BORN ON THE LOWEST RUNG
I've been called a feminist since high school. I never ever considered myself one. I have never raised my fist or burned a bra. I find those things trite, actually. I don't dislike the term. I just considered equality common sense. As I got older I found it wasn't so common at all.
I still get very annoyed at those who treat women as "less than." Or objects and a collection of parts. In my volunteer advocacy I have a few ex-escorts as clients now. I have learned a lot from them about the sickness of the sex trade and the serious mental and class problems of the people who hire them.
Being reduced to ones parts is one of the more demeaning experiences. I know what its like to be used like that. It's awful. I hate myself and feel sick when I even think about it. That I even was so silly to allow some guy to coerce me by playing with my emotions. Not just when I was younger but even more recently... the attitude of "boys will be boys" who discount your value because you're female. (The joke of "I love you" being the biggest lie in the English language comes to mind)
Many of these clients of mine are single moms, in abusive relationships, come from abusive homes and feel their only worth and the only way they can feel any power is to have sex (and I do mean just sex) with a man they met 5 minutes ago. Most of them now are on prescription anti-depressants just to handle the disconnect between the physical intimacy they perform and the lack of emotional intimacy they must ignore.
And now we have a woman running for President. Don't get me wrong, I am no fan of hers! (Ladies, we could have done better!) But already the 'swift-boating' of Hillary because she's female has started. She's a lesbian, she's moody, she's cold, women can't be trusted. It's as tired and old as the 'crazy jealous woman' analogy men use when they've unceremoniously ditched a girl they got tired of and don't want to provide her an explanation.
More and more women are college educated. The work force is populated with smart, hard working women who slam into glass ceilings and thinly veiled misogyny every day. My own father, of blessed memory, was very old-fashioned and truly thought women shouldn't work - despite my late mother being the vice-president of a bank. My late grandfather was a serious woman hater who thought women were only good for a handful of things - and one of them was beating up on them.
It's sad that as a society, even people my own age haven't risen above this... in fact - its just gotten worse. How do people get this way? Why do these ideas persist?
Ugly, boring and angry?
by Courtney E. Martin
As I travel across the country speaking about feminist issues I like to take a quick survey of the audiences. I ask them “What are the stereotypes you’ve heard about feminists?”
After a few timid moments, folks start shouting a flood of unsavoury characteristics:
ugly, bitchy, man-hating, boring, angry, bra-burning.The wild thing is that whether I am in a lecture hall in Jacksonville, Illinois, or a woman’s club in suburban New Jersey, or an immigration center in Queens, New York, whether I am among 15 year-olds, or 25 year-olds, or 60 year-olds, whether the crowd of faces that I see are mostly white, or mostly of color, or a welcome mix of all—this list tends to be almost identical.
I tell those in the audiences as much, and then I ask, “So how did all of you—from such vastly different backgrounds—get the exactly same stereotypes about feminism? Why would feminism be so vilified?”And to this they usually shrug their shoulders.
I believe that feminism has attracted so many unsavoury stereotypes because of its profound power and potential. It has gained such a reputation, been so inaccurately demonized, because it promises to upset one of the foundations on which this world, its corporations, its families, and its religions are based—gender roles.
If you asked diverse audiences to give you stereotypes about Protestantism, for example, you would have some groups that starred at you blank-faced and some that might have a jab or two. If you asked about the history of civil rights, even, you would get a fairly innocuous, probably even partly accurate sense of the progress afforded by sit-ins, freedom rides, and protests. But you ask about feminism and the whole room erupts with media-manufactured myths, passed down from generation to generation.
Some of these stereotypes can be traced to events or controversial figures in the women’s movement, though they are still perversions. That whole bra-burning thing came out of the 1968 Miss America protests in which feminists paraded one another around like cattle to show the dehumanizing effects of beauty pageants, but they didn’t actually burn any bras.
There have surely been some feminists who despised men and advocated for female-only spaces; others have undoubtedly resorted to an angry MO; there were probably even a few shabby dressers (though, I have to tell you, us third-wave gals tend to be pretty snappy).
More recently one of the most pervasive misperceptions about what feminism purports to do is actually perpetuated by strong, intelligent women; I refer to the mistaken belief that feminism is solely about achievement, competition, and death-defying acrobatics (sometimes called multitasking). I like to think of this as “shoulder-pad feminism”—the do it all, all at once circus act that so many of my friends and I witnessed growing up in households headed by superwomen.
The ugly truth about superwomen, my generation has come to realize, is that they tend to be exhausted, self-sacrificing, unsatisfied, and sometimes even self-loathing and sick. Feminism—and the progress it envisions—was never supposed to compromise women’s health. It was supposed to lead to richer, more enlightened, authentic lives characterized by a deep sense of wellness.
Feminism in its most glorious, transformative, inclusive sense, is not about man-hating, nor is it about superwomen.
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