My Feminist Awakening

I think for the longest time, I chose to disregard the fact that women were indeed less than equal within our society because I wanted to believe otherwise. Not too long ago, I shied away from the label "feminist" because I misunderstood everything that the term implicated. For me, feminists used to be these highly vocal, highly emotional, highly aggressive figures who fought for the "fairer sex" by tearing down those in their way. I thought that they were individuals who subscribed to a cause that had already been fulfilled.

How wrong was I? Very. Being a women in a system that puts on a facade of equality made me truly believe that this status quo was all there was. But reflecting upon all of the negative body image messages I got over the years, upon the brutality against women, the substandard emphasis of the sciences for women in our education system, and on and on, I realized that I had subscribed to a very cleverly disguised rose colored pair of glasses with which I viewed the world. Feminism for me is the activism towards crushing this faulty system of oppression and misogyny that is bred by the hegemonic patriarchy that misrepresents the majority of the human race. Feminism for me is a way to achieve gender equality by bringing women up in society to be alongside men, not to push men down in our efforts to climb up. Feminism is asserting my right to live autonomously without having factors that I had no active choice in determine my quality of life.

So thus the social issues of our time come to mind by extension. People may think that social issues that don't concern us or that aren't directly relate to us are issues that are not our business. Gay rights, racial equality, and many other issues are some that some of the majority marginalize for this very reason. But if we analyze the greater scheme of things and if we decide to really look at the core issues, these marginalized issues have some way of implicating severe consequences in our own lives as well. These issues of gender, sexual orientation, and racial equality all reactions to the social mores that we have contrived from discrimination and prejudice. So thus fighting for these social issues means that you're working to dismantle the status quo of our society that pushes for discrimination. Thus any social issue that pertains to the degradation of other individuals, the conditions which we allow for individuals to live autonomously, is an issue of great importance that deserves to be addressed. We are all working towards bettering the society around us and thus we should all subscribe to a pair of critical thinking glasses with which we can accurately see the strings in our system.