Thursday's Tidbit

This is what a feminist looks like:

Yep, I am a feminist and I'm not afraid to say it. It's funny, I used to talk about it a lot more. At university, I referred to myself as a lipstick feminist, because like you can like totally be a feminist and be like totally cute and like love to party. It must be siad that I went to school in San Diego.  

Recently I read How To Be a Woman by Caitlin Moran and was inspired to start talking about this again. Because A. Caitlin Moran is a bad ass, and B. it seems like women are more and more hesitant to claim feminism, like it became a dirty word somehow synonymous with man-hater. Or maybe we think that it's unnecessary at this point, not true: women still don't earn equal pay for equal work with men and our reproductive rights are constantly under fire, just scratching the surface here.

According to Moran: “[Feminism’s] a word that’s sadly been hijacked. People think it just means an angry lady who hates all men and dresses very badly and probably hasn’t had sex for awhile. Whereas of course feminism is a very simple and straightforward thing: it just simply means being equal to boys. That’s such a lovely and beautiful and revolutionary idea.

As an old hag of 37, I became very sad when I met people from the younger generation — whose knees have not yet gone and who have beautiful, dewy skin — who say ‘I’m not a feminist.’ You just go ‘What do you mean? You don’t want to be equal to boys?’ And they go ‘Oh yeah, is that what it means?’”

We still need to stand up for ourselves and for each other, because as Moran points out in her book: "These days, a plethora of shitty attitudes to women have become diffuse, indistinct, or almost entirely concealed. Fighting them feels like trying to combat a moldy mildew smell in the hallway, using only a bread knife. Because - like racism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia - modern sexism has become cunning. Sly. Codified ... The more women argue, loudly, against feminism, the more they both prove it exists and that they enjoy its hard-won privileges."

You can be a feminist and still flirt, have sex, wear skin-tight jeans, and do your hair (or don't, whateves), but do what you do because it makes you feel good and because you want to, not because you felt it was dictated or socially prescribed. Please don't think that feminism is obsolete, or that we don't need it, or that it means you have to be a crazy biotch. Just do you.  

Images of me via yours truly.