The F word.

I am a feminist.

There I said it.

Now for a second can we ignore the man-hating, hairy legs, “dyke” stigma

And just call it for what it is.

“Belief in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes.”

Women who want to be seen as equal, (not more or less).

 To earn, think, live, behave, work and be who/what we want to be.

It doesn’t seem scary when you put it that way.

It doesn’t seem like the kind of philosophy that will tear apart the family.

I took my first woman’s studies class completely on accident.

I grew up an only child with a mom who worked and was strong willed and with a dad who was a feminist with out really knowing it and so the idea that I could be who ever I wanted to be wasn’t something that was revolutionary to me.
But the word 'feminist' conjured up the idea of angry women who hated men. And that was not something that appealed to me so I never really took the time to consider “feminism”

My first semester at Columbia I took a class called “woman and art” I took this because I thought there were so few woman artists that were famous, so I wanted to know these ladies secrets, since I was going into the art world.  It never occurred to me to ask why there were so few women in museums, and why they had a separate class specifically about woman when I had literally taken over 6 art history classes up to this point. But when I did ask those questions I felt like all of a sudden a lot of the way I had felt growing up began to make sense. The first day of class, our cute little, lesbian, burlesque dancing professor stood at the front of the room and asked us to raise our hand if we were feminists. I did not raise my hand. I went home that day contemplating dropping the class, and wondered what sort of liberal nut job education system I had gotten myself into. But I ended up keeping the class mostly because I was too lazy to walk further down Wabash for a film studies class during the same time. Luckily my laziness paid off, because that class started an intense search for answers for me, I ate up every book I could on the subject. And I would now raise my hand proudly, because by opening my eyes to the world around me I began to see patterns we re-create and perpetuate with out thinking. I began to find so many things I just “lived with” and thought were normal (like an intrinsic fear of walking to the train station at night alone to be apart of the patterns of being a woman)- and when I recognized it, I knew it was not fair .

So that’s how I ended up a feminist. I shave my legs, I get angry sometimes but most of the time I feel pretty hopeful, I love the men in my life for their strength and also for respecting mine. And I am not a lesbian, but I don’t think it’s a requirement so my lesbian friends are ok with me still being a feminist.  So its not a dirty word, and I hope it doesn’t scare you from reading my blog- and it's ok If you dont call yourself a feminist, I hope that if you continue reading you will feel like a bad ass anyway.