At first I thought I had merely a bone to pick with sex-positive feminists and now I find that I have a bone to pick with the whole third wave. Head over to Feministing which is one of the most popular representations of the third wave and what do you see? Mainly their logo: a woman. Their bloggers: all women. They explain their logo as being ironic. "We wanted to take a traditionally sexist image – the mudflap girl – and subvert her. Hence, the middle finger. We like to think of her as saying “fuck you” to the sexist beauty standard she is supposed to represent." In the sense they describe the logo works, but only for that purpose which I find to personally be very narrow.
A recent blog post on the site is entitled "Attacks on Planned Parenthood are attacks on American women." In the spirit of continuous improvement, I would like to point out that attacks on Planned Parenthood are also attacks on men. Being a parent does not come with a following descriptive gender qualification. Women are not the only parents out there. In fact, male, female, or anywhere in between and you can be a parent. And why is it 'American' women? We have loads of people who live in our country, legally and illegally, who would not identify themselves as American, don't these attacks affect them as well?
"It pains me a little bit to say this, but I have to admit it. I’m kind of a hypocrite. I’ve spent over a year on this blog exploring most every facet of being a teen girl in this culture through a feminist lens. I’ve bitched (and rightfully so) about how there’s still a shit ton of sexism out there and how we still need to fight for equality, but I never really mentioned the guys." -Julie Z from thefbomb.org
Julie Zeilinger has been pretty widely recognized within the third wave and she's openly admitting this just now. Sexism goes many different ways. I mean come on people!
I understand that the default when talking about feminism is to talk about women. As I mention in Why Men Scoff (part one) this is also the most repetitive, so much so that it is a joke. I've heard on more than one occasion fellow students saying that they don't feel the need to show up when the lecture is on feminism because it's the same thing every darn time. However, feminists have themselves created this culture and none of them, with the exception of bell hooks (see quote in part one), seem willing to do anything to change it. This changes with yours truly.
I believe that in order to be a true feminist one must also believe that patriarchal systems are oppressive to men. Straight men. We have women, gay guys, lesbians, bisexuals, transgenders, and transexuals that get recognition from feminists but what about the straight guys? Essentially, they don't fit anywhere!
I suggest we start with the term feminism in the first place. It suggests that you need to be feminine and further so, female. Female feminists want men to identify themselves as feminist yet the term itself is not neutral at all, even if the ideology behind it is. Some go by equalist. I'm not sure I'm okay with this one either. Being a woman, man, transexual, or transgender each have their own lens and experience. They are all of equal importance of course but they are not the same experience. I'm not sure what the new term(s) should be but I think maybe there should be some talk of creating one(some).
Similarly, gender studies should be a study of gender, not women. Gender is not a synonym for women. Gender studies suggests that both women's studies, men's studies, queer studies, etc. are all included. To be honest, this rarely to never seems to be the case. Gender is constructed and therefore ALL of those constructions need to be given attention.
The LGBT movement needs support from those that wouldn't identify themselves as LGBT because homosexuals only make up about 10% of the population and never tend to reach more than that. They can't do it by themselves. The feminist movement on the other hand seems to believe that because we make up 50% of the population that we do not need outside support. And I'm here to tell you that we're dead wrong about that. Firstly, and primarily, because not all women are feminists! Right off the bat we do not have 50% of the population and certainly not 50% of the vote.
It's high time we start reaching out to people who would love to join our cause but can't just because we aren't willing to make a space for them.
