I Need Feminism

Do this. Google “I need feminism” and you will find a roster of reasons, examples and stories about why people need feminism.

I thought I’d chime in my own reasons. I need feminism because:

• I don’t like being called a bitch when I call someone out on their shit.

• Wearing an engagement ring is one of the measures I take in order to protect myself from unwanted advances. Someone please remind me why in hell my personal wishes to be left alone are never taken as seriously as some fictitious fiancé’s possession of me?

• Getting drunk has WAY too many risks.
• My (male) relatives believe I should enjoy the attention of guys who hang out their car windows and holler at me. WTF and WHY?
• I have given away apologies to people who never deserved them because I ‘friendzoned’ them. Friendzoning is bullshit. If you got your hopes up thinking  I would date you just because you throw compliments my way and try to engage me in conversation, then I refuse to take the blame for bursting your bubble. Wake up to fucking reality.

• Where I live, the more a guy has sex, the better track record he has. With a girl – it’s the exact opposite. I’m not advocating for either opinion, but a happy medium between the two would be great.
• “Boys will be boys”. WHAT THE HELL? I sure hope not. Why does anyone even say this? Unless you really want a society filled with male bodies walking around with the maturity of twelve year olds. Oh wait… Isn’t that what we’re dealing with?

• Being a virgin is the holy grail of womanhood. For some weird reason, my value to society stems more from whether or not I’m having sex rather than whether or not I’m an innovative mind who will be solving the problems the generations before me started. What?
• I’ve realized that I don’t take credit for my own successes when there’s no damn way I should attribute it to anything else than my hard work and tenacity. Watch this one minute video. It’s so true.
• A man on the street who I’ve never met before thinks he has the RIGHT to talk about my legs (as some object like the weather which one casually brings up in conversation) and what’s worse than that is I’m supposed to enjoy the ‘compliment’.

All these reasons about why I need feminism – while they’re valid, they’re also nowhere near the reasons many other people need feminism. My list here is a list of gender related problems I run into in a country where we would like to believe we have equality and it’s all good. My focus on my first world problems only has to do with the fact that these are the ones I know intimately, and I’m in no way wanting to forget about the serious issues feminism is combatting around the globe, sex trafficking, criminalization of rape and other shit like that which you really think would have been wiped off the face of the earth by now. Hello, it’s 2013. But no, as long as we have people writing laws based on men’s interpretation of religious texts, this bullfuckery will go down. I need feminism. You need feminism. You need feminism because you need me to have the empowerment to repair society from all the fuckups of patriarchy.