Still a Long Way to Go

After some deliberation I've decided not to recount a history of feminism to you here on the blog and instead jump into the subject I'd really like to talk about: why I think it's still important now. A lot of people know the bare bones history of the movement, and if you're interested in its roots, I suggest starting with Wikipedia (I know, I'm not supposed to say things like that, but this isn't a scholarly essay) and then heading to your library. There's far too much for me to get into here, and there's plenty of others who have told the story wonderfully.

What I want to talk about is what feminism is to me personally. I have a pretty simple definition -- equal rights for all regardless of gender. That's the basis anyway. But to me feminism encompasses a lot more than that. It's about equal rights for everybody, because why allow anybody to suffer inequality for any reason? For the sake of (some semblance of) brevity, I'll just focus on why the movement is still important to me and important for the world in the context of gender equality.

Though we have made huge strides for gender equality here in the U.S., things still aren't great for women in the world as a whole. In many countries women are still considered their husband's property or a commodity for fathers to trade. Abuse and rape go unpunished because these women have no rights, no voice, and no one to fight for them. Here it's easier for women to fight back against such treatment, but still difficult in a lot of cases. There's such a culture of fear and guilt that women suffer through when it comes to mistreatment.

As if the fear women feel when walking alone in a strange place or at night, or the guilt many feel after being mistreated -- as if they were asking for it -- wasn't enough, there are also impossible standards of perfection women are held to that men simply don't have to deal with. Women must be perfect mothers, have perfect homes, and most importantly, flawless looks in order to be considered good women.

And don't even get me started on the double standards women have to put up with when it comes to sexuality.

We still have a long way to go when it comes to gender equality, and until everything is just right, feminism will be there leading the way.

My Introduction to Feminism

Before I get into what feminism means to me and how I apply it to my daily life, I'd like to talk about how I discovered feminism. Ironically enough, it was because of a man. This man, to be exact:


Dr. John Alberti taught an Honors class titled "Feminist Punk Rock and Women's Protest Music" that I was lucky enough to take my sophomore year of college. It remains my favorite class I took at NKU and honestly changed my life.

Before Punk Rock, I'd only heard of feminism in the vaguest terms. I'm ashamed to say that I thought feminism was only something used for women's suffrage, and then it disappeared. Fortunately, I learned that feminism gained steam during women's suffrage, but boy, it wasn't done by a long shot after we got the vote.

Our class focused on the Riot Grrrl movement of the early 90s. Riot Grrrl, in a nutshell, was a bunch of girls and women deciding they were tired of the music scene being dominated by boys and men and storming the stages for themselves. This musical movement was in conjunction with a literary movement that saw a flood of "zines" being created by girls all over the country in an effort to connect with other girls and start raising awareness about issues such as body image, sexual abuse, depression, and much more.

Riot Grrrl inspired me so much that I decided to write a novella for my Honors Capstone about the subject. During my research, I discovered The Riot Grrrl Collection.


This book is a collection of zines from the period and proved itself invaluable time and again throughout my writing. It allows the reader to see for themselves what made the movement so special by reading the texts, rather than hearing analyses of the texts. Plus, it's just a gorgeous book to own with its glossy, full-color pages.

For class we read Girls to the Front, another book I highly recommend.


It tells the story of the bands, how the movement got its start and gathered steam, and even its eventual fizzling out. It's a great read, and a good primer for budding young feminists.

Besides the literature I was exposed to in class -- which will probably have its own post, because there has been a lot -- I heard a ton of great music. Bands like Bikini Kill, Sleater-Kinney, Letters to Cleo, and The Donnas have played their way into my heart since the first moments I heard them. To this day I find myself turning to their music whenever I need a hit of grrrl power, and experiencing them has changed the way I listen to music. If you want to listen to some of it, I've created a playlist on Spotify that I welcome you to check out (just search my name, you'll know which playlist it is).

I hope you'll check out some of the resources I've shared and discover a side of feminism that I never knew existed and will forever have a place of honor in my heart because it introduced me to the movement as a whole.

Panera, Joe, and Feminism

Everyone who works at Panera has a plethora of duties to take care of during each shift. There's a lot that needs to get done and things only run smoothly when everyone pitches in and goes a little bit above and beyond. Because I'm me and I apparently enjoy giving myself a lot of work, I've taken on one more responsibility in addition to all the others.

I'm going to teach one of my coworkers all about feminism.

The other day one of my coworkers, we'll call him Joe, and I were chatting as I ordered food from his register at break. I gave him the number for my MyPanera card and he selected my name when it came on the screen. He looked at it for a second, then asked me what my name was before I got married.

"Shuler. I kept my name when I got married," I answered. He looked confused.

"You can do that?"

I educated him on the practice of keeping one's name and told him why I chose to do so. His interest peaked when I mentioned feminism. He told me he didn't know what that was.

He genuinely  had no idea what feminism was.

Joe is a young guy in the middle of his college career that generally knows what's going on, but he'd never heard of feminism before. I'm disappointed by what this says about our school systems and general public awareness, but selfishly happy that I'm the one who gets to share such a powerful movement with a newbie. We had a good long chat about what feminism means to me and how I got started, and I think our next talk is going to cover why we still need feminism today. 

My conversations with Joe have inspired me to share my thoughts on feminism with you, because you may not know why I feel so strongly about the movement. So soon comes a less off-the-cuff version of what I told Joe feminism means to me.

The Top 5 Reasons I'm Pro-Choice

On Thursday, November 7, 2013, I protested for the first time in my life. A group on campus (whose name I don't know -- they didn't really advertise that) had an anti-abortion display up that was so disgustingly inaccurate and offensive that something in me broke down and I knew it was time to stand up for what I believed.

First of all, they were saying that abortion is genocide and that we're going through a new Holocaust. We won't even get into how misleading and offensive such a faulty comparison is. Secondly, they were showing obviously mislabeled and extremely graphic pictures of aborted "9-10 week old" fetuses that were obviously way, way more developed than 9-10 weeks.

I stood across from the display with signs of my own proclaiming my own pro-choice views and eventually people starting standing with me. Lots of students came and went, using up their gaps between classes to stand for what they believed. A lot more stood for a long time, and many sacrificed their lunch in order to make themselves seen and heard. At our strongest point, we probably had about 20 ladies and gentlemen out there with signs, peacefully protesting.

The amount of strangers who came up and thanked us for standing up against the group was astounding, and the support we garnered was heartwarming in the most unbelievable way. Lots and lots of people stopped and offered to buy us hot drinks, to bring us food, and to apologize that they were going to class and couldn't stand with us. It was amazing.

But unfortunately, such a stand doesn't leave much room for discussion with people on their way to class, and signs can only hold so much information, so I didn't really get to explain my views, only present them. Now, I would like to share the top five reasons I'm pro-choice and the reasoning behind them.

5. We do not have enough resources to care for all potential children.
     It is undeniable that the Earth is running out of resources and that overpopulation is already a problem. If every single fetus were to become a person, we would run out of what little we have even more quickly.

4. Abortion only affects the couple going through it.
    If a woman wants/needs to get an abortion, nobody else has to know. It does not affect anyone but her, and the father of the child. (I do think the father should get a say in what happens, as long as he's not a rapist or something, but that's a whole separate issue.) By choosing to have an abortion, it doesn't affect anybody else's life, but by making abortions illegal, people are directly affecting the life of that couple.

3. A woman should have more rights to her body than a fetus.
    There are laws that state that no person can use another person's body without their continual consent. If a woman is pregnant and no longer wants to be, then the fetus is using her body without her continued consent. By not allowing a woman to terminate her pregnancy, we are giving a fetus more right to her body than her.

2. We currently lack viable alternatives to abortion.
    Most schools in the country teach abstinence-only sexual education, which are ineffective. By not teaching students about sex in a frank and transparent way and creating an environment where students are not comfortable asking questions, we are not keeping teenagers from having sex, only from having educated, well-informed, protected sex.
     In addition, we need free contraception for all citizens. Allowing our taxes to go towards paying for birth control would actually save us money, because pregnancy is far, far more expensive, as are welfare programs and other expenses that come from supporting children that are born into a family that cannot afford them.

1. Every child should be wanted.
    Most importantly, I want every single child that is born to be wanted. Every baby deserves to be raised by people who love him or her and chose to bring them into their life. In cases of adoption, because I know not everybody who wants children can have them, there will be enough people morally opposed to abortion that would be willing to put their children up for adoption. We already have more children that need homes than homes for them to go to, and that makes me sad.

I hope this entry helps you get to know me a little better, and I hope you think closely about the abortion issue and where you stand.

My Body, My Rules

Yesterday I was talking with a classmate about his daughter. He slid his chair up to a group of three of us girls that are always chatty before class and said he needed some advice about girls. We, naturally, said we'd be happy to give it.

He asked us why girls wear shorts that are so short they have to constantly pick at them, and skirts so short that they're constantly pulling them down. In other words, why do girls wear uncomfortable things like that? His concern was that his daughter (who is college-aged) would start emulating this trend.


(http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Red_short_shorts.jpg)

The two others I was with immediately started saying it was stupid for girls to dress like this and he should just tell his daughter it was dumb and not let her wear these things -- for her own good.

I disagreed.

Why do girls wear stuff that so obviously uncomfortable? Because we're supposed to. The above picture is a comically extreme case, but we like to look and feel sexy, because we're constantly told that our body is for the viewing pleasures of others. Women are constantly judged by their looks, even if not maliciously, because we are raised from the time we are children to think in this way.

I told this to my classmate and suggested that he just leave his daughter alone and let her look how she wants. She's old enough to make her own decisions, and she has to figure out for herself what she wants her image to be. By telling her what she can and cannot look like, even if it's with the best of intentions for her sense of self-worth, he would be perpetuating the idea that her body is not her own and exists only to be what others want it to be.

He was taken aback, and said he'd never thought of that before. He mentioned how, when he stopped to think about it, women really did have a difficult time with their appearance because it was such a double-edged sword. We just can't win.

It blew my mind that he had never thought of that before. He'd never had to, because he's a man. And though men do have to deal with biases based off appearance, it's not as rampant for them. But the intricacies of how men view each other is lost on me, since I'm not part of that group. I'd love to hear your thoughts about this subject in the comments though.

And ladies, do you often worry about your appearance and how others perceive you based on that fact alone?

The F-Word

Sometimes, people ask me why I am a feminist. It's usually not as straightforward a question as that, but they're asking it. They'll ask me things like, "Isn't that over?" and "Doesn't the world have bigger problems?" They aren't questions I hear often, because most people who don't understand my choice don't bother to ask about it at all, they just roll their eyes or cock their heads and change the subject.

Not that everyone is like that. Don't read me wrong. I know lots of people who identify with feminism, totally get it, and think it's great. I know even more people who get behind feminism's ideals, but don't want to be called "the f-word." Feminism has gotten a bad rap, and I think that's what confuses the people who ask me about it.

But it's not confusing. I proudly identify as a feminist because it gives me a way to approach bettering the world that I can wrap my mind around. Simple as that. We live in a pretty amazing world, but it has its fair share of problems that need to be tackled, and no one can handle tackling all of them.

Feminism deals with problems I understand and can think of ways to change. I don't know what can be done about the damage we've dealt our ozone, nor do I know what it would take to help cure diseases, nor what steps we need to take to bring infrastructure to undeveloped countries that need clean water. To help with these issues, I donate my money to charities full of people who do know what needs to be done.

But I know what it takes to start changing the way we view gender. I know how to talk to others and show them where sexism still lives in our culture. Feminism also serves as the foundation for how I view equality. It's a movement that teaches us to view people as complex beings and see through things like sex, gender, race, social status, and all those other things we tend to use to bring each other down.

Feminism challenges me to keep a vigilant eye on myself to make sure I see past my own assumptions about people and overcome my own shortcomings to be a better, more accepting person. I can only hope that everyone finds a movement they identify with that helps them do the same.