I’ve told the story before of being shunned by feminists I knew many years back. How hurt and embarrassed I was, because they made me the butt of their jokes. How I couldn’t believe that a movement which housed women so mean, so vulgar, could have anything to offer to me.
In the early 2000’s, I was pretty gypsy-like. I traveled a lot, dated a lot of musicians, lived in the islands, just enjoyed my late 20’s and tried to make something of my career as an artist long before I was ready to do so. I learned a lot of hard lessons, but the feminist lesson, that one stung a lot.
I was dating a guy from Detroit. I spent nearly a year up there, until I learned about something they call wind chill, and what it feels like when it blows off the Great Lakes. Needless to say, Florida girl over here was not sticking around for that.
While I was in Detroit, I met some great people. I worked at an Allstate office (shoutout to James Jackson Allstate in Southfield, love y’all), my boss would give me Pistons tickets, I was having a great time all the time.
Then I met a few friends of my boyfriend. They were hardcore feminists, we’re talking plaids with Birkenstocks, razor lines cutting out mutton chops, breast binding type of people. And they hated me. Hated everything I stood for, with my “perky Florida breasts”, and my “overly helpful” attitude, and all the things about me that really just scream my momma raised me right.
In the eyes of those women, these same qualities were the things about me that were all wrong.
Now, I can take a joke. I have brothers who blew dog whistles at bats to get them to fly into my hair. I’m not soft, by any stretch of the imagination. My degree is in Engineering, and although I can play a dumb blonde to a T, I’m far from one.
They were not joking. It wasn’t in good fun. They hated everything about what I stood for. If I got him a glass of tea, I was a disgrace with an attitude for servitude. If I wore a skirt, I was distracting a meaningful conversation with my inability to tame my inner hussy. Nothing I did was right, all the way down to my very attractive Southern drawl.
Who in the hell could hate my Southern drawl? It’s damned attractive.
Those women, that’s who. And I found myself thinking, “no wonder nobody likes feminists”, and “I can see why we haven’t gained a leg up in a hundred years”. They made me hate a movement that quite literally made it possible for me to get that engineering degree. Made it possible for me to travel solo, live in the islands, date random musicians with horrible taste in friends, and I couldn’t understand there was another way, because I had never seen the quiet feminism working behind the scenes.
These days, I’m a woman well known for my convictions, and I’m proud of the things I bring to feminism, and to women in need when I have the opportunity to help out. I work with domestic assault survivors, some cases much worse than what we’ll just wrap up with that neat little bow.
I help women get a second chance if they really want one. I do so because I was a woman who needed one, and the gods saw fit to provide one for me. I spend a lot of time hearing horrible stories, making exit plans, scheduling Uber’s, sitting with the families of victims, and helping women find another way.
My life now is so, so good. This is feminism, to me.
I still have my “perky Florida breasts”, and my “attitude for servitude”, and yes, even the Southern drawl, although here in the South, we just call it talking. None of those things have ever stopped me from responding to a woman in need. None of those things have kept me from showing up at the ER, or hustling her and her kids to a motel for the night, or any of the hundreds of things I do to improve the lives of a handful of women I’m lucky enough to have the tools to assist.
You wouldn’t catch me dead in Birkenstocks, I’m teetering on 5″ heels as we speak, but I can kick these suckers off and toss a baby over my shoulder so fast your head will spin. I don’t need to bind my breasts or pretend I’m not great at serving tea on the porch in order to be a feminist because my contributions are just as valuable to this movement as anyone else’s.
I know this because the women I have helped, and their families, their children, have told me so. I know this because I get a letter in the mail every year or so from a survivor I took out of her home with a broken jaw. I know this because when I think of feminism, I don’t think about arguing with morons on the internet about whether women should be welding or not, because what a fantastic waste of my time that would be.
I know we can do anything we set our mind to doing, once you remove the violent and terrible men who refuse to allow us to be anything more than an incubator and punching bag to them. Send me all of the “not all men” hate mail you want, that’s [email protected], but remember, I would simply be wasting my breath making that disclaimer.
If you’re one of the ones screaming “not all men”, it’s probably because you’re one of “those” men.
Instead, I focus my efforts, this new school feminist playbook, on helping as many women and girls as possible to understand that you can be both. I’m a feminist, and still very Southern, and they aren’t mutually exclusive. Just because I’ll get you a glass of tea doesn’t mean I won’t break something off for you if you raise your voice at me in my home.
I’m not less than. I’m an equal, the same way I had to prove myself an equal in industrial engineering (take that, welding men). I’ve proven myself in an arena that never should have required proof of entry from me.
I’m a woman, and feminism should have welcomed me like I welcome folks to my home. With a smile, and a glass of tea, instead of eye-rolling and sneers.
So, if you ask me, I’m okay with the old feminism dying out. I won’t miss it, not a bit. Because in its place are some strong, confident, capable women who probably wear Louboutin heels and can make a mean sausage gravy. I mean, if I were to take a guess, anyway.
Women can be anything they would like, so please, make room. They’re not all going to look and act like you think a feminist should. What matters is that they receive the message and want better for women. Women being better women for the sake of bettering women, that’s my only goal for us.
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This post was previously published on April Hawkins, Ask A Bitchface.
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