Am I a Feminist?

If you had told me even five years ago that I'd start a blog primarily focused on gender, I'd think you were insane. When we first started dating in college, my wife asked me if I was a feminist. I said I was not, which surprised her and thankfully wasn't the end of our relationship right then and there. I believed in the importance of equality and women's rights, but I didn't call myself a feminist because I wasn't doing anything to support the cause. I wasn't out lobbying, or volunteering with the campus women's center, or engaging in feminist discussions. It didn't feel right to call myself a feminist if I wasn't doing anything to earn the label. When I explained my reasoning, she understood what I meant even though she didn't agree with my conclusion.

Looking back over a decade later, I understand where 19 year old me was coming from and it made sense with how I engaged with social issues at the time (read: very surface-level). Since then though, I've discovered my definition of being a feminist was too narrow. I don't need to be marching in the streets to call myself a feminist. The Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 started the process of strangthening my engagement with social issues. Those events prompted me to take a step back and acknowledge there were a lot of things I didn't understand. That allowed me to just listen. Listening let me learn and grow. The biggest area of growth was in how I thought about race and gender. I had previously fallen for the "why are you making everything about race" or "why are you making everything about gender" mind games and I finally understood that language was used by the oppressors to distract from the reality that in the United States, it is all about race and it is all about gender. I learned about systemic racism and unconscious bias and started pausing to challenge my preconcieved notions and gut reactions.

Throughout this process I came to the realization that I was doing the work to be a feminist. Starting with myself and focusing on listening and learning was a necessary step. Since then I've worked hard to eliminate unnecessarily gendered language from my speech and looked for ways to better understand women's issues and gender issues more broadly. I've made an effort to read books from a more diverse group of authors, read more books in genres stereotypically associated with women (like romance or cozier sci-fi/fantasy), and listen to more music by women. Looking at how we use language in particular is important because it helps us understand how we communicate and how that affects others. One of my favorite things I've read on the subject is Amanda Montell's Wordslut, which looks at how English words are gendered, often taking on new deragatory meanings, but only when directed at women. She breaks down the common criticism of speech patterns women use and describes how they serve a linguistic purpose. I love that I learned these things because language is an easy entrypoint to appyling my growth in real life. It gives me a better sense of my own biases and helps me notice issues such as women being interrupted or left out in meetings.

So yes, I have grown and I am a feminist. That's why, much to my own surprise, I'm writing about gender and how it interacts with fatherood. I don't want my son to take as long as I did to learn these things and I certainly don't want to be the kind of father who only cares about women's issues once he has a daughter. Men and boys can and should be feminists. Feminism is about fixing the societal issues that cause gender-based harm in any direction, and I'm here to support that in even the smallest way I can.