Back when I was a cute li’l co-ed — cardigan buttoned up to the neck and ponytail a-flippin’ — I signed up for an introductory woman’s studies course at my university. It was a good class, but I couldn’t help but notice how the more I learned from it, the more radical and frightening things started to get.
Of course, it started small. It always does — a quick braless errand to the convenience store across the street to my house, the occasional quoting of bell hooks — but it grew, OH, HOW IT GREW! Soon, learning about feminism and women’s lib had poisoned my mind to the point was calling myself a feminist, questioning the patriarchy and actually valuing the work of women who came before me and fought hard so that I could experience some semblance of equality. I suddenly had the audacity to question the current social and political system and ask how — if at all — it served women.
The black, tangled web of feminism had overwhelmed me. I’d stay up late into the night, chanting, “Men, men, how do we destroy men?” In the morning, I’d stare at myself in the mirror and whisper, “You’re the victim. Forever the victim, pretty lady” before snapping “DON’T YOU CALL ME PRETTY” at my own reflection. My hair fell out of my head, but grew rapidly under my arms and on my legs. You know it as typical feminist stuff. You know it because it also happened to you.
You might be thinking that you’re a lost cause. That you’ll never be happy again because you acknowledge rape culture and believe in reproductive freedom and the basic concept that women should be treated with the same fairness as men. That’s what I thought, too, until I discovered WomenAgainstFeminism, a super cool movement on Twitter and Tumblr that has opened my eyes to a lot of misconceptions that I’ve been holding onto about feminism. I’d like to share those things with you now so that, together, we can recover from this ideology that has actually never done anything good for women*.
First of all, I’d like to apologize to this woman. I’m the one who has been harassing her husband. I stand by his parking space at the corporate office where he works. I do it while wearing a leather jacket, smoking a cigarette and cracking my knuckles. I even have a hair comb that looks like a switch blade and sometimes I whisper “job-haver” under my breath as he walks by. Once he heard me and said, “Excuse me? What did you say?” and I said “JOB-HAVER” again, this time a whole lot louder, and he just shrugged and replied, “Oh, alright” and walked into the office where he earns a dollar for every 77 cents a woman with the same job would get.
Awhile back, I was at dinner with my dad when he passed me a bread basket and I almost said “Thank you.” It was so scary and I was so glad that I caught myself before I showed appreciation to a man and thereby ENCOURAGED RAPE CULTURE.
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