feminism will save your life.
feminism “ruins” everything because it makes you think. it stops you from blindly following anything. when i see myself in the mirror and my eyes are distracted by my acne or my crooked teeth or asymmetrical eyes, my brain starts recalling The Beauty Myth or Susan Sontag’s essays on beauty in On Women. with that, i can no longer stare at myself and see genuine imperfections meant to be fixed but rather i am allowed to confront the actual reason i see these imperfections in the first place. when i find myself or others being too quick to judge a woman and ignore the man’s wrongdoings, i think of Woman Hating and acknowledge these judgements. when i habitually refer to everyone as “guys”, i think of Invisible Women and recognize the default male in my language. when i start feeling lost and am tempted to fall back into religion, i think of the excerpts i read from When God Was A Woman and remember everything “Jesus” and “God” stole from us.
feminism gets tiring and frustrating because misogyny is everywhere. from language to behavior, misogyny just lingers in the air. and feminism forces you to acknowledge its presence instead of trying to shoo it away. and as much as it hurts sometimes, it never fails to help me grow. what i was blinded to yesterday, i see clearly now. i don’t have to let patriarchy run my life, i don’t have to lay under men’s boots and cry. i can be the change i want to be in the world and i am capable of doing the things my ancestors would’ve loved to have the freedom to do. especially being a black girl, the freedom i have now is not something i can take for granted. those women before me fought tooth and nail with everything they had for me to be here.
