Feminist Guilt

I am a feminist.

There.

I said it.

I even put it in bold for you.

On occasions the reactions received from outing yourself as one are not dissimilar to those you might get from admitting to voting BNP or I don’t know, not believing in global warming.

wow. offensive.

Why could this be? In my mind a feminist is not discriminatory or ignorant… rather they are forward thinking and egalitarian.

Last year in a seminar, our tutor asked for people to raise their hand if they considered themselves to be a feminist. Out of close to fifteen people, me and maybe one other person did- she asked us why we were and I said “everyone should be one, shouldn’t they?”

If I said the F word to you (feminist, not fuck) and asked you to picture one, I doubt you’d think about someone like me …

I’m young, I’m straight, and I look a bit like Barbie.

Not middle aged, not a butch lesbian; I don’t have a buzzcut, although I do have that certain ferocious demeanour.

I think that it’s about time that these sorts of preconceptions are QUASHED.

Anyone can be a feminist, old, young, gay, straight, male or female.

Perhaps some women use feminism as an excuse to be man-haters, and that has coloured your view on them. But as far as I’m concerned to be a feminist means only that you believe in equality between men and women, so everybody should support it- ESPECIALLY women themselves.

You can be a feminist and wear makeup, you can be a feminist and have sex for money, and you can even be a feminist without insisting people refer to you as a ‘womyn’.

Seriously.. I google 'feminist' and THIS comes up!!!! bleedin eck! (and no that wasn't a menstrual pun)

I feel that a lot of young women see Feminism as some kind of embarrassing taboo- but the fact is that even nowadays the average British male wage continues to surpass the female one by 16%, despite girls generally outperforming boys at GCSE and A Level.

So girls, let me ask you this, would you be happy to be paid less than a man for doing an identical job?

If you answered no- welcome to the magical world of Feminism!

Unfortunately that isn’t really the case Bey.