reasons why girls wouldn't want to be feminists.

For one, for women of colour, feminism has an awful track record of being super white feminist-y. I mean, I'm white, and while I try to be as conscious as I can, I must admit that white feminism is a big problem for the movement. I lot of feminist icons (Tina Fey, Lena Dunham, Amy Schumer) have awful track records of this kind of thing, and I can definitely understand why people would want to distance themselves away from that.

For second, trans woman have also had a ridiculous deal of being excluded from the movements. There's a lot of radical feminists that are very concerned about what you have in your pants, which is awful, but, I'm not someone who would deny that presence in the feminist movement. I try to be really intersectional with my feminism, and I'm definitely all for the inclusion of trans woman, but I can see how any transgender person might be wary of this type of thing.

And of course, there are girls that kind of just shrug their shoulders and go, well, it doesn't really affect me. I'm okay with whatever. I don't see a big deal.

I can understand that too. I mean, if you're open to conversation but just don't find it relevant, I don't know, I used to feel this intense need to like turn people to feminism, especially girls, but these days, I'm just kind of open to conversation. If you don't feel like feminism is your thing, I'm okay with it. It's not for everyone.

For me, personally, I kind of found feminism in a kind of dark? part of my life. I'd gotten taken advantage of when I was really intoxicated, blurry memories are just painful and awkward and losing my virginity was not all of rainbows and roses I was promised when I was younger. Which, I mean, is a another thing in itself, but yeah.

And I kind of held this dark thing inside for the longest time, kind of just being like yeah, well, I drank a lot. I could've made a bigger deal of stopping it. It's not that bad, he didn't mean it, I'm just looking to much into it. And then I found feminism, and then ideas of consent, and I'm really happy that, if anything, feminism is really pushing forward the conversation on consent. And I no longer carried around that burden, that dark spot inside of me, and I was able to let it go, which was amazing. And I think that's why I wanted other people to see feminism in the same light I did, was because it honestly helped me a lot.

I know it's a lot of "professionally offended" and whatnot, but I think this culture that at least I live in, it doesn't want to talk about rape. It doesn't want to talk about assault. It doesn't want to talk about the seemingly "innocent" ways guys will approach girls at bars and so on. I'm sick and tired of going out only to get grabbed, to get yelled at when I don't properly reciprocate what guys want, to be demeaned, all in ways that my guy friends whom I go out with never deal with. I like going out, but sometimes it's just so draining dealing with multiple guys just not understanding boundaries. And it's always happening to my girl friends, never happening to my guy friends.

It's sad to think that someone I know just got accepted into the military and told our mutual friend he's excited to go over seas to have sex with woman and for them to say no, which when our friend was like "dude that's rape", he had the audacity to say it wasn't.

This is a smart, college-educated guy who I was friends with.

And that's the kind of thing that really brought me to feminism. The idea that too many of my girl friends have been raped or assaulted and I've never ever ever seen any guy ever face any kind of consequence. That's I guess like, my "brand" of feminism. I don't know.

And I guess that's really contributed with my lifestyle? I'm in college, I like going out, I like drinking, most of my friends do too, and there's this really gross dynamic that happens in college drinking culture that I'm not too fond of.

I'm just curious to know what you guys think! Are you guys feminists? Are you guys not feminists? I'm interested in conversation!
November 5th, 2016 at 01:15am