Somehow, despite women attempting for decades upon decades to ignite equality within our society, with several valiant and successful efforts – suffrage earned in 1920 and Roe v. Wade in 1973, the two most notable examples – we still exist in a society in which feminism is the f-word that is more controversial coming from my mouth than the actual curse word. We touted the progress we’d made as a society each time one of those milestones was achieved, as though the Supreme Court’s decision to place the charge of a woman’s body into her own hands was the pinnacle of success.
But even today, over 40 years after Roe v. Wade first occurred, we have people lobbying to reverse the order. We have women fighting women, fighting feminists, on the basis that they believe in “equality” over women’s superiority to men. (Newsflash: feminism is about equality. Misandry is about female superiority. There’s a difference.) We have women arguing that feminism is degrading women’s choices, that feminism is an institutionalized condescension towards women who genuinely want to get married and stay at home and raise children, when in fact the opposite is true. Feminism is not about streamlining the idea of what women should be or should do. Feminism is about recognizing the fact that there are innate differences in women, and allowing women to make a choice about what they want to do with their lives. No way is the “right” way to be a woman.
The stigmatization of feminism (even the mere mention of it around boys my age is enough to make them roll their eyes and make a rude comment) is the driving force behind this polarization. Not only is it creating schisms between women, but it is also alienating men; by placing them into the “other” category, men are left shorted by a widespread ideology that is seeking major reformation socioeconomically, politically, and also on a more human and emotional scale. And while I am of the belief that a movement does not intrinsically need to benefit men in order to be of some importance, there is a space within feminist ideology that men inhabit and need to openly inhabit in order to make this platform work on more than just a simple, close-minded level. In order to make feminism something I can utter out loud without meeting laughter and ignorant smirks, men need to be involved.
In my spring semester, I took a Women Writers class in which we watched Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s famous TEDxTalk, “We Should All Be Feminists.” Her talk was different from the generic, cookie-cutter “women can be great and should be great and let’s celebrate women!” sentiment. For while those things are true, if the entirety of the feminist movement was founded in that, it would lack a great deal of meaning. Instead, she focused on the manners in which feminism acts not in a concrete and obviously visible way – there are not people running around claiming to be sexist, for example – but rather in a more abstract manner. Sexism is something that has been encoded in our society’s DNA, a mutation that has simply been passed down from generation to generation. We adapted ourselves to it, learned how to live with it, forced ourselves into the resignation that this was the way our lives would be forever.
Adichie noted in this TEDxTalk not just that our society is pigeonholing girls into one particular brand of “woman” and “feminine,” but also that “We do a great disservice to boys in how we raise them. We stifle the humanity of boys. We define masculinity in a very narrow way. Masculinity becomes this hard, small cage and we put the boys inside the cage. We teach boys to be afraid of weakness, of vulnerability.” The reason feminism exists is not simply to provide women with equal pay, to give us more representatives in Hollywood and in Congress, to let us attain positions of authority without the degrading comments about our appearances rather than our actual worth – it exists because there is a notion within our present society that being a woman, that being feminine, is a bad thing. Boys are told not to run or throw or play like a girl. Girls are told to cover their shoulders and their knees and their chests because it might “distract” their male counterparts, even from the age of five. We mock boys that play with dolls or like the color pink. We socialize our children from the youngest of ages into this sexist society.
And men are not escaping the ironclad grip of this sexism. As Adichie noted, they are forced into these confines of masculinity that tell them that weakness, insecurity, and vulnerability are off-limits to them. A vibrant, complex emotional spectrum is ridiculed as feminine and feminine means bad. We raise our boys in this environment and throw them to the world, and then wonder why they struggle to make lasting relationships and struggle with identity and why our fathers are always so concerned about salaries and jobs and being the breadwinner. It is because, as Adichie notes, we “link masculinity to money.” In the same way that this sexist society forged a box for women – homemaker and wife who stays at home and takes care of the children and keeps the husband happy – into which they shoved us without asking what we wanted to do, men are forced into the cage that fits perfectly opposite the woman’s.
Feminism is not merely a woman’s problem or a woman’s game. And as much as the feminist movement encourages the independence of women, men are a necessity. They are just as integral to its propagation and to its success, because, contrary to popular belief, it does, in fact, affect men, too. Adichie closes her TEDxTalk with her own edition of the definition of a feminist: it is “a man or a woman who says, ‘Yes, there is a problem with gender as it is today, and we must fix it; we must do better.’"
