Feminism: More than just a dirty word

In my last couple of SoCo classes (Sociocultural perspectives on human development), we’ve been exploring feminism and notions of masculinity. Looking at these issues, I was surprised to see how much my thinking on them has evolved in the 13 years since I completed my undergrad, and at how little things in the broader world seem to have changed. I thought we’d become much more enlightened as a society. We may have come a long way, baby, but not, it seems, as far as I’d thought.

Not that anyone’s keeping score, but here’s the score: we did three readings and two hours in  class on modern notions of masculinity; one reading and one-and-a-half hours on feminism as a movement; and zip on notions of femininity (thanks to @SoCoAgnesTU for pointing that out). In “Women and Education”, from Feminist Issues: Race, Class and Sexuality, our one feminist reading, author Michelle Webber suggests there is a hidden curriculum in schools that teaches girls that they aren’t as important as boys. The unequal weighting of the course readings in favour of masculinity could also be interpreted that way.

Nonetheless, I think two cases could be made here in favour of leaving fem-issues out of the limelight:

1. That feminism itself has made notions of contemporary femininity a part of our everyday dialogue, and very accessible to anyone who wants to explore them more deeply on their own.
2. That, since contemporary masculinity is deeply connected to the issue of homophobia in schools (and the rest of our culture), our exploration of hegemonic masculinity was intended more as part of the “queer issues” part of the course and therefore separate and not to be compared against the “feminist issues” part of the course.

The trouble with this second argument is that it leaves out the experiences of gay women and the impact of both hegemonic femininity and hegemonic masculinity (through straight male fantasies of lesbian sexuality, for example) on the individual development of lesbians and queer folk identifying as women.

The first argument ignores the mountain of evidence showing that notions of contemporary femininity still aren’t aligned with the experiences and expectations of todays’ women, particularly vis-à-vis their professional lives, but also in their personal lives.

In “Women in Education”, Webber notes that even today schools are essentially “educational harems”, where women mainly teach and men mainly supervise. This communicates a subversive message to students about who holds the authority in society at large — an issue that I think is still worth spending time talking about. Why aren’t more women in educational leadership? Is it an intrinsic quality of women not to desire these roles? Or are we being socialized not to desire them because of hegemonic notions of femininity? Or are women actually going after these positions but still being held back by ideas of appropriate roles for women in society, capacity to lead, etc.?

And why is it that so many women are reluctant to call themselves feminists? The woman sitting next to me in class audibly groaned when our instructor announced that day’s topic. “I hate talking about feminism,” she said. Why? As a woman, what is it that makes you hate talking about feminism? Do young women today feel like there’s nothing left to say? That the fight for equal rights has been won? Because there’s lots of evidence out there saying it’s not over yet. Spend 45 seconds on Google and you’ll find all sorts of statistical assurances that we aren’t living in a gender-equal utopia. But let’s get personal for a minute. When a dude at a hostel climbs into my bed while I’m sleeping and I wake up with his hands between my legs and he tells me that he couldn’t help it because of what I was wearing, is the need for feminism over? When, despite years of doing so, I get scolded for hoisting a scuba tank over my shoulder because even though it’s more ergonomically efficient and an accepted way to carry a tank, as a (weak) woman, I could slip and fall and damage the tank — is it over? When a guy asks for help moving a piece of furniture and a woman steps up and he clears his throat and says to the only other man in the room that he thinks it’s “a job for the guns” — is it over?  When new male hires are fawned over and mentored by management while I’m left to languish in my cubicle — is it over? When my female director insists on using “Doctor” in her title because she knows that sometimes it’s the only way she can get the male academics she meets at conferences to listen to her — is it over?

Should I be surprised that women don’t want to be feminists? That after four years of undergrad studies in the safe, culturally insulated sandbox that most (Canadian) universities provide, that a young, middle-class white woman doesn’t see what the big deal is about women’s rights or whatever? No. I know that this is perfectly normal since I was once her. (I’m more surprised to realize just how deep a turn my own attitudes have clearly taken.) When I was in university, I too rolled my eyes and scoffed at the femininsts — those unshaven women with their nose-rings, their black tank tops, painters-pants and combat boots; who insisted on words like “womyn” and “herstory”; who brazenly let gravity have its way with their mammaries. Those “don’t-call-me-a-chick chicks”.  As a student journalist, I made it my business to be a chronic arguer, disagreer, shit-disturber, to raise hackles and make people question their assumptions. In the left-wing socialist bleeding-heart breeding ground that was my (every?) university campus, the student newspaper was a hotbed of neo-capitalist-cum-libertarian argument. Feminism was over, unnecessary, redundant; continuing to talk about it was just so much hate-mongering towards men. Women could do whatever they wanted now. I should know — I was doing it. I was a woman, and I was powerful: I helped decide and craft what 25,000 students read and thought about the world every week. Who needed feminism?

Then a funny thing happened: in my last year of university, I joined the campus women’s centre (actually, it was the “Womyn’s Centre”), and I found myself organizing public debates on abortion and co-editing an anthology of women’s art and literature. I had left the student newspaper and suddenly I found myself with more free time than I knew what to do with. So I joined a bunch of student groups and found myself hanging out with left-wing hippies who championed social justice and co-operation. After years of neglecting them in print and writing them off as disorganized dreamers who would never effect any real change, there I was at their potlucks, eating their baked tofu slices and vegan carob cake and politely listening to their politics.

My change in attitude wasn’t an overnight revolution, of course. It’s been a long, slow transformation, mediated by a decade and a half of life experiences — my own, those of my friends, and the ones I’ve absorbed through the media and culture we are all marinating in: Paris Hilton. Eminem. Facebook’s censorship of breastfeeding photos. The Kardashians. Cosmo. The “My Space”angle. Barbie. Oprah. Madonna. Internet privacy. Western medicine’s insistence onmedicalizing pregnancy, menopause and almost every other natural condition of the female body. Ellen. Lara Croft. Angelina Jolie. Whoopi Goldberg’s defence of Roman Polanski because even though he drugged and had sex with a 13-year-old, it wasn’t “rape” rape.  The Spice Girls. Sarah Palin. Tina Fey. Jennifer Livingston, the fat news anchor from Wisconsin. Sex and the City. Manolo Blahnik. Silicone breasts. The abortion debate. Stand-up comics who make rapejokes, and all the people, including me, who later wonder why they didn't walk out. Internet porn.

If it took me a decade of living and seeing and feeling the pressures and frustrations and inequities of womanhood to come around to feminism, is it fair to expect someone without the benefit of that experience to understand its significance? No. But had I had more opportunities to explore these issues when I was still in school, that spark of solidarity might have ignited a little sooner. Trent has taken seriously its responsibility of ensuring that tomorrow’s educators have had at least an introduction to the real issues that students today are facing. We’ve covered racism, classicism and homophobia. Let’s not forget about our girls and women.