My Uneasy Relationship with the “Feminist” Tag

Jessica Bennett’s Feminism or Bust, which appeared in Newsweek in March, 2010 examined female resistance to feminism in the face of discrepancy between the successes of the feminist movement and the reality of the current female experience in the work place. Like Bennett, I grew up enjoying certain successes of feminism. Title IX, which passed just two years before my birth, protected my right to follow my big brother into a variety of sports, where I excelled for many years. My success as a student was second to none and my eventual descent into the very male world of rock ‘n’ roll never seemed odd or impossible to me even with few female role models lighting the way. While I have endured sexist comments and doubt throughout my varying endeavors, I never felt real exclusion until I was in my 20′s and entering the traditional workforce; it was only then that I began to consider more closely the ways that gender expectations and ideas impact and influence not only my life but the lives of all women.

Feminism has most certainly affected the female experience in positive ways. It’s elevated our expectations for girls and elevated their individual ambitions. However, the adult world those girls enter is still marked by antiquated notions about gender and professional opportunity. In short we’ve become very good at setting our daughters up for disappointment in their adult lives…when the “you can do anything you want and be anything you want” rhetoric of their childhood meets the reality of a work force that resists female ambition.

I felt this intimately during my senior year of college, when I worked as a temp in administrative support for the sales team of a major seat-belt manufacturer. The team consisted of a lead manager, 4-6 outside sales managers, who traveled extensively to meet client needs, 3-5 inside sales managers, who supported the outsides sales managers from the central office, and maybe 2-3 administrative support people. The highest paid and most interesting jobs, the lead manager and the outside sales managers, were all men. Men and women worked as inside sales managers. All of the administrative support people were women. At one point, an outside sales position opened up and one of the male and one of the female inside managers wanted the job. The male, just two years out of college, got the job over the woman, also a college graduate, but one who’d worked there longer and had triple the recent grad’s experience in sales. Many women have a similar “welcome to reality – men have the advantage when it comes to work” moment early in their career. This advantage can be attributed to a lot of different things…and almost all of them sit squarely in a fundamental gender bias that continues to inform work relationships and expectations. Clearly, the goals of feminism have not yet been met!

So, why has feminism become a label many women, including myself, resist? This topic is much discussed; and a Google search for ‘feminism and bad word’ yields pages of results – mostly articles arguing for a more nuanced positive application of the word that more accurately depicts the movement’s aims. Such arguments are fair, but I’m not sure they are the best use of energy. At the end of the day, it is just a word…a word with an unfair connotation, but one that nevertheless has become associated not with a desire for gender equality, but with a blanket hatred and distrust of men; that connotation is here to stay and it creates resistance to the important messages of the movement. Moreover, calling oneself a feminist implies support of ALL feminist issues, something that many women have a hard time accepting. Most women can agree that equal pay for equal work should be a given. But not all issues that fall under the feminist umbrella are as easily agreed upon.

I think to best serve the aims of the feminist movement, the individual issues need to be taken out from under the label’s umbrella and disseminated in a more nuanced and effective way – one that allows women AND men to offer support without tacitly agreeing to the connotations carried by the feminist tag? I recognize that those who embrace the label with aplomb are probably bristling with anger right now. Or, some might feel sorry for me and think I just don’t get it. Perhaps they’re right. But I worry that these most vocal proponents of feminism are driven more by a love of controversy and contention than by their desire to improve the state of women; and because the movement is defined as unilaterally female, the contentious energy inevitably feels directed at men, even when it’s not. Moreover, accusing the patriarchal right-wing of single handedly weakening the movement by re-writing the image of the feminist as ugly and unappealing to young women and girls is a simplification of what has happened and potentially insulting to those very girls the movement claims have been alienated. In fact, the real success of that assault, which I believe has occurred, is that many feminists now exert energy and time fighting for the right to be called “feminists” without connotation rather than finding creative ways to subvert the negativity and further advance the movement’s goals. This type of subversion is what I aim for in my work as editor of Deflowered Memoirs, and in the production of our shows Live and Rated R and Ding Dong My Hymen’s Gone. My goal from the start was to create a venue where the stories of women were presented in a way that men could enjoy as well. After all, in order to accomplish the goals of feminism men must see the value in our aims and work with us to accomplish them. As long as those goals are tied to a term that is associated with gender animosity (regardless of the fairness of that association), that cooperation will be more difficult to find than it should be. For this reason, my dance with the “feminist” label will remain uneasy.