That's what it said on her T-shirt.
The T-shirts were obviously printed up on the theory that a whole bunch of feminists would buy them and wear them and we awful men would see that feminists come in all shapes and sizes and thereby be disabused of our negative stereotypes.
Unfortunately, the woman wearing the T-shirt fit the stereotype right down to a T. She was decidedly unfeminine and you could tell she had put zero effort into trying to look feminine. She was unhappy, unpleasant and it was painfully obvious that she doesn't like men much.
So the T-shirt achieved the exact opposite effect of what was desired. I would think that any self-respecting feminist who knows this woman well should take her aside and say, 'Please, for the sake of the cause, never wear that T-shirt again.'
There is more here.
UPDATE from the department of unintended consequences: In the comments below Harmony mentions that she found this post while searching for a place she could buy the T-shirt. Well, as a consequence of her making that comment this post now rates far enough up the search listing for people looking to buy that one or two people come here every day looking to buy one.
The T-shirts were obviously printed up on the theory that a whole bunch of feminists would buy them and wear them and we awful men would see that feminists come in all shapes and sizes and thereby be disabused of our negative stereotypes.
Unfortunately, the woman wearing the T-shirt fit the stereotype right down to a T. She was decidedly unfeminine and you could tell she had put zero effort into trying to look feminine. She was unhappy, unpleasant and it was painfully obvious that she doesn't like men much.
So the T-shirt achieved the exact opposite effect of what was desired. I would think that any self-respecting feminist who knows this woman well should take her aside and say, 'Please, for the sake of the cause, never wear that T-shirt again.'
There is more here.
UPDATE from the department of unintended consequences: In the comments below Harmony mentions that she found this post while searching for a place she could buy the T-shirt. Well, as a consequence of her making that comment this post now rates far enough up the search listing for people looking to buy that one or two people come here every day looking to buy one.
I think you have failed to understand the difference between feminine and feminist. With the way the world works against women, why wouldn't a feminist be unhappy ?
ReplyDeleteThank you for commenting.
ReplyDeletePerhaps you are right. And I should add, in case it's not obvious, that this was just one woman and I'm not drawing any general conclusions from this. For all I know she may not be a feminist at all but was given the T-shirt and was only wearing it because it was laundry day or something.
That said, I think for a some of us (and we're not just men) the primary issue is why their should be a tension between feminine and feminist. It was presumably the intent of the campaign to convince Neanderthals like me that we are wrong because we would see all sorts of different women wearing these T-shirts and see that feminists come in a wide variety. I thought it was funny then that the woman I saw wearing it was right out of central casting. I would think even most feminists (whatever that means anymore) would have thought it funny.
Feminists come in all shapes and sizes. Even the central casting shapes and sizes. And in man-sizes and shapes. Some feminists are ugly. Some are beautiful. Some are working class. Some are elitist who went to Harvard. Some work outside the home. Some do not. Some are moms. Some are sisters. All are daughters. "The point" of a T-shirt campaign like that isn't to disabuse Neaderthals of their limited thinking. It's so much more than that. Affirmation, celebration, declaration, normalization, aattention, among other things.
ReplyDeleteWe don't need to measure our success based on your metrics; that's kind of one of the points of feminism. The patriarchal game has been rigged and it takes careful attention and work to dismantle it. Thanks for playing and showing how much that is still true.
Came across your blog, by the way, when searching for a "THIS IS WHAT A FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE" t-shirt to buy for myself and my daughter.
Peace. :)
Thanks for dropping by. I am always grateful to anyone who drops by and especially flattered when someone takes the trouble to comment.
ReplyDeleteI hope you find the T-shirts you are looking for. It's a pity they only seem to come as T-shirts. I would think a polo with a collar and smaller tasteful print, perhaps an insignia incorporating the words would look much better.
Hi, I feel an important point that has been missed here, is that you don't by any means have to be a woman to be a feminist. That's like saying that you have to be black to be against racism - it's not only absurd, it's offensive. Just because we live in a society which is still governed in part by patriarchal ideals, doesn't mean that men are the enemy. They're also just caught up in this mess. They're ALSO limited by the stereotypes that the same system deals to them.
ReplyDeleteAnd more than this, any man who has women in his life that he cares about, should also want for the feminist movement to work towards a meaningful resolution. I mean, don't you want for your sisters, mothers, daughters, wives, etc, to live their lives to the full, in any way that they choose, without being held back by antequated patriarchal attitudes and values?
I wonder if you still think that the primary issue is "why there should be a tension between feminine and feminist"? Because for me this also totally missed the point. Conventional gender roles and things like "masculine" and "feminine" are just constructs, some aspect of these are manifest in most men or women respectively, but, for example, a lot of women spend a lot of money on cosmetics to look more feminine. That doesn't have anything to do with the physical reality of being a women, it's to do with our social construct of what a women should be - which is even backed up by your comment above: "you could tell she had put zero effort into trying to look feminine".
Thanks for the open-minded discourse.
the photo that led me to google the phrase: http://www.theantiroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/bill_bailey_l.jpg
Thank you Annette. That is an interesting comment. I don't think I could do it justice without thinking about it so I'll leave much of what you say unanswered for now.
ReplyDeleteOne quick comment, I do wonder about the phrase "the feminist movement". Is there only one feminist movement? Or, to put it another way, how diverse is feminism? Or, maybe, how diverse can feminism be?
Well, on first reading your response, I suppose that you're right to a point. "The feminist movement" is a convenient buzz phrase to take all of feminism and put it in one box. I'd say there are as many different ideas about feminism as there are people - and unfortunately the word has a bad reputation these days, which does hinder efforts to close the gender gap.
ReplyDeleteJust to get past this point, let's define the key idea of feminism as something like this: "the idea that everyone has the basic right to social, economic, and vocational equality" - this generally has an emphasis on women since they are the gender that have been most oppressed, but in my own personal brand of feminism I think it's important to include everyone here, since for me that's pretty much the point. It's "love thy neighbour" stuff, and it's also the idea at the heart of democracy.
A few thoughts spring to mind here.
ReplyDeleteThe first is that if we define the core of feminism as "the idea that everyone has the basic right to social, economic, and vocational equality" then feminism is identical to progressive liberalism. And when you go on to say this is feminist because women are the gender that is most oppressed, you are giving women a role in progressive liberalism that is very similar to that played by the working class in Marxist thought.
I see the logic here but I'm not sure you really want to do that. If we look at the history of Marxism, for example, we can see that while Marxists have made heavy use of the plight of the working class to make rhetorical points, they have not been very kind to the working class in practice.
The second thought flows from the first and it is that progressive liberalism has not been a very friendly environment for feminism and it has not been so for a long time. I don't know if you know the story of what happened when Shulamith Firestone and Jo Freeman tried to put forward at the 1968 National Conference for New Politics. If you don't, you may want to look it up. And some of the stories now beginning to emerge about how women and women's security have been treated at the Occupy demonstrations suggests that things haven't changed much.
The third thought is that the vast majority of people, both women and men, are not progressive liberals. A feminism defined in terms of equality would have a hard time winning over most women never mind men. To put it another way, it is easy to get women (and men) to sign onto the notion that equality is an important political goal but it would be exceptionally difficult to convince most women that equality was the key idea. And that is before we get into the thorny problem of discussing precisely what we mean by equality.
Whoops, there is an incomplete sentence above. I emant to say "...when Shulamith Firestone and Jo Freeman tried to put forward a motion to discuss women's issues at the 1968 National Conference for New Politics".
ReplyDeleteAnd now we start to fundamentally disagree with each other.
ReplyDelete"A feminism defined in terms of equality would have a hard time winning over most women never mind men"? I totally disagree. If not equality, then what? Humour me while I quote from a horribly unacademic source like wikipedia, the first sentence of the article on feminism says this: "Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women" (and continues: "Feminism is mainly focused on women's issues, but because feminism seeks gender equality, some feminists argue that men's liberation is therefore a necessary part of feminism, and that men are also harmed by sexism and gender roles").
It is sometimes a useful thing to fundamentally disagree.
ReplyDelete"If not equality, then what?"
That's very well put.
A big part of how we might answer that is to ask how well we think feminism has been doing with the emphasis on equality. I would say not well. No one has to agree with me, but I think feminism hasn't been doing as well the last two decades as it did from about 1968 to 1984 or so.
But nobody has to listen to me and that is a good thing. Current feminism has, as I say above, wedded itself to progressive liberalism for better or for worse. We'll see how that works out.
Last word is yours of you want it and I thank you again for your comments.