I Really Don’t Mean To

My dad called me a radical feminist today. He was mostly joking.

I have been trying so hard not to feminist rant. I really don’t want to be a “radical” anything. I don’t want to constantly feel like I’m pointing at things and crying, “Not right!” I don’t want to be any of those things people sling around when someone stands up for women’s rights, like a killjoy, angry bitch, or oversensitive feminazi.

But

I also don’t want to live in a world where women are called bitches for not being pleased as pie when any leach hits on her. I don’t want to live in a country where people who run for high political office can say things like “legitimate rape” or spew completely erroneous biological bullshit to support their anti-woman policies or are willing to tell a woman she has to die instead of aborting a doomed pregnancy.

I want to live in a country with gender roles and identities that are much less janked the hell up.

I get pissed off about the female issues because I see them. I get pissed off because I didn’t see them as issues before, and when I grow to see how they are issues, I feel a new level of betrayal. I thought the Republican”War on Women” was a bunch of political grandstanding until I started paying attention. I rolled my eyes at campaigns to end street harassment, until I started thinking about it. I would read an article about the small ways we degrade women and devalue them, and I would think of it as reactionary crap until I paid attention.

Here is the truth of it: any governmental restrictions on a woman’s right to contraception is an attack on her freedoms. It is an attempt to take away a woman’s control of her own body. It is a tried and true historical tactic for keeping women disenfranchised. (By the way, I love it when men say “if a woman doesn’t want to get pregnant, she shouldn’t have sex.” I find it charming, enlightened, and wonderful. It takes all of the responsibility for pregnancy away from men.)

Women have the right to be treated with respect while walking down the streets. We have the right to tell a man who is hitting on us we aren’t interested without being verbally assaulted. We aren’t being bitches when men are “harmlessly flirting” with us, and we want it to stop. If a woman indicates she is uninterested in your advances, banter, compliments, leers, or catcalls, you should have to stop.

My wonderful friend Kathleen linked me this Ted Talk:

The thing is, we really do associate a lot of what we consider female with weakness and inferiority. This pisses me off. I don’t feel like I should have to expand on why it does. Women are different from men, but we sure as hell aren’t weak or inferior.

I don’t want to be angry. I don’t. I want it to change. I want us to teach our girls and our boys to be better. Our problem doesn’t stop with the female half of society. Men have some sad and terrible gender expectations on them. We can’t fix one without fixing the other. I want to be in a world were people can be who they are without bullshit gender training.

I want to have no reason to rant.

(Also, I can’t be the only one stunned and saddened that there is controversy of contraception in 2012. It is like some twilight zone crap.)