THE F-WORD

I was sitting in a class on women and religion when the teacher’s assistant announced that, judging by our most recently submitted assignments, the majority of the class considered ‘feminism’ a bad word. I looked around me. The class was almost all female and came from a variety of ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds. As the class engaged in discussion, I noticed that while half the women thought that feminism was a ‘good thing when it came out’, others agreed with most of the concepts, but nobody, with the exception myself and two others, identified themselves as feminists. Everyone in the class recognized that it was because of feminists that they were in university to begin with. Nonetheless there seemed to be a stigma attached to the ‘feminist’ label, so powerful that no one wanted to be called a feminist. Since when in our post sexual revolution society, did it become a bad thing to be a feminist?


Since when did feminism become the new F-word?


My professor defined feminism as “the belief in the full humanity of women”. Most of my classmates seemed to agree with it, but nobody wanted to be labeled a feminist.


Like any good student, I figured the easiest way to get the best explanation was to Google the term “feminism”. When I typed it in, I got mostly Academic websites describing the different branches of the philosophy i.e. Anarchist, Analytical, and Egalitarian, and a site for a group that call themselves “Ladies Against Feminism” or LAF.


As an egalitarian feminist who had to fight her mother’s insistence that pink was not an evil colour, the name grabbed my attention instantly. So I had a look. At top of the Website is their motto “promoting beautiful womanhood”. Behind it all looms the argument that feminism is evil, and that the freedoms it has won, such as access to contraception, has led to “divorce, adultery, political tyranny and even disease”. Upon closer examination, I realized the website was being promoted by Christian extremists who advocated the values of “feminine modesty” (translation: keep your mouth shut, expressing the wrong opinion is immodest) so many modern women have abandoned. Other anti-feminist websites I found pointed to extreme branches of feminism, such as “ALL MEN MUST DIE”ism and complained about the vast numbers of books banned worldwide under what they called “feminist censorship”.


Looking at page after page, I realized the issue was not one of right or wrong, but of generalizations. The extremists take one bad egg as their example and use it to censor the entire group and its philosophy. Extreme feminists and anti-feminists make generalizations and ignore the variations within each other’s camps. Any deviation from the extreme on either side is ignored because it might soil their cases against each other. To the hard-core anti feminist, there is no such thing as the egalitarian: all feminists are man haters, who seek to destroy the family, and castrate the world. To the extreme feminists, all anti-feminists become the witch burners, rapists, fanatics, and wife beaters. The ensuing ideological battle has to do with labels. The winner is the group that is more successful at attaching the bigger stigma to its opponent’s founding philosophy. In their fight, “man-haters” and “witch-burners” take every moderate along for the ride, forcing them to choose a side.

Unfortunately for my generation, the hard-core anti-feminists are the winners. Everywhere women are saying “I am not a feminist, but…” as a sort of disclaimer for their feminist views. The disclaimer says: I believe in feminist ideals, but I don’t want to be branded a man-hater. The women of my generation aren’t against feminism; they are closet feminists. None of today’s powerful women, who’s ranks include Condolezza Rice, Hilary Clinton, and Oprah Winfrey, never admit to having feminist beliefs in spite of what they’ve done for their gender. As a result today’s feminists have little incentive for coming out of the closet, and chose remain in it along with the world’s superwomen. Even Sex and the City, television’s tribute to the modern woman, presented every feminist critique of patriarchal views of love, sex, and marriage without ever mentioning the F-word.


Why?


The golden age of Gloria Steinem and Betty Freidan (she wrote The Feminine Mystique) are over, and suddenly, it’s bad to be a feminist again. The problem is that if we accept the stigma attached to the feminist label, we also accept the injustice that continues against half of humanity, despite the conservative myth that feminism has achieved its divine purpose. In case anyone’s forgotten: the glass ceiling still exists, and there are still judges operating in North American courts that think rape is a woman’s fault. There are still countries that stone a woman for being gay, kill her for flirting with a man, and whip her for having an illegitimate child. As long as these problems exist, feminism is far from dead in North America and across the globe. No one should be ashamed of identifying themselves with an ideology that recognizes that humanity is made up of male and female, both of whom deserve equal rights. Every feminist that stays in the closet wins one more point for the ‘witch burners’, who continue to blame women for everything that’s wrong with the world.


So what if it’s the new F-word? The only way a label can drop its stigma, is if more conscientious egalitarian moderates adopt it and wear it with pride. If gays can come out of the closet, then so can we; if you support the full humanity of women, it’s time to come out. Don’t let the extremists ruin it for you.

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