As many people do, I would consider myself to be a feminist. With that being said, I believe most people lack to understand what the actual meaning of feminism is, along with the way in which we need to go about achieving gender equality. Most who lack to understand the true meaning of feminism are those who lack understanding for what the feminist movement is meant to represent.
The feminist movement is thought by a great amount of people to be the female gender trying to dominate over the male gender. That's not it at all. What feminism and what the feminist movement was actually created for was that of gender equality. Basically, whether someone is a male or female, it should have no impact on the way society acts or thinks about that person. While the feminist movement has been pretty successful so far, it still has a ways to go. The goal of feminism is to end sexual oppression altogether.
Looking at society as a whole, it's very clear that sexual oppression exists for females in area it just doesn't for the opposite gender. A major example of this that people often use when comparing genders to one another would be the wage gap and the fact that women are paid 30 percent less than males. While this is true and rather disappointing in my opinion, many people miss other factors in everyday society that allow for the sexual oppression of females to exist. When looking at clothing for instance, sexual oppression exists even in this case. If an average-sized male buys clothes and it doesn't fit, it's usually for a positive reason such as the fact that they're too muscular or broad. The point being that the clothes are made to fit them that way. If you look at clothes for an average-sized woman that doesn't fit them, it's likely for the exact opposite reason. Even clothing has been built to give sexual oppression in its meaning, even if it's unintentional.
While society has been shaped this way to favor the male gender and undermine feminism, an issue exists here in itself. Part of sexual oppression is the fact that society has been able to undermine women in the first place and talk about women in a negative light on topics in which they talk about men in a positive light. A major contribution to the reasoning as to why society does this, at least in my opinion, would be the fact that some women set the example to let society do this. Today, we live in a society where women joke about things that are unnecessary For example, they'll call each other inappropriate names or pretend that their being only exists for sexual instances or accommodates the male gender. While women are obviously joking about this, being the gender that is sexually oppressed, society looks at women saying this and believe that it's okay to do that in return. What women need to do is recognize the fact that we are the gender being oppressed and because of that, we can't go around acting like it's okay to undermine ourselves in any way, even if we are joking, because society will respond that way. Set the example and do not let society undermine feminism.
