this is what I was thinking about as I walked to the med center for class on three hours of sleep: One of the reasons I'm a feminist is that feminism is a way of explaining some of the things that happen in our lives. It's easy to think of every good or bad experience as isolated events that affect us individually, but sometimes I'm finding that things are part of a broader pattern. If I'm in a particularly militant mood, the language is more or less that some things I've gone through are part of the systematic violence against (girls/women/LGBQ people/youth/non-Christians/whatever). But tonight I'm not feeling angry so much as contemplative, and these things make me kind of wistful.
I'm a feminist because it wasn't just me who saw the thin women on TV portrayed as worth loving and the bigger women portrayed as either funny or angry, but always single. It was also not just me who heard the words "fat slob" spoken in their own living rooms about women with BMIs over 19. It was not just my old friend who was beaten up in high school for coming out. For every one person who comes forward about being sexually harassed at work or who resents being whistled at in the street, there are countless more who are silent. My mother was not the only person who had to decide between paying for day care and leaving her job; in fact she was not the only young woman who didn't earn enough money to live on her own after college without a significant other. Years later, I was not the only one whose significant other got away with shit because he was physically larger. And these are just white middle-class troubles.
feminism taught me that none of us are alone. but somewhere in that, it makes us able to unite.
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