Redefining Me
After many years of thinking of myself as a feminist, I’ve realized that I’m not. That definition has become too loaded with baggage I don’t want to carry any more. There’s a particular brand of feminism that proclaims if you’re a feminist, then you’re for everything womyn and against everything male. Modern feminist rhetoric lost me when their pendulum swung so far that it’s no longer about gender neutrality, but feminine superiority.
That’s just swapping one form of tyranny for another. If you haven’t picked-up on it yet, I have a low tolerance for bullies.
Now I absolutely support wage equality, shattering glass ceilings, and social, economic, educational, and political parity. Ain’t nobody gonna put Baby in the corner, right? So if that’s how you define feminism, preach, sister, preach.
In my head, what these ideas have in common is that they’re all about how groups of humans work and live together. I think most of us would agree that the rules, expectations, and opportunities in a secular society should be gender neutral.
However, it’s at the individual level where much of what modern feminists beat their drums over loses me, particularly when they start placing value judgments against women who choose differently than they do and claim that all differences between men and women are irrelevant. A lot of feminists groups are drawing hard lines in the sand and to my surprise some of those lines exclude me.
If being a modern feminist means fitting into a narrow definition and being anti-male, I’m going to have to pass.
Besides, some of the finest human beings I know are male. It’s not gender, it’s attitude.