Yesterday I stepped on the soapbox and pontificated on why we need more feminism, now, even while some famous and influential female celebrities refuse to be identified as a feminist when asked point blank “Are you a feminist?” My cerebral writer and thinker friend Christine left a much more eloquent comment highlighting the significance of the confluence between “feminist” and the word “bitch” in popular imagination.
Being identified as a bitch opens a woman up to disrespect, disdain, renunciation, and violence.
“The bitch deserves it.”
Someone on my Twitter stream was exasperated that something called “rapeseed” even exists. I laughed because I’ve always felt the same way about this and would never want to be caught dead with a bottle of “rapeseed oil” in my kitchen. Just because. I decided to find out WHY it has such an unfortunate name. So I searched for “Why is rapeseed named” only that I did not get far before I caught sight of this and had to pause and hyperventilate…
Really? Really?!
By now you must have come across images from the ad campaign for UN Women (dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women) created by Memac Ogilvy & Mather Dubai. It’s infuriating, to say the least.
In the face of “prevalent opinions” as revealed by Google searches, we remember what Arundhati Roy said about the Voiceless:
[T]here’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.
— Arundhati Roy (2004)
I think it has always been about fear. We repress what we fear.
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This is a very important blog post and I thank you for writing it. I hadn’t seen these ads for UN Women before. Very, very powerful. Wondering if you have read Caitlin Moran’s book, How To Be a Woman. I would highly recommend it. I AM A FEMINIST because I believe in the empowerment of women.
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Thank you. Yes, I love Caitlin Moran and chatted w her a few times on Twitter. By chatting I mean she @ me and I screamed like a little girl.
I love what she wrote and I want to read the passage out loud every time I hear someone denying being a feminist.