Until sometime ago, I didn’t think much of feminism. I thought it was a systematic way for the female empowerment to become a trend, for “bitch” to describe the pre-eminent modern woman, always gauche never submissive. The statistics and articles stressing the income disparity between men and women failed to amaze me. Jennifer Lawrence’s Lenny letter about the inequality in workplace has inspired many women to step forth. I am still a college student, two years away from entering the workforce and waddling in my own ignorance about how disfiguring the gender-centered system really is. Unable to relate to either sentiment on the spectrum, I turned away with a shrug of shoulders. What I didn’t get for a longtime was that at the center of the idea of feminism is respect for individuals, a virtue I had been practicing, living and preaching all my life.

I’ve always been the goody-two-shoes, yes-ma’m, say-no-to-profanity and sorry-I-bumped-into-you-even-though-you-really-bumped-into-me-but-I’ll-apologize-because-I-don’t-want-any-problems kind of girl, yielding to authority: mentors, parents, adults, dandi baba (a wooden stick that my daddy painted on to make it look all menacing as a way to ensure us kids wouldn’t step out of line – I remember, countless occasions, when dandi baba was used to deliver terrible spankings), all powerful beings. But there’s a fine line between respecting someone and letting them walk all over you. In fact, I never stood up for myself until I was in seventh grade, when middle school started to feel like hell and I knew if I didn’t at least silence the hammering inside my brain, I would lose myself. I respected myself and my worth and I believed there was no room for such inappropriate behavior.

So when my friend told me about an incidence that occurred during a class discussion, I was aghast. She is a public speaker and a student leader of many organizations, a powerful woman on campus. And yet, she was displaced as though her persona lacked gravitas, her confidence, a prized tool, was sexualized and reduced to nothing. During the mini group discussion, one male student snorted a ghastly comment (that I dare not reproduce here) when he was asked to share his opinion on what my friend had to say. The kind of comment that makes you think, wait, wasn’t this supposed to be a discussion on Europe’s healthcare policy? The kind of comment that makes you wonder if you should double with a retort or simply walk away from it. It is almost always the latter. He was having a good laugh with his pals, LOL, but this kind of thing is becoming hackneyed. Maureen Sherry wrote a noteworthy article for the NY Times, in which she recalls many cases of sexual harassment on Wall Street during her time there, like “the young banker who was groped publicly to settle a bet about whether her breasts were real.” Incidences like these simply assert the impermanence of the male obsession with female subservience. The cruelties individual women wake up to everyday are powerful to make them cry and pull out their hair and re-open the casket to all the other grievances because while the cry for change has become age-old, the injustices have not.

The line shouldn’t be drawn at unequal income, it should be drawn way before, where the worth of a woman is recalculated. Women are not objects to be toyed with. They are individuals worthy of their titles, because women, too, have worked hard to get where they are. Feminism is a simple idea, really: treat women equally. And it begins before proponents of Planned Parenthood and Susan B. Anthony and Abigail Adams’s letters to John Adams, fraught with advice “Don’t forget women”. Perhaps, it began with Eve as life was breathed into her and Adam realized what an honor it was to have a companion, a friend, a lifelong partner and so he put her on a pedestal and treated her with respect.