This is going to be one heck of a truthful post. First, we must ask ourselves this. What, precisely, is feminism?
Take that ‘meninists’.
As seen above, feminism is about the equality of sexes.
Modern Day Feminism
In recent years, we’ve seen women and men stand together to advocate feminism. Until then, we’d seen men take a fearful approach towards it. Admittedly, I myself took an unsure stance towards feminism, believing the sole purpose of it (albeit an existent radical feminist approach) was that feminists wanted ‘world domination’ and that they were all angry and rude, a stereotype that I’ve now realised was offensive and harsh. In light of recent events, I’ve now noticed that feminism is so much more than that, and I see it’s true importance. Feminism is about allowing everybody to have the opportunity of free expression, to be able to live in a society where we’re all treated equally, a society where women will be paid and treated with the same respect that men are, because while the place of women in today’s society has considerably improved, there are still limitations. As a ‘man’ myself, I’ve still taken the time to look into society and notice that, in 2015, we still live in a patriarchal society. However, thanks to social media, feminists have been able to initiate a much more active form of feminism, with a considerable amount of young people involved.
Now, a large amount of feminists, notably on Twitter, identify themselves as ‘Intersectional Feminists’, while I didn’t understand this at first, I’m now hugely supportive of intersectionalism, a key reason being as follows;
“The view that women experience oppression in varying configurations and
in varying degrees of intensity. Cultural patterns of oppression are
not only interrelated, but are bound together and influenced by
the intersectional systems of society. Examples of this
include race, gender, class, ability, and ethnicity.”
Masculinity
An important factor when discussing feminism is who you are, who you really are, in all forms. It helps with understanding gender inequality on both sides, myself being (at the time of writing) an 18 year-old, straight, white, working-class, male. Due to my lifestyle and my surroundings, I’m able to understand the oppression women face, but I’m also able to understand the struggle of masculinity. Here’s a rant I had a while back;
While I don’t want to undermine the oppression faced by women, we’re fortunate enough to understand that there is indeed oppression faced by the male gender, not to the extremes of female oppression, but it’s definitely there. The key factors in male oppression are sexuality, class, and age. As previously mentioned, being straight, assumingly working class and 18 (a ‘new’ adult so to speak), means that there are certain limitations in my character, or at least what is expected of me. I’m expected to like rugby and football, whereby in contrast I prefer comic books and film/TV, which somehow makes me less of a ‘man’ than people who prefer sports. Being raised in this situation, where people expected me to be obsessed with sports, I grew up understanding that there are different forms of masculinity, and unfortunately these are ranked to define how ‘manly’ you are. I would frequently get asked “are you a rugby player?”/”do you play football”, and I would reply “no, I prefer to play video games/write/etc” and would be asked “What? Are you a girl?”, which is hugely undermining of character.
We shouldn’t forget that men have the highest percentage of depression and suicide, we don’t talk to people about it because we’re expected to “not be as sensitive” or “man up”. We’re expected to hide our feelings in order to be a ‘man’, and that in itself is damaging. Within my ‘group of friends’, this struggle for masculinity would also occur. I would be asked “why do you have a tumblr account? I thought it was for girls”, “why do you like Marina and the Diamonds? You’re a man!”. I would witness others be asked similar things, but I would also, especially in my two years at sixth form, experience my ‘guy’ friends joke about rape and ‘how nice her tits are’. The new wave of feminism really does help the struggle of masculinity, it helps us understand the layered system of being a man, and it’s helping us understand feminism as a whole and the ever-going fight for gender equality and understanding. Fortunately, there are male celebrities who openly support feminism, which is hugely beneficial.
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| L-R; Ezra Miller, Tom Hardy and John Legend, three of the ever-growing list of male celebrity feminists. |
With this in mind, I hope that with the progressive nature of new-feminism, us men are able to not only be happy within ourselves and have free expression, but also to understand the derogatory basis of female oppression, to truly understand that rape jokes are not okay and that consent is hugely important, the objectification of both men and women is something that needs to be changed. Challenging masculinity is why this is hugely important, if men can begin to understand how they internally oppress each other, and overtly oppress women, then we can help men who do not identify as feminists and gain their support in gaining an overall equality of gender.
Feminism in the media
Before starting this section, I’d like to identify my three feminist icons.
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| L-R; Virginia Woolf (author), Emma Watson, and Mark Ruffalo. |
As I mentioned before, I’m a huge comic book fan. We’re set to get two female-led superhero movies soon, Captain Marvel for, well, Marvel, and the iconic Wonder Woman for DC. It was recently announced that the gender gap in comic readers is narrowing, in fact, women have taken over men and are now the dominant gender in comic book readership.
I thought it would be worthwhile pointing out some important female heroes in comic books, from the two dominant forces Marvel and DC Comics. These heroes are hugely important because they teach their readers that anyone can be a hero, no matter their gender, age, sexuality, race and, well, even species. Young girls are hardly ever encouraged in the same way young boys are, so these heroes are hugely important for these reasons.
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| L-R; Marvel’s Black Widow (a spy), Captain Marvel (a pilot) and She-Hulk (a lawyer) |
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| L-R; DC’s Batgirl, Wonder Woman, Supergirl. |
While we’re on the topic of female superheroes, we shouldn’t forget Miss America (America Chavez, an LGBT Latin-American superhero that leads the Young Avengers), Squirrel Girl (she defeated the top Marvel villains like Thanos (you know, that huge purple guy with the infinity gauntlet), and some heroes like Deadpool, with squirrels), Miss Martian, Magik, Zatanna, and Hawkgirl.
We also have some iconic feminist characters in the wonderful world of TV and film;
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| L-R; Princess Merida (Brave), Mindy Lahiri (The Mindy Project) and Imperator Furiosa (Mad Max) |
The importance of such characters like Merida, Mindy and Furiosa is that they define this new wave of feminism in a way that promotes the idea of free expression within character. While characters like Merida and Furiosa are genuinely bad-ass heroes that don’t need no man, Mindy is a doctor that stands by her fellow women while being happy to fall in love. Feminism is about the equality of genders, and with this in mind, these characters promote the idea that you can do whatever you want to do and still be a feminist, because that’s what it’s about, the freedom to be yourself in an equal society.
I’d like to end with these two quotes from Mark Ruffalo (y’know, Hulk) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche (the hugely important feminist, the one that ‘woke up like dis’ in the Beyoncé song).
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| Hero |
Thanks for reading, I hope you’ve read this and feel like you can fully support the feminist cause, no matter what your age, gender, sexuality, race or social class is.
Feminism is here to benefit everyone.
That’s all for now, feel free to share this post (it took me 4 rewrites to get it right), follow me on all my social media accounts if you’d like to!
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