The F-word

Let me be straightforward: I love the word feminist. I wasn't even a teenager when I started using it, and I was shocked to discover in my early twenties that there are smart, well-educated women who don't use it to describe themselves.

Immediate political issues are the face of feminism to many people. Right now, abortion, access to birth control, and emergency contraception are all getting a lot of attention. These issues are certainly important and bear the stamp of urgency in that they endanger women's rights and health in some of the richest areas of the world, an effect which trickles down to countries receiving pretty much any kind of aid from the U.S., where I live, and its first-world allies. While I applaud the attention given to these issues, to me, the interesting questions of feminism lie deeper.

One of my basic and probably unprovable beliefs is that we all learn certain basic assumptions about the world from the culture we grow up in, and that we internalize these assumptions so deeply that we find it difficult to concieve of them as assumptions that could be wrong and instead treat them as facts. To me, the essential job of feminism is to call these assumptions, particularly ones related to sex, gender, and sexuality, into question.

Essentially, I'm curious. I'm curious about how I, growing up in the era of "Girls Can Do Anything!" t-shirts, make assumptions about sex, gender, sexuality, and identity. I'm curious about how I learned to assign value to gendered behaviors or traits and how this affects my life and view of myself and the world. And I'm curious how these things work for other people. Perhaps it makes me academic, but I think curiousity and the challenging of assumptions are basically good things, and to me, feminism is a name for focusing on a particular set of things about which to be curious, and it's a set I find interesting and compelling.

To me, this is what a feminist looks like.