Are You A Feminist?

ARE YOU TW/ Mentions of rape/assault A No, really, are you a feminist? For all the AFAB/femme people reading this, I swear this is not a rhetorical question. I want you to seriously consider your answer. Pretend, for a moment, that feminism is more than believing in equality between men and women, or that women should be treated as human beings with dignity and respect. Pretend, if you can, that feminism is the man-hating body-hair-toting lesbians of the second wave, the bra-burners, the protesters, the women that went “too far”. Pretend that Marxist, socialist, and radical feminisms are the rule, not the extreme. Pretend that feminism isn’t a sticker on your laptop, but an entire movement built on the backs of activism, the majority of women of which were not at all involved. Now, I ask again: are you a feminist? If you are, then good: we need more. If you aren’t, which I wager places you in the majority, I want to discuss why you think you are: or, most perniciously, think that you must be. It is no secret that feminism has been commercialised, watered-down and crushed into a barely-recognisable oblivion through capitalism. Worst of all, it has been universalised. Everyone is a feminist. It’s akin to claiming you’re not racist, or not transphobic: a passive rejection of the “bad side”. If you’re not a feminist, especially as a celebrity or public figure, you’re just not on the right side of history. God forbid you are a non-feminist woman. Those poor, poor things, they don’t even know that being a woman makes you a feminist automatically. Those silly, silly, conservatives, you arevoting against your own interests!

Words by Lottie Minney Feminism is for everyone! Honestly, I really wish it wasn’t. This unveralisation is made worse by the fact that feminists themselves perpetrate this idea. I can, of course, understand why we want more of us, but it cannot be at the expense of the movement itself. Feminism was not made to be universal, it was made to be uncomfortable and earth-shattering. If everyone truly is a feminist, then by God we are doing a shit job of dismantling patriarchal capitalism. That is the goal, right? Oh, my apologies! What I meant to say is - by God we are doing a wonderful job of, among other things: improving body positivity in the - inherently sexist - beauty industry, letting women become CEO’s to their own slave-owning companies, and educating POC about how good girls shouldn’t wear hijabs. Above all, we have done a great job in making sure we can do whatever we want without feeling like a bad feminist, because that really sucks :( I won’t deny there have been leaps and strides in many of the first and secondwave feminist causes – as a white, middle-to-upper-class lesbian who has never been sexually assaulted or raped, many institutional freedoms have been awarded to my demographic. However, the issues that remain, especially those that concern POC and those in low-socio-economic groups, are actually fucking embarrassing in the face of feminist empowerment and girl power. A universal feminism will always benefit the ‘norm’ rather thanthe ‘Other’. If you are comfortable, you are doing feminism wrong. Worse, if you think there is a true monolith of feminist belief, a ‘correct’ perspective – if you ignore the writings of our

feminist predecessors like Dworkin, MacKinnon, and Firestone and only give heed to Wolf and Friedan - feminism is not a movement for you, it’s a lifestyle.

One of my central issues with universal feminism, other than the ways it can devalue the movement, is in itself a feminist issue- it places another

unreasonable expectation on women to be everything to everyone at once. I hope it is clear that I do think women should be feminists, but much like a political party or other social/intellectual movements, I don’t expect everyone to be. Yet, if you are female-presenting (and therefore must be a feminist) you automatically take on the burden of representing feminism as a whole.

There is a popular Cut series on YouTube called Middle Ground. I’m sure you’ve seen it before, “Flat Earthers vs Scientists”, “Rich vs Poor”, “Polyamory vs Monogamy”, etc. Two years ago, they released “Men’s Rights vs Feminism”, intended to provide a discourse between representatives of each group. There’s just one problem: the feminist side was simply… women. These women were self-identified feminists, but decidedly not scholars with the knowledge and expertise to rival the experts in men’s rights rhetoric. If you hadn’t already made your mind up about which side you’re on (which, let’s face it, you have), you could almost argue the men had won. Their statistics and arguments may have been false and contrived, but at least they were there. Cut has done this before, mind you, with “Traditional vs Trans,” pitting transphobes who had heavily researched issues of gender identity against people who just happen to be transgender. It’s not the job of a minority to be a spokesperson. It’s not your job, as a woman/femme person, to be a feminist either. You are not wrong for this – as Jessa Crispin concludes in her antifeminist feminist manifesto, “the choices you make on a daily basis… are not destroying the world” though they “are not saving the world” either (2017, p. 147). It’s not our job, either, to look after men; to always be ready to provide them with feminist comebacks off-the-bat, to inform them when they misinterpret, to

mother them with our knowledge.

It is not even feminism’s job to look after men. We don’t need your metrics of approval – we don’t need the success of feminism measured on how many women in parliament there are, or how good we are at entering male-dominated fields – we don’t want your system. I know our favourite way of convincing men of our good-girl intentions is to reassure them that feminism is “good for men too”; that it won’t disrupt anything too much, that they sare safe. Fuck that. Feminism will disrupt. It will make life better for men simply because it will make life better for everyone, but I don’t need to endear myself to you, to bring you kicking-andscreaming along for the ride just so you don’t get too shocked when the revolution hits. I don’t need to get on my knees for the patriarchy so as not to offend.

If what I’ve said here resonates with you, I want you to consider more carefully what it represents when you call yourself a ‘feminist’. If you can, I want you to make yourself into one too. It is an act, not a word, and you must embody it. Only when feminism becomes extreme, upsetting, and disruptive again will we be able to manifest change. Forgive yourself for not being a femininist -- both the kind that I would support and the girlboss CEO. As women/femmes, we suffer horribly from the guilt of not doing enough, but we are not everything. We are not everywoman. So step forward or step back, but know what it is that you are doing.