Why feminism is about the collective
We live in confusing times. It used to be that the word feminism bristled with meaning. It stood like a messiah on a mountaintop. It revolted in the streets with placards, polarising the hell out of people. It was a world of the Fabindia-clad and Spanx-clad, and never the twain could meet.
Now feminism has floundered into equanimity, into the mud of white noise.
So you can post photographs of your tits on Instagram because you’re in charge of your erotic capital, and this is a version of female empowerment.
Or you could be a girl who was shot in the head by a brute while going to school, who lives to tell the tale and becomes an icon — and this is also a version of female empowerment. And even as the gamut of feminism has been extended to accommodate a berth so wide so as not to exclude anyone, even as we’ve made the notion of feminism so palatable so no one could really object to the word feminist because it simply means equal rights and opportunities for men and women, and who could be opposed to that?
Even then, you do a straw poll. You ask around, and people say, I’m for equality, but I’m not a feminist.
Because something about the word still reeks of aggressiveness and armpit hair. I understand. There’s a too-muchness to it. It asserts, it challenges, it means to rock the boat. And perhaps you don’t want to be militant. You don’t want to come off as shrill.
You’re happy to be part of the world as it is, and life has turned out okay for you, so why complain? But feminism isn’t about hating men or rejecting feminine qualities. It has nothing to do with who opens the door for whom. It isn’t even about you. You are just the starting point of your own story.
Feminism is about the collective. It’s about challenging centuries of patriarchy, of asking how it is possible that in this country of profound mother worship, we have lost 100 million girls.
How is it that every 20 minutes in this country, a woman is raped, that women still don’t have control over their reproductive rights, and girls are found naked in ditches and wells — defaced, damaged, dead. And we are meant to absorb all this news, and say what? I’m not a feminist?
| How it is possible that in this country of profound mother worship, we have lost 100 million girls? |
I hear all kinds of words being tossed around — survival feminism, marketplace feminism, full frontal feminism, intersectional feminism, white feminism, radical feminism, pseudo feminism — and it all goes whoosh over my head because I don’t understand how a basic idea can be made so complex.
The only thing I feel is: Shouldn’t we be more angry? Shouldn’t we all be seething? Because we’re not just talking gender roles anymore. So much of that has already been turned on its head — trans, gay, masculine, feminine, genderqueer. We are no longer dealing with binaries.
So, it’s about identity and sex and what the poet Adrienne Rich described as the realisation that politics isn’t something "out there" but something "in here". It’s about how we can live with our bodies, our imaginations, our creativity, and our freedom in the strictures of a male-dominated society.
And this is an invitation to men too — who live with confusions of their own - hyper masculinity, toxic masculinity, the crisis of masculinity.
What does it mean to be a man in the 21st century? Men are still the ones committing the majority of violence in the world. So how does any of this get vanquished? By inquiring what it means to be a man. By coming on board, because as American writer Rebecca Solnit says, "The men who get it understand that feminism is not a scheme to deprive men but a campaign to liberate us all."
You might ask, why not just call ourselves humanists if we are against racism, against homophobia, against misogyny. Wouldn’t that be easier? An umbrella term to signify all that we are against? Because humanists believe in the goodness of human beings and in the importance of the human over divine matters. But the fact is that for so long women, homosexuals, and people of colour were divinely ordained as chattel, as less than human, and people have been decidedly slow at allowing them their emancipation.
So we’ve had to stake claims, and while our struggles may take us along the same roads, our revolution is unique to our wombs, breasts, and fallopian tubes, our birth-giving anatomical splendour.
So let’s not be coy about it. It’s about survival. About channelling whatever kind of feminism is available to us. And if it means running Pinkathons or marching in Slutwalks, if it means pussy rioting or leaning in or Beyoncé or bell hooks, let’s do it, but let’s call ourselves feminists.