What Feminism is Not. A guide.
Here’s a brief checklist that I thought you may find handful. It encloses pretty much the basic -and wrong- ideas about what feminism and its representatives are.
1.- Not the opposite of chauvinism.
2.- Not a battle against men.
3.- Not an exclusive battle of and for women’s rights.
4.- Not a discriminative movement.
5.- Not a new movement or invention.
6.- Not a trend or style.
7.- Not a mechanism of repression.
8.- Not a frustrated women fight.
9.- Not a fight from the past with no current implications.
10.- Not an excuse so women can dominate men.
11.- Not a way to leave men out of the map (workplace, politics, military, healthcare, income, property ownership, parental rights)
12.- Not a mere discussion of who’s to pay the bills. Also, not about whether women should shave their legs and armpits or not.
13.- Not a lesbians’ issue.
14.- Not a matter regarding only the LGBTI community.
15.- Not a movement that’s dead.
But I’ve always considered myself a humanist.
If you have followed the previous ideas to define what feminism is, you have misunderstood and maybe stereotyped activists and people working/believing in this movement. That’s okay. It has been a long way for feminism and there’s a lot more to do. Being a feminist expands your humanistic vision.
What you can do.
If you want to know more about what feminism, I suggest starting with the basics: reading Simone De Beauvoir’s masterpiece “The Second Sex”, Judith Butler’s “Gender Trouble”, Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A room of one’s own”. Although these are only some samples of one type of feminism -white western feminism-, it’s a good way to start understanding the reasons why fighting for womens’ right to vote, equal opportunities in the workplace and the recognition of women in scientific fields.
If interested in other types of feminism such as latin feminism, you can check out Marcela Lagarde’s essays or Lidia Falcón’s “The new chauvinism” book. There are complex causes to fight such as sexual violence used as a war weapon, rape culture, female genital mutilation, among many others. The evolution of African feminism is pretty interesting, too.
For this last example, I strongly recommend watching "Africa Rising” by Paula Heredia about FGM -Female Genital Mutilation-. It really makes you understand other realities even though they are not precisely yours.
Keep in mind that the full video is not uploaded on youtube. You have to place an order here: http://www.wmm.com/filmcatalog/pages/c762.shtml in order to collaborate with the foundation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HflMxeGeUOA
Our -everybody’s- fight continues.