I Am Not a Feminist

I am not a feminist.

I have been forced out of feminism.  

As a child, there was nothing I believed in more than a strictly feminist ideology.  I played hockey with boys because I was reared to believe it was the same as playing anything with anyone.  I grew up in a neighbourhood devoid of little girls and so had only boy-friends as a little girl and that too was the same as playing with anyone.

As a child, on top of being unable to perceive a marked difference between boys and girls outside of the obvious, I also couldn’t notice the difference between my Asian best friend and I.  I didn’t understand why having a gay uncle might be a weird thing.  I was fascinated by other religions and often wished I was Hindu so I could go to big, outlandish weddings with bangles and brightly coloured dresses. 

And this is why I have been forced out of feminism. 

You see, feminism, insofar as I can tell, has never just been a story about women.  It has always been firmly tethered to an overall umbrella of equality and normative rights.  The body of thought employs the prefix “femin-”but its ambit is so much wider than an appreciation of rights strictly “designed” for women.  Feminism is meant to be a spectrum of equality rights and issues.  Questions in regards feminism are not isolated to discussions of women’s rights.  Instead, the feminist discourse is a much wider body of thought igniting issues surrounding gender, sexual orientation, nationality, economic status, social status, and religious orientation among others.  Feminism has always had roots in fighting for equality in these many issues.  Does this not seem like such an accessible theory?  That for any person who might have ever faced any adversity, their cause is likely entwined and engulfed somewhere in the matrix of “feminism”?

The trouble is, there are still too many people who don’t see that.  Feminism is somehow STILL equated with burning bras and man-hating and unshaven legs, causing many people to feel unable to identify as being a “feminist” – including both men and women I know who believe in equality to the core of their very being.  If feminism cannot do what it’s meant to do but instead simply creates a bigger gap between “feminists” and “non-feminists” then we are in this pathetic losing battle in which we hold this word “feminism” feverishly between our legs because we don’t want to forget our history, or abandon our fore-mothers, or some other similar pointless but fairly romantic and nostalgic idea of what is important.  Yet, as long as women are expected to change their routes home after getting raped, and as long as Obama says we need to think about our “own” women in order to feel compassion for rape victims we still need feminism.  However, it’s not just for those issues that feminism has ever existed.

Feminism is about equality.  And equality is not rooted in protection through paternalistic and self-gratifying methodology.  Rape is a remarkably good example of this.  A man as well as a woman can be the victim of sexual assault and rape – so tell me then, what good does all my compassion for my sister do me when a man I know has been raped?  We have marginalized and transformed an act of sexual violence into a female-only problem, with convoluted and corrupted protective mechanisms attached.  And, in doing so, we have pushed the goals of feminism further and further beyond our reach, rendering its good and valuable elements without merit and strength.

It is this corruption and misunderstanding that has forced me out of feminism.  I am not a feminist.  I am an equalist.  There is no burning bras in here.  There is no man-hating.  My legs are shaven.  I wear dresses and I went to law school and I deserve pay equity over the course of my life.  I deserve to be raped as little as my male counterpart.  And, if I am raped, I deserve to have your compassion in and of itself, not because you analogize me to your sister or an aunt or a girlfriend for whom you would feel true compassion for if they were raped.

Equalism means that we can fight for women’s right at the same time as black rights at the same time as LGBT rights.  This is what we’ve been doing and calling “feminism” all along yet at some point, this fundamental element of broad-reaching equality-seeking theory was misstated and misinterpreted until it was no longer easily accessible.   Yes, somewhere in the world of academia, wise but disgruntled scholars with feather plumes and dusty books grabbed hold of equality and wrote papers after treatises after anthologies about “feminism” and the word became so confused that it lost some of its value.  For those who do not inherently understand or believe in “feminism”, the convoluted discourse and associated stereotypes struck out the import of the word.  “Feminism” is not seen as this body of equality seeking struggles.  Instead, the unshaven legs and man-bashing image often prevails. 

It is because I believe so fervently, so passionately, obsessively for the tenets of feminism that I write this today.  For these same reasons I have bowed out of this comfortable school of thought which has been present with me through all of my life.  I am not a feminist.