“Feminism is dead,” he said casually. I almost choked on my latte. As I sat across from him at a coffee house, I could see my reaction reflected on the faces of my two female friends, all of us looking at him aghast, trying to control the heat rising collectively up our necks, desperate to mutate into an angry, acid-tongued response.
Feminism is dead? I try to contemplate the repercussions of the statement but find my head swimming. The feminist movement being dead implies defeat. The feminist movement had been defeated, then after decades we’ve surrendered, he says. Or perhaps he means that we have achieved our goals, and modern feminists are just trying to be superior. I ask him to elaborate, more harshly than I intended. “Feminism is dead,” he says simply, avoiding the look in my eyes, “there is no reason to have it anymore.” An hour later, in the interest of remaining friends, we make our closing statements.
That conversation, from a year ago, is seared into my memory and comes to light whenever I ponder the relevance of feminism and people’s understanding of it. Not only is it the closest I’ve ever come to a spit take, but it awakened me to the harsh reality regarding the misconceptions surrounding feminism–rampant in modern thought.
“What exactly do you think a feminist looks like? What do you think they believe?” I said as calmly as possible, trying to hide the derision in my voice, although it is likely the look on my face showed my position quite clearly. “Feminists are angry women who want to be superior to men,” he said. My other friend intercepted, “But that isn’t a feminist, David, that’s a femi-nazi.” I cringed. Did one of my most independent female friends really just compare a woman who is passionate about the women’s equality and angry that other people these days don’t seem to care to a Nazi?
The truth is that the feminist movement is still incredibly relevant today, and if men argue that we’ve achieved equality, it only takes a Youtube search to prove that they’re wrong. Characterizing a woman in a bar as a slut is as damaging as calling a woman who is passionate about equality as an angry spinster. Now the feminist movement itself, like many other movements, has gone out of style. In the decades since the 1960s bra burners, the media has been able to demonize the fight for equality by declaring it over then continuing new and inventive forms of oppression, similar to last year, when the GOP stated Rosa Parks ended racism back in 1955. Because media must create caricatures, not true representations of people, it makes sense that they would do the same to social movements. Take the 1994 Olympic scandal for example. A recent ESPN 30 for 30 installment, The Price of Gold rehashed the twenty-year-old scandal throughout which both women were caricatures. Nancy Kerrigan was the spoiled princess, and Tonya Harding was the underdog. Or Kerrigan was the victim, and Harding was a demon. Whatever version you believe, both are likely oversimplifications of the facts. Both women had to be boxed up because the real story and the real people were probably too complex to be profitable. So is the objectification of feminism. The simpler the media can make it, the less potent it becomes. Those who enter the fray today, like my friends that day at the coffee shop, see feminism as one-dimensional. But of course, women who want to combat the “make me a sandwich,” “legitimate rape,” Blurred Lines society we live in, are angry. It’s almost impossible not to be. Maybe the question is: why aren’t you?