I have always been too scared to label myself as a Feminist
for fear of immediate judgement and ridicule. Feminists are those angry, hairy
arm-pitted lesbians with men’s haircuts and lots of piercings, right? Oh, how
wrong.
Feminism is changing, Feminism has changed, and the internet
is facilitating that movement. You no longer have to be a die-hard, man-hating
Feminist to read up on the topic, in fact, you don’t even have to be female. It’s
hard to estimate the number of my skim-reading generation that might have
flicked through the pages of, ‘The Female Eunuch’ or perhaps even heard of
Virginia Woolf and her, ‘Room of One’s Own’, let alone any with the XY chromosome.
However, many more, one could imagine, have clicked onto the, ‘Everyday SexismProject’ or been inquisitive enough to reach the end of a Guardian CiF article
by the fantastic Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett or Holly Baxter (writers of Vagenda-
for the slightly more curious Feminist). Even the questionable layman’s news
provider, BuzzFeed is in on the act, with dozens of articles promoting the gender equality cause.
Feminists don’t have to be a Feminist first and foremost and
a teacher/student/parent second. Feminism doesn’t have to take over one’s life
and force us into a state of stereotypical penis-haters. We don’t need to hold
up signs of giant genitalia to get our point across. Feminism is accessible to
everyone in the UK and the more people who are thinking about it, the more that
are writing about it and that means there is more pressure to do something
about it. Even if we’re being told to ‘Look Up’ from our screens, a video I
suspect the majority of my generation (myself included) will gush over and then
continue to ignore, sometimes it’s progressive to look down.
The topic is enormous. Whether your particular attention
focuses on the lack of female MPs in parliament (147 out of 650)[1],
the gender pay gap (the GPG in the UK in 2013 stood at 19.7%[2])
or the blatant and totally undeniable sexism in music videos for example; Feminism
can no longer be pigeon-holed.
The Feminism issue is evolving, opinion-splitting and
practically undefinable. Although we are being told to stop being a world of, ‘smart-phones
and dumb people’, this intangible, influential connection between us that we
call the internet is offering easier access and therefore encouraging more and
more young people to take an interest, form an opinion and ask the right
questions.
