I thought I was a feminist until I came to Kenyon. This may seem odd because Kenyon is so obsessed with gender equality and feminism, but some days I really feel excluded. I like to wear makeup, do my hair, flirt with boys, and yes sometimes I think it could fall under "objectifying myself" but I always feel like a strong woman making choices I have no regrets about...or I guess I can't use the word "woman" because it has man in it. Um, female? No...that includes male. Girl? No, not that either, that word treats women as juveniles. Lady? Oh wait, that starts with "lad." Please explain to me how I am supposed to refer to my own gender. Or is it my own sex because it's a biological difference I'm talking about? It's so easy to get confused! And heaven forbid I refer to myself as a bitch. Reclaim it!
At points I feel alienated for my views about the female gender. I call women annoying, because let's face it girls, we are! I would never want to deal with myself. Half the time I don't even know why I'm upset. I use a little extra cleavage to get discounts on things. I wear clothes that accent my body and makeup to make my face look better. I love a good push-up bra. I don't feel like I have to do any of these things, but I think they work to my advantage.
I'm not sure why everything needs a separate "female" category or group. It's as if women feel like in order to be noticed in a field they have to start their own subgroup. We learned about the Women in Psychology group in Psych of Women today and it made me think, they're already in the field of psychology why can't they just play well with the men. Why do they need their own subgroup? Why do we have powderpuff football and regular football. Why do we need to point out women in the arts or women in literature? Just by having a career in the arts you're a woman in the arts, do you really need a group to point it out and in a way perpetuate the idea that men and women are separate in career fields?
This article on a website I frequent called HelloGiggles (one of the three founders was Zooey Deschanel, holla!) sort of explained my feelings on this. The author wrote a previous post on types of gamers but didn't add "Girl Gamers" because girl is a gender not a category. This website has been called anti-feminist by some people because it features posts about "cute things" or stereotypical girl interests like clothing, men, rom-coms, cooking. Just because I like to watch youtube videos of baby animals while saving money on dresses and baking cookies for my boyfriend before going to yoga does NOT mean I'm antifeminist. It just means I like dresses, cute things, being nice, and exercise. I also like bad 80's rock, leather jackets, and learning about wars. Being feminist has absolutely nothing to do with your interests, it has to do with feeling comfortable in your own skin.
I think a feminist looks like any woman who is confident with herself and achieves in what she sets out to do. If that means she uses her sexuality to get ahead I see no problem with that. A lot of women I know at Kenyon say that's bad, it's putting women behing and overly sexualizing them and I think that's bullshit. Why can't a woman use her looks to get ahead? Being a human is about using the whole package, that includes beauty and brains. I want to be an actress and I know that in that field I will be judged for how I look, I will be typecast and have to appear a certain way. That's just the profession, the men have to do it to. You look at celebrities like Britney Spears for example, and see her videos thinking "Wow, it's sad that society's standards force female entertainers to overly sexualize themselves and dance around almost naked." But you know what? She found success, and there's nothing wrong with being a woman and using your sexuality to your advantage.
In some ways I think the way I think of feminism falls under "Liberal Feminism." It's about individual empowerment. And I'll be honest, I haven't had enough Psychology of Women classes yet to really speak about feminism in the broader sense, this is just my experience at Kenyon. So hopefully I didn't grievously offend anyone, and I'd like to hear other opinions on this. I know in some ways I'm very naive to the feminist movement, I just know what I've experienced and I'm probably wrong about a lot of things.
I know this post wasn't of my usual sarcastic and hopefully humorous nature and that's because I've been using all my recent joke ideas of my stand up routine. So, if I haven't made you mad, or if I have and you want to throw Gloria Steinem books at me, come to the 2 Drink Minimum show on Saturday at 10! With an opening act featuring my suite mate, the one, the only...Johnny Melodica!
One of the things that consistently troubles me about identity (gay, feminist, racial) politics is that they are sometimes as reductive and restrictive as the cultural hegemony they attempt to undermine. My favorite example of this comes from Irish politics as portrayed by James Joyce--to many of the Irish revolutionaries at the turn of the century, you could either be Irish (which meant that you were Catholic,spoke Gaelic,and played Gaelic football) or British (which meant you were a rotten imperialist and had to die). In my reading of Joyce, true freedom means being given the choice to be Irish or British or anything in between, not exchanging one prescribed identity for another.
ReplyDeleteTo my mind, feminism is just one facet of the struggle for individual freedom. At Kenyon, I do think people use ideas like feminism to form clubs or impress or exclude other students, which occasionally means that they wield the more restrictive manifestations of ideologies like weapons. But I would attribute that to pretty universal college-student/human failings, rather than something intrinsic to feminism. Similar pressures exist (even more strongly, I think) within gay communities here.