How I got into feminism

For the purpose of clarity I'm going to start by saying that I was always a feminist. I can't think of a time in my life when I didn't believe that men and women should be equal for as long as I'd known that men and women could be treated unequally. But insofar as believing that men and women should be equal makes you a feminist, most everybody is a feminist.

When I talk about "getting into feminism" I'm talking about the time when I started to feel really strongly about it, and started to educate myself about ways in which women were treated in an unequal way, how we could go about changing that, and actively engaging in trying to make a change.

As a kid I was always vaguely pissed off when people assumed my favourite colour was pink, and that I couldn't play football (I wasn't good at football but this was more due to a total ineptitude at almost all sports on my part than to a lack of a Y chromosome). But around age 15 or 16 was when I started to get scared, upset and angry at how women are treated and began to try and take on a responsibility towards feminism.

I was in a mixed school and by now most of the year had reached sexual and intellectual maturity. What had previously been boys saying "get back in the kitchen" because it was just what you said to be controversial, and because they didn't know better, had become men who were smart enough to know what these jokes really meant about society's attitude toward women, making sexist jokes when they should have known better. I was sick of being told that I didn't know anything and should be making sandwiches in the name of humour by people trying to wind me up, and acting like I was overreacting when I did get wound up.

I was reading the prescribed feminist poetry for the Leaving Cert (cue more sexist jokes in English class) and it really got me thinking about what it meant to be an active feminist.

I was nestling into my own corner of the internet, outside of facebook and monkeys riding on the backs of baby pigs, and so I was reading and watching more about what feminists were saying and doing and thinking, and learning about what problems are around currently that were making us unequal, and what was being done about it. I read about anti-porn feminism, sex-positive feminism, slut shaming, women in the media. About rape culture. About burkas, genital mutilation, missing white woman syndrome. About women.

I had taken up debating at school but always found myself more engaged with debates at parties and in the back of class when we should have been working. "What's the harm in ___?" "What pay gap?" "I don't really think that, I'm just poking fun". I got very heated in these debates with all the furor of a teenager pissed off with the world looking for something to believe in.

By now I had "filled out" and was developing my own sense of style in how I dressed. Alcohol started showing up at house parties and I started going to pubs with my friends every once in a while. I was uncomfortable with the reactions I was getting in a social context. I was annoyed that I couldn't walk down the road without being beeped or whistled at. I was sick of strange men in bars trying to grab my arse. I was scared by stories from friends and peers and experiences of my own, which ranged from lads making inappropriate comments about about breasts to people being raped or almost raped. I was angry that I lived in a society where none of this was unusual.

So I educated myself about it. I tried to learn and understand specific ways in which society treats women unfairly. I learned about the way in which we're all products of a culture where there is a constant undercurrent of misogyny. I learned about what I could do, and I formed my own opinions on what I agreed with and didn't agree with, what really was "harmless fun" and what was just blatant sexism. To me that was the difference between being a "feminist" and an "active feminist". Engaging with it properly.

I'm not saying that I know everything. I'm not saying I'm somehow more of a feminist or any better of a feminist than anyone else. I'm just trying to explain how I got to this point, where I'm comfortable openly describing myself as "feminist", where I'm aware of ways in which people can be sexist without even realising it, and willing to call people out when they are sexist.

I'll wrap up by saying that feminism isn't about being angry. It isn't about hating men. It isn't just for women, or young people, or activists, or politics. It's for anyone that wants to be as informed as possible about the culture we live in, how that culture shapes us, and how we would like to shape that culture into an environment that's better for everyone. Go read a blog. Watch youtube. Google it. Find your stance (I'll probably write another post at some time in the future about key issues where there's division among feminists, and recommend some reading/listening/viewing material).