Prior to attending UC Davis, I understood the word “feminism” to be something leaning towards evil. I don’t know how to articulate it exactly, but it used to be illustrated in my mind as a legion of irrationally angry women. In short, I thought it was related to civil rights advocacy— but on an extremist level. I remember being asked if I was a feminist by my friend during my freshman year of high school. My response? “Sure, but I’m not a femi-Nazi.” Yes, I equated the feminist movement to the Nazi agenda. This exchange now makes me recoil. I’d heard the disfigured term “femi-Nazi” being thrown around to counter feminism, and I took it to mean that the movement itself was heralded by some crazed female supremacy group. Without knowing it, I was being oppressed. Sadly, the way sociopolitical opinions spread is kind of like wildfire in that one can easily subscribe to an overheard opinion without necessarily understanding it.
Instead of thinking of feminism as something born from pettiness and anger, I now realize that feminism is more about being a just person: one who strives not to discriminate or underestimate a woman on account of her gender’s perceived weaknesses. If this definition was salient to me back then, my answer to my friend’s question would have been a passionate “yes” — or, more accurately, “duh.”
My college experience challenged me to think about what it means to be female. It also complicated my notion of it, as discussions introduced new terms like “intersectionality” and dimensions like race. When I was a kid, I accepted the hero/damsel dynamic as the gospel representation of the gender binary. I matter-of-factly thought that men were the stronger gender, so much so that in roleplaying games with my cousins, I volunteered to play the prince or the dad. I wanted to swoop in to save the day. It wasn’t until I was exposed to cartoon heroines— like the Powerpuff Girls, Kim Possible and Mulan— that it was slowly becoming ingrained in my mind that girls could be tough, too. However, my liberal arts education affords me the realization that it is not enough to think that girls are “just as good” as boys. While seemingly harmless, this ideology still presumes that what is codedly masculine is better and, ergo, the standard.
This is not to say that toughness in girls is merely a reaction to toughness in boys. Not at all. I still feel empowered by fictional representations of strong willed girls. After my strictly cartoons-only phase, I was introduced to Lorelai Gilmore and Hermione Granger, who made me want to be as sharp and unafraid to speak my mind. And in my college years, I have Leslie Knope and Liz Lemon to admire for their hustle and unabashedness.
I simply want to put it out there that there are many forms of courage. I mean this in terms of how we tend to code certain traits as “masculine” and “feminine.” A sensitive male and a tough female are differently courageous (as is the case with a sensitive female and a tough male) but we tend to overlook other forms of courage because of the more universally recognized “tough equals male.” After all, there is courage in vulnerability, ambition, loyalty, and assertiveness. But we tend to be surprised (usually pleasantly so) when we are presented with a tough girl because it’s, on a gender construct-level, unexpected.
Many, if not all, personality traits tend to be needlessly gender-coded, and I urge that when we are presented with people and fictional characters we don’t think of them relative to their gender, but whether or not they are real. People, regardless of their gender, are distinguishable through nuance— every human being has passions, behaviors, quirks, and ways of thinking that are unique to them. So, while a ditzy shopaholic might be dinged for being an unfortunate portrayal of her gender, we must consider whether our criticisms buy into the socially imposed gender codes or if they challenge them. It is my opinion that we should endeavor towards the latter.