The Story
Looking at Feminism from the Outside, In
The other day, in a class on gender and French literature, a Canadian girl with whom I had until then never exchanged a single word asked me, with a blend of smirking malice and tapping-on-the-aquarium-glass curiosity, "Don't you feel bad learning about this? About what men have done to women?"
At the time, I didn't quite know how to respond, and so I simply coughed out some formulaic recitation of feminist theory.
But in the days since that glassy-eyed Canuck asked me that piercing question, I've been thinking about exactly what it means to be a young man in the feminist movement and how I got started feeling the way I do about gender.
Growing up as a devout Catholic made, perhaps ironically, an indelible mark on me as a social liberal. Reading the Bible as a set of parabolic moral texts during catechism classes and alone at home helped me to learn the value of individuals despite the schismatic, socially imposed labels that form a central part of our identities.
To the elementary school version of me, who would habitually glance down at his W.W.J.D. bracelet and pound out hymns on the severely out-of-tune piano at his Wednesday before-school Bible study group, being united under a single belief let me erase from my mind all the other things that divided me from my religious peers.
Women and men, adults and children, Catholics and Protestants: we were all united by something that transcended those stark differences.
While I have since become detached from such institutionalized faith (my Facebook profile now lists feminism as my religious views), I cannot ignore the role that the idea of moral transcendentalism has played in my development as an intellectual and political individual.
But instead of faith in God, the coalescent value at the center of my mindset is something more universal: human dignity, the special intangible something that exists within all of us because of our shared experiences as human beings.
We are all special and worthy, but that comes not from being a member of a certain group, from looking a certain way or speaking a certain language: it comes simply from existing.
As a result, the social struggles of our time are about giving individuals rights and privileges not because they are members of some group but, rather, because they are people.
Social action is not about patriarchal white altruists trying to level out some perceived innate biological inequality between groups, to protect the voting rights of black Americans or to raise women's salaries because they can't do it themselves.
It's about creating an infrastructure of self-worth, an environment of valorization, where people are equal in spite of the social constraints and pressures we face; it's about finding a place where the things that make us similar can bind us together, rather than letting the things that distinguish us drive us further apart.
It's about destroying the rampant ideology of conformist exclusivity to an idealized vision of whiteness, of masculinity, of femininity. It's about letting young black girls know that their natural hair is as beautiful as Barbie's, letting young boys know that loving another boy is as natural as loving a girl.
We all have hair, and we all feel love: let us allow those things to forge bonds between us.
I have lived my whole life as a white male, a member of American society's most elite and privileged group. I've never had someone doubt my intelligence because of my name or my skin color or my gender. I've never had someone say that my vote doesn’t matter, that I can't go to college, that I can't get married to someone I love, or that I can't be the President of the United States.
And everyone should get to feel that way all the time.
I may not be a woman, or a person of color, or a transgender person, but I am a human being -- we all are -- and that's why I'm a feminist.
Jake Robert Nelson is the Executive Editor and a columnist for The DSJ. His views do not necessarily represent those of the entire staff.