Why I need Feminism

So on a recent assignment, one my tutors marked me down and stated that he had found my work dull, and unfunny. At the time I received the feedback, I was upset. Not because of the criticism per say - the work was hardly my finest...But in particular because of the position that my tutor held, his sex, the comments he had made, and how they - however truthful - made me reflect on the kind of life I've lead.

Please note, I am not calling my tutor sexist, rather examining why I reacted so badly to his comments. And how he, as male, might not be able to appreciate how deeply some of his comments affected me.

This is one of those things that happens to me late at night. When I become reflective and truthful, and have meaningful thoughts that I feel confident enough to share. Apparently this is the only time I feel safe enough to do this, and tomorrow God knows I’ll regret putting it up. Tomorrow I’ll feel ashamed.

And that is part of the problem.

One of the things that I have trouble dealing with nowadays, is the unbearable feeling of powerlessness that comes with being a young woman.

From a young age, I remember being confident. I remember knowing what I wanted in life, and knowing how I was going to get it. Right up until I was in my late teens, I saw life as a list of achievable goals.

I suffered my first conscious post-pubescent form of sexual harassment when I was fifteen.  The incident left me shocked, and frightened, and made me look back on my life. I realised then that I had been taken advantage of several times in my life already, from as young as the age of eight. I only became aware that I had been sexualised all my life then, and to my horror now what I felt wasn’t disgust…But shame.

I was ashamed that at eight years old, an older boy who should have known better, made me take my clothes off in-front of him and sexually assaulted me.  I was ashamed.

Life changed then. I became increasingly frightened of men. Figures of authority in particular made me feel uneasy – I couldn’t be alone with teachers for long, I got frightened if I brushed past them, or they touched my arm. Old men, young men, even boys. I received a black-belt in Karate, and yet my stomach would still drop if a group of boys looked at me as I walked past on the street.

Life suddenly stopped being a list of achievable goals. I became aware of my sex, I became aware of the feminist movement that was happening. I became aware of how little representation women had in the jobs I was interested in, and how tough it would be for me to make it if I wasn’t a skinny blonde in a mini-skirt. The media told me that to be a woman and to make it, was to be cold, calculated and ruthless. And society told me that by thirty if I didn’t have a family I was ‘frigid’ and ‘strange’, and if by thirty I had a family but no job I was a ‘dizzy housewife’.

The nightmares about rape started when I was sixteen. I dreamt of being attacked. I dreamt of being drowned, and suffocated, and being unable to move. My insomnia which had always been bad, got worse. My depression was treated as a young girl acting out, and wasn’t taken seriously. I stayed in an emotionally abusive relationship, where my boy-friend constantly pressurised me for sex, as something that I ‘owed’ to him, and silenced me by saying that I wasn’t funny, and that humour was best left to him. His jokes were offensive, repressive, and people always laughed. 'Men are funnier' they say. Women can't make people laugh. When I made motions to break up with him, my ‘friends’ called me a bitch.

At eighteen I learned the true meaning of feminism. Up until that point, feminists had been painted to me as 

domineering female Nazis with only one agenda. To repress men. I realised then why the thought of the repression of men had upset me. Not because I thought that people should be equal, and that no sex is better as I do now…But because at that time I strove to be a ‘man’ in every sense. I did manly sports, played men in school plays, even acted as the male role in a female group. I didn’t want men supressed, because I was striving to fit in with them, and if they were down low – where the hell did that leave me?

I’m still afraid of men. Even now. My tutor made a few jokes in class about himself and a couple of the female students (all harmless jokes, I might add), and I sat and squirmed inside because nice as the guy is, I still see him as a threat. A powerful, male figure in authority who outranks me in both academic and scholarly ways, but also has the potential to overpower me physically. A man who's jokes I laughed at even though they made me sick, because in my mind I am aware that both as a man and my tutor, I need to 'appease him' in order to succeed. Sick, right?

The worst is still the nightmares. Occasionally my boy-friend has to shake me awake and hold me while I cry. Sometimes I wake up from a nightmare where it was him who was hurting me. The love of my life, and my brain still wants me to be afraid.

How is it that society could poison the person I was, so full of hope and ambition, a dream to save the world and the determination to be able to do it. How is it, that instead of doing that, I wasted a decade of my life being frightened of 49% of the world’s populous? A fear that will live with me for the rest of my life.

People ask why I need feminism? I need it, because if I ever have a little girl, I don’t want her to be afraid like I am. And if I have a boy, I sure as hell don’t want him to have to hold his girl-friend in the night whilst she explains that’s she’s just had a dream where he raped her.