If you read the title of this article, it should come as no surprise to you that I am a feminist. It also shouldn't come as a surprise that I think you, too, should be a feminist. Now, depending on who you are, where you live and what you believe, the word feminist can mean a lot of different things to you. I can only speak for myself when I define the word, but I like to believe that I am not too far off from what the word means.
Feminist: it's eight letters, three vowels, five consonants and three syllables. But what does it mean? The word can mean something completely different from one person to another, but it isn't as intangible as it seems. To be a feminist means to support feminism, and to support feminism means, in the simplest terms, equality. This equality can mean any number of things. It can be simple, like being seen by society as equal beings to men. It can be a little more complex, like being paid as much as men. It can be being allowed to do the same work as men. It can be having basic human rights as men do. It can be having the right to simply exist.
Today, there are many negative opinions regarding feminism and being a feminist, and this is a huge problem. For some reason, people seem to think that women wanting rights is an impractical notion. Personally, I think that these people are impractical. Why is wanting to be treated like a valid human being such a bad thing? Feminists don't want to enslave mankind like the Greek Amazons. They aren't throwing burning bras at the capital in an extremist effort to prove that they are better than men. Yes, there are some who do extreme and irrational things in the name of feminism, but that's not what feminism is striving for.
Feminists don't think that women are better than men simply because they are women. Feminism is not about establishing a dictatorship-based matriarchy. Feminists don't want to purge the world of all men. They don't want to establish dominance and rule the universe like The Eye of Sauron. They want equality. They want to be treated like they are worth the time of day. They don't want to be harassed for just being women. They don't want to be valued only for the fact that they can birth children.
Feminists want men and women to be treated the same way, and the beautiful thing about this is that their mission goes both ways. Women and men deserve equal treatment. That is the mission of feminism. Men aren't always strong and women aren't always weak. These gender "norms" are a huge problem in themselves when it comes to feminism and daily life, but that is an argument for another time.
Essentially, I am a feminist. I support women's rights. I support men's rights. I am an activist for equality in the workforce, in society, in the media, in the home and in all other aspects of life. I believe that all human beings deserve to be treated as human beings. So yes, I am a feminist, and you should be, too.
