No, Actually I Won’t Shut Up.

*Just to warn everyone upfront, this is a rant.  I don’t know if this is the kind of stuff people want to read about on Feministing, but I thought there might be someone here who can relate…

You know, I remember the exact day it started. It started when I was researching birth control. I was about to get married, and I knew nothing about it.I didn’t even know that if you were on the pill, you had to take it everyday, and I certainly didn’t know you had to take it at the same time everyday. I didn’t learn about it from my mom, who thought the pill was dangerous and whose preferred birth control method during the 1970s was the diaphragm. (Do people still use those?) And I certainly didn’t learn about it in my abstinence only sex education classes. I had to research it myself, the old fashioned way – on Google. Somewhere in between reading about estrogen, progesterone and cervical mucus, I stumbled across an article about how some pharmacists were refusing to fill prescriptions for birth control and emergency contraception. I was outraged, I couldn’t believe it… someone could actually refuse to fill a prescription that my doctor wrote me based on “moral grounds”?! Yes, I was getting married, but what if I wasn’t? That was the moment, right then and there – there was no turning back. I was a feminist.

Growing up, especially growing up in a religious circles, the word “feminist” always had a negative connotation. You did not want to be a “feminist” because they were crazy man-hating psychos who didn’t shave their legs. So I never really gave women’s issues much thought until, ironically enough, I was about to get married.

I secretly began to do more and more research and kept finding stories about women who were raped and not told that they had the option to take emergency contraception, women who asked for emergency contraception only to be told their doctor "didn’t believe in it", and women who were getting physicals in preparation for the adoption process only to be told their doctor wouldn’t sign off it because she didn’t have a husband.

I read about women who were shamed for the choices they made or who weren’t given the opportunity to make a choice at all. I read about how some women were getting raped and then blamed for it because they had a drink at a party, or went out by themselves at night, or wore a low cut top, or "looked like they were asking for it." I read about domestic violence and realized that many women couldn’t get out of those bad relationships because they were afraid and because they didn’t have the resources to make it on their own.

I read about Lilly Ledbetter who retired from GoodYear Tire Company and after talking to some coworkers realized that she had not been getting paid as much as her male coworkers over the years for doing the same job. Her case got brought to the Supreme Court and they did indeed find that she had been discriminated against but did not rule in her favor because "she could have, and should have, sued" when the pay decisions were made, instead of waiting beyond the 180-day statutory charging period. Because she would obviously know within 180 days of her first paycheck that she was being discriminated against.

I’ve been told that women make less than men because they aren’t as aggressive as men, they don’t negotiate their salaries as well, and they don’t want to take the jobs that pay more because they would rather stay home with their families (you know, like a good woman should). I would argue that when women get assertive in the workplace it is often seen as "bitchy" and they choose not to be aggressive or even assertive because society has told them that "ladies don’t do that" and "if you want boys to like you, you need to be coy." And on the flip side, boys are told to go after what they want and be upfront. I would also argue that we shouldn’t organize our work life and social policies around the ideal of a male breadwinner providing for a stay-at-home wife because that "ideal" is no longer the norm. (Actually Stephanie Coontz made that argument as well as many others I’m sure – and I most definitely agree) For example, most other industrialized countries provide paid maternity AND paternity leave, they don’t work as many hours, or the work solutions are much more flexible. Oh yeah, and they have government subsidized childcare.

Look, I never ran through the streets yelling "Hey, I’m a feminist!!!" but soon my new found revelations began to creep into conversations. I started reading blogs, one in particular called Feministing.com whose tag line is "Young women are rarely given the opportunity to speak on their own behalf on issues that affect their lives and futures. Feministing provides a platform for us to comment, analyze, influence and connect." I thought that was awesome, so I joined their group on Facebook. I changed a couple of my quotes because I was feeling sassy and maybe a little bit empowered. And people began to make comments. Some in particular who I am very close to, and those comments weren’t cool.

Some people called me crazy. Some people called me sexist (because I’m "anti-men" now). Some people called me extreme. I’ve told people that women make 77 cents for every dollar earned by a man and been accused of making it up. Well I just found it Forbes, CNN, and the US Census Bureau. Some people don’t want me to become a political activist. They said "that’s not who you are." If I’m a feminist, I must be scary. I must’ve gone off the deep end. I must not be feminine. Well I’m calling bullshit. I think that most women identify with the values of feminism which is simply advocating for social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men. And if you think that sexism doesn’t exist because "women can vote and drive!" (yes I was told that) then you are deluding yourself. I am not "anti-men" nor am trying to alienate of the men in my life. I’ve just realized that there are several issues that are unique to women or affect women in disproportionate numbers and I’ve happened to take an interest in these issues. Even though they haven’t happened to me personally, it’s still personal because laws that are being created around these issues (a lot of which do more harm than good) that could potentially affect me. And so what if it doesn’t affect me personally? That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t care about it! No one argues that when people take an interest in other issues like fighting cancer, or hunger, or poverty. And just because I have made myself aware of women’s issues does not mean that I am oblivious to or don’t care about other issues. That doesn’t mean "I don’t care about men."

I’m really sick of this crap. I’m sick of taking it from seemingly everyone I know. And I know the easiest thing to do would be to just shut up about it, remove myself from the Feministing Group on Facebook, and put more appropriate quotes on my profile like depressing song lyrics, but I do not choose to that. In fact all the shit I’ve been getting on this has inspired me to do even more research and while I’m not going to shove it down anyone’s throat, if I am asked or ridiculed about it I will be ready with facts from unbiased sources, I will not be ashamed, and I will not apologize. And if you don’t like that I care about women’s issues, then you don’t like me because that is part of who I am.

Yes, I am a feminist. DEAL WITH IT.