Feminism: Not just a dessert topping anymore.

So there's this story on Salon this week... here's the link- Feminist Article - the jist of the article is, though, that young women, when professing traditionally feminist sentiments, deny that they are feminists.

I do it.
I believe in abortion on demand, without questions, for anyone who finds themselves afflicted with an embryo or fetus.
I believe in equal work for equal pay.
I believe that men and women should be equally protected and prosecuted by the law.

I am not a feminist. I believe in social justice. I believe in a basically libertarian worldview, with exceptions that would protect the destitute and otherwise marginalized. I don't believe in the factionalized circus that is modern feminism. I love Camille Paglia. Andrea Dworkin (RIP, etc) gives me heartburn. Susan Sontag leaves me cold. The vagina monologues left me feeling like the only kid in the class without an imaginary friend. My vagina wouldn't wear a hat or say anything. Eve Ensler said, this past election, that women vote with their vaginas. I use the pen provided in the booth, actually.

I have a loathing for most of the institutions of female culture. I don't like the cattiness, the obsessions with appearance, the consumerism, the fundamental superficiality of it all. Even feminists are obsessed with appearance. They talk about 'the male gaze', body image, whether pornography liberates or opresses. Balls to all that, and I goddamned well don't mean ovaries. Feminism seems to argue that women are pushed into this outward (to the mall) and downward (at their bodies) facing culture as a substitute for fulfillment. Women aren't pushed. They run. It's so much easier to care about how you look than what you do. It's so much easier to blame society for asking too much. I'll agree with feminists that women are poisoned by culture; but women chug that strychnine because it's cheap and goes down so smooth.

My sister is an anorexic. She almost died. She had osteoporosis at sixteen. She menstruates dust and ghosts. She still doesn't eat well. She didn't catch it from a magazine (or a toilet seat). She got it herself. She studied it. She watched the lifetime movies and read 'Reviving Ophelia' (a gorgeous manual for any teenage girl seeking instant drama and artistic depth, it gives you the inside track on eating disorders, self mutilation, and all kinds of fun ways to make people realize it's SO hard to be you!). And she got it. And the therapy. And the group hugs. And all of a sudden, her life was simple. Her life was anorexia. Grades, after-school jobs, getting her license, all fell away. My sister is a feminist.

I am not a feminist. I'm pro-abortion (fuck choice- I'll say it- I'm glad abortion exists. Abortion is a truly feminist act. It frees women from a biological inevitability that opresses more than any inadequate girl's soccer budget) I'm pro-woman, insofar as a woman is a person. I'm glad that the feminist movement existed, and that the pill (which I love, which I worship, which I exalt) is covered by health insurance in my state. I donate to Planned Parenthood and NARAL, even though I can't afford to. I hated the Taliban, and Female Genital Mutilation and AIDS in Africa are feminist causes I can get fully behind.

But feminism doesn't seem to be about helping a 4 year old in the Sudan, or a 15 year old in South Africa. It seems pre-occupied with cushioning the world for middle-class women. They want date-rape counselors on every street corner in Ohio, but condoms in the hands of prostitutes in Sierra Leone is too far away, and too hard. They want stiffer sexual harassment laws, but teaching women to read (which reduces infant mortality), or offering micro-loans to families in the third world (an aid program that works)- aren't on the list. Feminists should toughen up, live their lives, take responsibility for their own happiness, and turn outward. When being a feminist means that you're for the basic rights of women everywhere in the world before your own ego and neuroses, I'll be a feminist. Until then, I'm a domestic misogynist, and international feminist.