I am feminist, hear me roar!

The days of our final blogs have come. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m seriously going to miss anonymously sharing my opinions and thoughts of frustration, happiness, depression, and angst relating to our intense readings that have taught me so much, and have enabled me to think more critically than I ever had before. Call me cliché for saying this, but I will never look at our world the same. Up until taking this class, I truly believed men and women had equal rights and opportunities. I was wrong, clearly. How silly of me. I realize society made me believe that the daily oppression I face solely due to the fact that I am a woman is ‘natural.’ Feeling as though I have to be squeezed into binaries that society has ever so kindly created to control me, is really sad. As a women, I am to be motherly, pretty, thin, accepted, gentle, soft, docile, virginal, (but also skanky in the bedroom when my partner insists) heterosexual, married, & to produce a plethora of babies and be happy about it.
This is me virtually sticking up my middle finger to these binaries. I will choose how I want to act and live my life, screw everything else. I will resist the status quo if I wish, and will not care if you insist on calling me a lesbian for doing so.

Reading through chapter 13 of WVFV, I had a good laugh reading the cartoon entitled ‘Unrequited Love no5- Passing a Building Site Fantasy.’ Hilariously enough and also sadly enough, I do not believe this scene will ever come to be true. Construction working men staring at an attractive female walking by saying things like, “I bet she’s intelligent” and “Wouldn’t mind a game of scrabble with her,” is a huge stretch. All I could think about when reading this cartoon, aside from the fact of how hilariously ironic it was, is when the commander invited Offred to his office late at night in The Handmaid’s Tale. I assumed the commander, like many of you safely assumed as well, was going to either rape or seduce Offred. Yet, he asked her to play a mere game of SCRABBLE! HA! That got me good. Men say women are so quick to judge and see them as pigs, but they, they’re the ones who should be showing us otherwise, right? Maybe if men were to say comments that were said in the cartoon, women wouldn’t feel like we needed to keep up with our “rape schedule,’ even though statistics show women are most often raped by people they know. Anyway, that’s what came to mind when I read the cartoon.

More importantly, it was disheartening reading in Hogeland’s article “Fear of Feminism- Why Young Women get the Willies” of how so many young women fear feminism, just as I once used to. I admit, I am still sometimes afraid of saying it out loud in front of certain people, but I know I have to bite my tongue and deal with it if I want to help raise awareness and witness change.
Hogeland made a great point about feminism in relation to politics. She states, “Feminism politicizes gender consciousness [and] inserts it into a systematic analysis of histories and structures of domination and privilege.” (723). Women do not want to hear of how underprivileged and oppressed they are, and men do not want to let go of the power they hold over women. So, feminism is scary to many. Feminism raises issues that make you think, issues that contain no right or wrong answers. But, that’s the beauty of feminism and the study of gender, there ISN’T a right answer. You are free to be, and that is all. As humans, all we know for certain about ourselves is we exist. In the famous words of Descartes, “I think, therefore I am.” He is absolutely correct.
So let’s not hesitate to say it ladies and gents. “I am FEMINIST, hear me roar!”