I Am Not A Feminist TBH

Recently a woman I hardly know felt it necessary to shame me for having feelings that differentiate me from a coffee table or a sociopath. I went through a painful breakup this year. It was very complicated and very horrible. I know I’m not the only person on earth to have experienced this and I know I’m not the only person on the planet who felt unsure about how to cope or who fell into a long depression as a result. I’m not the only person who has felt heartbreak and not been able to quickly move on, place everything tidily away in the past and come out unscathed. It has been a difficult year and I’m not ashamed to admit that. But somehow, this person felt that this experience, these feelings, and the difficulties I’ve had coping were particularly shameful because I ‘pretended’ to be a feminist. It wasn’t just that I was had been hurt that was so pathetic and wrong, but it was because I purported to be a feminist that made this pain particularly shameful. As a feminist, I was supposed to be ‘strong’, ‘independent’, and know everything. Weakness, love, sadness, heartbreak and, yes, even a little instability and irrationality were not, according to this woman, things that feminists were allowed to feel. If we did fail so badly at being appropriately ‘strong’ and unfeeling feminists, if we admit to not knowing all the answers and perhaps flailing a little bit in the process, there is something wrong with us, we should be ashamed, and we are clearly not truly feminist.

Alison Spillane of the Irish Feminist Network points out that “young people in particular seem to be drawn toward the feminist movement”. For me, the problem isn’t that there are no young feminists, the problem is that the myth has been propagated to the point where it is now accepted as fact. The result is devastating – a generation of excited and passionate activists is slowly being made to feel invisible.

A couple of months ago, I was at a house party. A couple of guys I was with started commenting on the appearance of a woman sitting across the room. She was wearing what they considered to be a very inappropriate shirt—a low-cut v-neck that revealed what registered to them as an obscene level of cleavage. They were speculating as to why a woman would wear such a shirt in public and what her intentions were in putting it on. “If I were wearing that same shirt, it wouldn’t seem inappropriate at all,” I noted. Of course, it wasn’t really the shirt—it was the size of the woman’s breasts that was deemed socially unacceptable.

As this annual onslaught on a woman’s right to hide her shameful, sub-beautiful physicality marches nearer, many of you will be wondering: what will I do with my body hair? How will I achieve environmentally devastating deforestation of my legs? How best to kill my underarm kittens? How to convince the curlies partying on my inner thighs to get back in my knickers and stay there?

Ah, the establishment that is FHM. A publication of such high class their pages are treasured under beds nationwide, crispy with semen and pored over by British men in cover of darkness. I have never read FHM, because it is not a magazine aimed at PGs. Instead, it is a magazine containing hundreds of pictures of PGs wearing gold jewellery, masking tape and engine grease. Though it may be unfair for me to review their 100 sexiest women feature while simultaneously reading Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, watch me give a fuck. Because I really, really don’t.