Let's talk about the F word; that dirty word that you know you shouldn’t say but kind of want to anyway – FEMINISM.
What images do you conjure up in your head when you think of feminism? Bra-burning, man-hating, hairy, angry women? When I think of feminism I think of something even more radical; something absolutely wild. Feminism to me is a belief that people of all genders should be – get this – treated EQUALLY!!!
What is this propaganda?! I must be menstruating, otherwise there’s no possible reason I could get away with saying something so ridiculous – it must be the hormones playing up, love. We’re already giving women the utter privilege of being able to join the workforce, have their own bank accounts and even wear TROUSERS. Now they’re demanding that their bank accounts come with equal salaries and their trousers come with equally sized pockets? It’s political correctness gone mad!
Feminism is literally just a belief in the social, political and economic equality for ALL people of ALL genders. It’s not just for a group of middle-class, cisgender, able-bodied, straight white women – it is for everyone.
The more privilege you have within the group of gender minorities (by this I am referring to being a minority in terms of access to power, rather than on a population level), the more important it is that you stand up for the rights of those that are more marginalised.
I am a big fat F word – although now the term I use to describe myself is ‘Intersectional feminist’ because I’m bougie and I like using extra words so people know that English is my first language and think that I’m a legit blogger.
The ideas around Intersectionality help us to understand that people can belong to multiple marginalised groups and can have very different experiences because of that. For example as a brown woman, I don’t just experience the sum of being brown and being a woman, I have a unique experience of being a brown woman in and of itself. Intersectionality also helps us to understand that you can simultaneously be oppressed and be privileged, and even sometimes contribute to the oppression of other marginalised groups without realising it.
Feminism has always ended up getting a bit of a bad name for various reasons. It’s almost as though the privileged white men in our society that have historically upheld the patriarchy had something to gain from ridiculing people who were asking for equality…
There’s often this rhetoric used by such people that being a feminist means that you hate men and want women to dominate over men – surely the only reason people could be asking if they could maybe not be oppressed is because they have a secret agenda to castrate their husbands?
The imagery of old-school feminists burning bras and growing out their body hair never bothered me or put me off feminism – to me it was always clear that feminism is about equality, equity and liberation; it is about freedom and the ability to express yourself which ever way you want. For some people that may mean freeing the nipple and dying your armpit hair blue, and for others it may mean paying someone actual money to pour hot wax over your body to remove every shred of evidence that your body hair exists. I don’t think either of these acts make anyone less of a feminist – as long as it is their own decision to do so. To me feminism is all about having autonomy over your own body and your own life.
Of course, sometimes it’s hard to disentangle whether we are doing something because we actually want to, or whether there has been some deep-seated social conditioning going on. It’s that age-old question which rolls off all of our tongues: ‘do I actually want this, or has our patriarchal, cis-heterenormative, racist, capitalist society brainwashed me into thinking I want it?’
I’ve been trying to do a lot of learning around what our society has brainwashed me to think about myself in the context of body image. It’s a topic that comes up a lot these days, with the rise of social media accounts dedicated to body positivity and fat activism.
I once foolishly made the mistake of being a teenage girl and watching mainstream media and it left me with a confused relationship with my body. On the one hand, I know that I’ve been fed Eurocentric beauty standards through most of the TV I watched growing up which perpetuated the idea of the thin white woman being the ideal standard of beauty – and I wholeheartedly think that’s such a load of rubbish.
I also know that there are many corporations out there that benefit from us feeling insecure in our own bodies because they can get us to buy their stupid diet products and literally profit of our own self-hatred. This is increasingly affecting men too, but the majority of this advertising is aimed at young women.
I know that the patriarchy benefits from women hating their bodies, because that way they can make us direct all our anger towards ourselves rather than directing it towards the massive systems of oppression that underpin our society. I have read the statistics, analysed the graphs and done the therapy to deal with this.
Yet still I find myself googling ‘how to lose weight without making any changes to my lifestyle’ fairly regularly and feel a sense of panic when I see other people’s bodies on instagram that look half the size of mine. Those people are probably full time models, and the only modelling I do is the mathematical type that does not require your body to look any way, shape or form, so it’s as irrational as pi for me to compare myself to them. There’s also a good chance that they’ve used all sorts of lighting and editing tricks to make themselves look better.
I know all this – I am hyper aware of it, yet still sometimes I think that it would be easier to just lose a bit of weight rather than unlearn all the many years of social conditioning that I have continuously been taught. Does that make me a bad feminist? Or worse, does it make me an idiot?
Part of me is aware that these feelings are somewhat unrelated to what my body actually looks like, that even when I have weighed significantly less I felt exactly the same way. The body standards itself that we are being upheld to almost feel arbitrary; the issue is with this idea that your body can always be better than it already is.
I think the idea of self-improvement is fine, even helpful sometimes – I think if it’s an attitude you apply to your work or your activism it can help you to achieve the things you want to in life – but the emphasis here is on achieving the things you want to achieve rather than the things the patriarchy tells you that you must achieve.
It’s so easy to become completely obsessed with all of the negative aspects of yourself and forget to be grateful to the healthy, strong, beautiful body you live in – and more importantly forget about all the things about yourself that are way more important than your body.
After all, why am I focussing on my body when I could be focussing on my wit, my intelligence and my super sophisticated use of exclamation marks in my writing!!!!!!!!!!!???!!!!!