“The number of women who identify as feminists went up 12 percent from 2006 to 2012, according to a study by Ms. magazine. The affiliation is especially strong among young women; a you.gov poll found that 42 percent of women under 30 call themselves feminists, the highest percentage of any age group.” ~Glamour
Who’s Afraid of Feminism?
Well, that’s a change we’ve been waiting for, isn’t it? For many years women have rejected the term feminist, perhaps to avoid the backlash. (Feminazi! Ball Breaker!) Maybe today’s young woman — eager to carve out an identity for herself that is different from her mother’s — will more readily embrace the term and the ideas for which it stands.
Young women today, our Millenials, can’t comprehend why woman would ever have been excluded from certain jobs, or that their ambitions should have been limited to the Pink Ghettos. They actually expect to be paid the same as men (let’s leave that topic aside for this post). They truly believe — they KNOW — that they can,and should, do anything they want.
Isn’t that what we fought for? To get rid of those constricting limitations on women’s behavior, ambitions, and achievements?
Can Laughing at Sexism Cure Misogyny?
A new book by feminist writer Anna Holmes, former editor of the wildly popular feminist website Jezebel, sends up those old-fashioned yet still all-too-present gendered expectations in The Book of Jezebel: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Lady Things.
We might as well laugh as cry, so give it a read and ask your library to buy it. By laughing at those archaic ideas maybe we can help drive a stake through their hearts once and for all.
As Anna Holmes says to explain the resurgence of the F-word: “Feminism is not about strength or weakness. It is about inequality, inequity, and leveling the playing field, opening up opportunities to women of all ages, races, and economic classes.”
What’s not to like?By the way, if you want a laugh today, head on over to Jezebel.com. It’s as much fun as The Onion!