M. Suzanne Terry

{Day 2} Why It Matters: On Wednesday, February 27, link up at Danielle Vermeer’s blog, and write about these questions: What is at stake in this discussion? Why is feminism important to you? Are you thinking about your children or your sisters or the people that have come before you? Or, why do you not like the term? What are you concerned we’re not focusing on or we’re losing sight of when we talk about feminism? Why do you feel passionately about this topic?

Feminism is important to me, because I can’t do it alone. I need the world to want equality in both word and deed – for everyone. And I need feminism, because lately, I’ve been angry.

I want to be hopeful, and I am (sort of) – it’s just not the prevalent force in my life that I want it to be.

I am angry that…

– Too many women still have to work harder to earn the same respect, money, position, or insert-your-desired-compensation-for-work-here that men do, and that’s ridiculous. Don’t know any woman who has had that experience? Welcome to me. I can name four specific times in the last ten years of my career when I have been passed over for a job, only to find out that the man who got the job not only had less education than I do but more importantly, significantly less experience. And I would like to be able to say that those specific men chosen performed those jobs just as well as I would have, so it all worked out, but that’s only true of one of them (who was great at it, and I’m so glad that he got the job). The other three performed exactly how any rational person would expect someone with their limited skills and experience to perform. It’s frustrating enough to lose a job where I know I’d be an asset, but to lose it to someone who does not excel at it is maddening. I’m not naïve enough to think that the choice to hire them rather than me was merely institutional sexism – there were probably many factors involved, some of which were likely my own doing – but I am also not naïve enough to believe that sexism wasn’t one of the factors. And it needs to stop being one of the factors.

I don’t want to seem ungrateful. I do have two jobs that I generally like, while a lot of people are having problems finding any job at all. And there could be more cards stacked against me. I could be a woman AND a minority. I suppose I should see myself as one of the lucky ones. But do you really want to defend the position that working sixty hours a week, just to make ends meet, is lucky? Is that what a system that works looks like to you? That’s certainly not what it looks like to me, and that it works even less for some people than for others is wrong.

– Too many people are bound by rigid, socially constructed gender roles, and their unhappiness that they can’t seem to conform to them, despite constant pressure from church/family/media/society to do so, is unnecessary. I want a world where people can grow into themselves, especially the part of the self where their gender makes sense to them, without being told who they should be and being punished for violating some absurd norm from some imaginary world that was birthed so that the limited number of people who actually fit the stereotypes could feel superior.

– Too many people live in fear. I hate rape culture. I hate that, as a single woman living alone, I have had to take self-defense classes, and that I have various tools that can easily be used as weapons (and yes, I’ve practiced) stashed around my home, and that I have an escape plan – from my own damn home – the place that should be the safest place in the whole world for me – should it become compromised or violated. I hate that I am terrified that I just announced on the Internet that I am a single woman living alone. I hate that education on the subject tends to focus on how not to get raped instead of how to choose not to rape, assuming that prevention is a lost cause or worse – assuming that some people somehow deserve to be degraded. I hate that, twenty years after being a first-year college student myself, our culture is still so stunted in its awareness of this problem that I still have to explain to first-year college students why it matters whether or not they laugh at jokes about rape or abuse – why it is a big deal, always and every time –that that’s how desensitization works and that the complacency created by their desensitization is a big part of said problem. I hate that survivors of violence and abuse are silenced because their real and personal trauma seems like nothing but a big joke to our culture, which leads them to think that no one cares or will believe them and that, more often that you would believe, they’re absolutely right. I hate that rape culture is “just the way the world is,” and I refuse to let it stay that way.

– Too many people – mostly women and girls – are sold into slavery. I need feminism, because sex trafficking exists, and that’s not okay. I need feminism, because it pisses me off to live in a world where I have to say that sex trafficking – specifically, the selling of someone without her/his free consent (i.e., without threat of punishment, abuse, homelessness, ostracism, personal rejection, etc.) – is not okay. I need feminism because this is a problem in my country, in my state, not just “elsewhere.” And if somehow you manage to live in this world and you still didn’t know that, then you need feminism, too, because clearly your churches and your classrooms aren’t even talking about it, and that’s a problem.

– Too much of the world has too many problems, and too few people are whole enough to see far enough outside themselves to resolve them. There are people whose lives are defined by realities that I merely fear. There are people who work themselves to death and still go hungry and homeless. There are people who have to resort to illegal means or means that we, the richest 1% in the world, judge from afar as unethical in order to feed their family, because making an honest living doesn’t actually make a living at all (but it sure does make it possible for us to get great deals at Walmart, so for all our judgment, it seems that, once again, we’re the problem). There are people plagued by disease and poverty who have a voice but don’t have anyone to listen to it. We need to stop being selfish, sexist, controlling, thieving, abusive assholes to one another, because the world needs all the help it can get, and there are only so many hours in a day, and sometimes it’s too much to ask that we overcome our trauma and everyone else’s trauma, too. I am embarrassed that I ever accept that as an excuse not to try.

I am angry that people can see problems right in front of them, hurting people they claim to love,and still not understand or care.

I am angry, because I REFUSE to be apathetic, and most days, those seem like the only two choices.

I’m fed up. I’m tired. I could have written this post twenty years ago, because so little has changed. That’s exhausting. It’s disheartening to work so hard – to teach so much – and see it make so little difference. And I’ve only been at it twenty years. I think of those who have worked toward these goals for two or three times as long as I have, and I sometimes wonder how they get out of bed in the morning.

But between Jesus and feminism (which I suspect Jesus has a bit of a hand in), I have learned how to hope, so I can’t wait until I’m fixed to help others. There might be many pains outside our control, but there are enough pains that are fully within our grasp to alleviate or prevent. So let’s alleviate or prevent them. Let’s all cause each other less trauma. I need feminism (and my Jesus who taught it to me), because at its core is the theme that everyone benefits not only by our being less terrible to one another but also by our being good to one another.

So I am angry. But there is hope. Reading other FemFest posts this week has refreshed some of that hope in me. More on that tomorrow.