What Did You Call Me? Discomfort of a Modern-Day F-Word

Who’s a Feminist?

What Did You Call Me? Discomfort of a Modern-Day F-Word

Katie Machen, 2015

Ware College House

January 25, 2015

Katie Machen is an English Literature and French double major from Monkton, Maryland. She was the student leader of Creative Writers Corps, a tutor at the Writing Center, and an intern with the Ware Institute. Katie plans to pursue a career in education and will spend the following school year teaching English as a foreign language in France.

Scrolling down my Facebook newsfeed one day in November, I came across a link that piqued my interest. It was TIME’s yearly reader poll, by correspondent Katy Steinmetz (2015), “Which Word Should Be Banned In 2015?”As an English major and general fan of words, I clicked the link. The opener to the poll goes like this: “If you hear that word one more time, you will definitely cringe. You may exhale pointedly. And you might even seek out the nearest pair of chopsticks and thrust them through your own eardrums like straws through plastic lids. What word is this? You tell us” (Steinmetz, 2015). Many of the words and phrases on the list were familiar and, indeed, annoying: “bae,” “turnt,” “obvi,” “I can’t even,” and “said no one ever”; they are vapid, overused, and yes, probably make my generation look somewhat stupid. And then, sandwiched somewhere between “basic” and “kale,” I found a word that caught me off guard, that didn’t seem to fit in with any of the rest: “feminist.” Beside the word was a description asserting its placement on the list. It reads, “You have nothing against feminism itself, but when did it become a thing that every celebrity had to state their position on whether this word applies to them, like some politician declaring a party? Let’s stick to the issues and quit throwing this label around like ticker tape at a Susan B. Anthony parade” (Steinmetz, 2015). Aside from a bad joke at the expense of women’s suffrage,the assertion is unsettling in other ways; although Steinmetz argues not to “have anything against feminism,” her inclusion of “feminist” indicates an overarching discomfort of the word and the perceptions it calls forth.

Turning aside from immediate emotive reactions, I wonder if Steinmetz may have a point. There is an undeniable portion of society who sees “feminism” as a dirty word, not because of its dictionary definition or the movement behind it, but because of the associations it calls forth. Indeed, I have respected, college-educated friends who believe in the equality of the sexes, but they have told me they don’t consider themselves feminists because of classic reasons: they aren’t man-haters, they don’t burn their bras, and they like to shave their armpits. What’s more, they like men.With this regard, it may as well be noted straight off the bat that feminism is not a synonym of misandry. I suppose most of you to know andto have heard this many times before, but in terms of this discussion, it bears repeating. The Oxford English dictionary defines feminism as “advocacy of equality of the sexes and the establishment of the political, social, and economic rights of the female sex” (OED). The aim of this paper is not to traverse the entire history of the feminist movement; such an endeavor could, and does, fill entire semesters. Rather, in this paper I will explore subjects that led to TIME’s inclusion of “feminist” as a proposed banned word. Through a look at the common conception of feminism and the influence of popular culture, I will address Steinmetz’s question head on: ought we to do away with the word “feminist”?With all the baggage the term carries, is it even a suitable term at all anymore, or has it become merely another dirty f-word?

Before launching into a look at feminism’s role today, I will provide a brief background of the movement to be sure we’re all on the same page. We have now heard its official definition and have in mind that feminism is meant to focus on equality rather than female superiority. Again, citing the OED (n.d.), we see that:

The issue of rights for women first became prominent during the French and American revolutions in the late 18th [century], with regard especially to property rights, the marriage relationship, and the right to vote. In Britain it was not until the emergence of the suffragette movement in the late 19th [century] that there was significant political change. A ‘second wave’ of feminism arose in the 1960s, concerned especially with economic and social discrimination, with an emphasis on unity and sisterhood. A more diverse ‘third wave’ is sometimes considered to have arisen in the 1980s and 1990s, as a reaction against the perceived lack of focus on class and race issues in earlier movements.

All this is to say that the history of the movement is long and complicated and continues today, having made certain progress, but women have not reached a sense of equality. One such example of work left to do includes the right to equal pay, in which “full-time women workers’ earnings are only about 77 percent of their male counterparts’ earnings” “despite passage of the Equal Pay Act of 1963, which requires that men and women in the same work place be given equal pay for equal work” (White House, n.d.). Women today benefit from the labors of feminists in the first, second, and third waves, and it’s inferable that one would be hard-pressed to find a woman who would oppose equal pay. Most of the women who do not self-identify as feminists do not oppose the work of prior feminists, but even so, the word is feared or disliked to such an extent that it would be placed under consideration of a ban, like “previous castoffs OMG, YOLO, and twerk” (Steinmetz, 2015, author’s original emphasis).

The poll suggests that the current issue is not the movement itself, but the way the movement is commonly understood, or perhaps, forgotten. It turns the discussion away from women’s rights and moves it towards a linguistic debate, and “feminist’s” position beside fad words suggests that feminism might itself be a fad. It feels important here to note that others also took issuein regards to the word’s place on the list, and the editor, Nancy Gibbs (2015), stated a formal apology that now appears at the top of the article, writing,“While we meant to debate about some of the ways the word was used this year, that nuance was lost, and we regret that its inclusion has become a distraction from the important debate over equality and justice” (Steinmetz, 2015). Although Gibbs attempts to clarify the poll’s intentions, TIME’s apology feels like it is too little, too late. The fact of the matter is that feminism is not a fad, but its recent celebrity popularity might come off as trendy.

The year 2014 has been one of public feminist declarations. Perhaps the most notable celebrity to declare her status as a feminist is Beyoncé, who closed MTV’s Video Music Awards in August with a giant “FEMINIST” lighting up the screen, her silhouette in the foreground. Her song “Flawless” includes an excerpt from Nigerian feminist and author ChimamandaNgoziAdichie’s TED talk entitled “We Should All Be Feminists,” the end of which includes that textbook definition of “feminist: that person who believes in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes” (Adichie, 2013). Jessica Bennett, another contributing columnist at Time.com, addresses Beyoncé's activism, looking through a linguistic lens at how the artist transformed the cultural regard to the word “feminism” in the time following her VMA performance (2014).

Bennett collaborated with NicSubtirelu to study the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWbE). COCA “includes a variety of different media from 1990 to 2012 ([Subtirelu] restricted [his] analysis to radio, television, magazines, and newspapers),”and GloWbE “includes websites from various countries ([he] restricted it to US websites)” (Subtirelu, 2014). Subtirelu’s goal was to seek collocates, or associated words, of “feminist” and “feminists.” The words were ranked “according to the degree to which they tend to co-occur with the word feminist…this means that each of these words shows a tendency to show up near (within 5 words to the left or the right) to feminist” (ibid.) For COCA, two of the most associated words were radical and militant; for GloWbE, two words were man-hating and, again,radical, man-hating scoring a shocking 31.3% rate, evidence of the popular conception of feminism. To give an idea, the next highest percentage rate of any of the collocates ranks a mere 2.54%. That feminists would be characterized solely and surpassingly as radical man-haters shows a need for some type of enhancer to the public image of feminism, and Beyoncé provided that image. In the 48 hours after the VMAs, Bennett searched “feminist” on Twitter and came up with no trace of “man-hating,” but she did find one constant word association: “Beyoncé” (Bennett, 2014). In terms of pop culture, Beyoncé seems to have it all:

Universally loved, virtually unquestioned, and flawless, the 33-year-old entertainer seems to debunk every feminist stereotype you’ve ever heard….Her relationship…has been elevated as a kind of model for egalitarian bliss: dual earners, adventurous sex life, supportive husband and an adorable child held up on stage by daddy while mommy worked. Beyoncé’s got the confidence of a superstar but the feminine touch of a mother. And, as a woman of color, she’s speaking to the masses – a powerful voice amid a movement that has a complicated historywhen it comes to inclusion (ibid.).

This image envisions Beyoncé as multi-faceted and somehow relatable, as a pop star superhero who also likes to have sex and who cares for her child, creating a different face of a feminist, one who is not man-hating but is actually man-loving, who preaches equality of the sexes and presumably lives it in her everyday life. Beyoncé gave the public, especially young women, the option to identify themselves as feminists in a way that activists did not always achieve.

It feels necessary to say at this point that the term “feminist” was never meant to be gender-exclusive, and when I discuss women who feel uncomfortable with the term, it is because it seems to be that women more often feel more comfortable rejecting or accepting the title than men do, in part due to these collocates, these societal interpretations and perceptions of the label. If the public views feminists as man-haters, then naturally, men are less likely to self-identify as feminists. The word is a turnoff; as Jessica Bennett noted in a 2010 article for Newsweek,“part of the problem with feminism, of course, is the word itself. Though it was meant to be inclusive (men could engage in feminism in a way they couldn't engage in the "women's" movement) it has alienated from the start” (Bennett, 2010).It is easy to assume feminism to be a group for women, rather than a group for everyone, and as opposed to other labels like humanist or egalitarian. But the difference between these types of groups is significant. While feminism is meant to encapsulate equal rights much like egalitarianism, men do not seek equality in the same way women do, at least, not in terms of sex separated from race. Feminism needs its own standing, and as such should not be tossed aside or replaced.

Beyoncé’s promotion of the word certainly marked a sort of furthering within the movement, especially in terms of other celebrity involvement. Bennett quotes media critic Jennifer Pozner (2010), founder of Women In Media News, who writes, “Sure, it’sjustthe VMAs….She’s not marching in Ferguson or staffing a battered woman’s shelter, but through her performance millions of mainstream music fans are being challenged to think about feminism as something powerful, important, and yes, attractive” (Bennett, 2010, author’s original emphasis). Beyoncé is not the only famous person to have declared the label: she stands among the ranks of Kerry Washington, Amy Poehler, Lena Dunham, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Taylor Swift, and such celebrity involvement leads Jessica Valenti (2014), columnist for The Guardian US and author of Full Frontal Feminism, to write, “feminism is no longer ‘the f-word,’ it’s the realm of the cool kids.” The sudden feminist declarations alter the way the word is regarded, but in none of my research did I find actual statistics to show the impact of this sort of celebrity activism, so to speak, on the general public. The proclamations make noise, certainly, but it is unclear whether or not anyone truly listens for long enough to take the noise seriously. After all, some, like Steinmetz and her TIME poll, criticize the way in which the word has become a type of celebrity craze, seemingly moving away from the actual issues at hand.

That criticism was in part set off by celebrities who felt pressure to assert an opinion about feminism one way or the other, as if someone was asking, and someone probably was, “Beyoncé’s a feminist, what about you?” One such example is Salma Hayek, who was honored by Equality Now for her participation in co-founding an organization that fights for global women’s rights. However, The Guardian’s Barbara Ellen (2014) writes, “At the ceremony, which also honouredGloria Steinem, Hayek said: ‘I am not a feminist. If men were going through the things women are going through today, I would be fighting for them with just as much passion. I believe in equality.’”Selma Hayek deserves her freedom of speech and has the right to maintain whatever beliefs and opinions she may; if she does not consider herself a feminist, then by all means, that is her prerogative. The issue with such a statement is not that Hayek is not a feminist; it is that the feminism she publicly denounces does not stand by the definition outlined at the beginning of this paper, but rather assumes its own definition that implicitly seems to be more in line with the associative man-hating. According to the OED definition, Hayek is a feminist; she believes in equality, she wants women to be equal to men. She, like some of my friends referenced earlier, need not identify as a feminist if she does not want to. But it would behoove her, and the entire feminist movement, to have a more grounded definition of the word and to support that definition. The danger of her statement at the Equality Now ceremony is that it provides conflicting information to the definition that Beyoncé provides. Ellen balks at the pervasive nature of “the astonishing persistence of what [she’d] term small-f feminist-woman. The kind of woman who isn’t necessarily stupid or ill-informed, who, in fact, often talks and behaves in a ‘feminist’ way, yet she still recoils from the term ‘feminist’ as if she’d just found a scorpion nestling in her shoe” (ibid.). Hayek can be seen as such a woman. Though she does veritable good work for the furthering of equality, her denunciation of feminism renders the term murkier and detracts from the sort of promotion that Beyoncé and others do, promotion attached to the actual definition of the word. That Hayek would make such a statement standing alongside Gloria Steinem, one of the most important living feminist leaders, demonstrates a discord between the feminist movement and the word itself.

Perhaps it is too easy for us today to take for granted the work done in years past, and for this reason, some women don’t call themselves feminists because they don’t see that they have to. In Bennett’s 2010 Newsweek article, “Why Young Women Need Feminism,” she writes, “for all the talk about feminism as passé, mine wasn't a generation that rejected it for its militant, man-hating connotation—but because of its success. Women were equal—duh—so why did we need feminism?” (author’s original emphasis). She goes on to say, “It is only recently that I, and women my age, have come to eat those words” (ibid.). In the face of frustration of a world still without equal pay, not to mention the rape culture prevalent on college campuses and street harassment that women face every day, both of which are subjects for a different paper, it is clear that equality does not yet exist. As a representative of the “Make Equality Reality” event, Salma Hayek would agree with that statement. But I argue that because equality is not yet a reality, we need feminism all the more, and we need to use the word itself because of its rich legacy, not in spite of it.

Last summer sparked an online movement of women and girls who created a Tumblrblog called “Women Against Feminism.” These women post pictures of themselves holding signs that start, “I don’t need feminism because” and go on to give various reasons, including “I don’t need feminism because I enjoy being feminine,” “I don’t need feminism because: it’s hurting men AND it’s not helping women,” “I don’t need feminism because a women-only world would be a nightmare,” “I don’t need feminism because I don’t want these people to be MY VOICE” (Women Against Feminism, n.d.). While some of these inclusions come off as ridiculous and almost comical, like the idea of feminist overlords exterminating all the world’s men (a nightmare indeed), others, such as the last example, provide a more poignant look into what makes young women so uncomfortable with the term. And such a criticism feels legitimate. The point of feminism has never been for one voice to drown out all others, but for all voices to have a space. Equality should never be suppressive, but should instead give way to freedom to voice both concerns and frustrations, hopes and goals. Contrary to the young woman’s sign, we do need feminism so that she can be free to raise her own voice, and Beyoncé hers, and Salma Hayek hers. But for feminism to be the avenue to such vocality, it needs to lose its stigma and reclaim a sense of its actual definition. If Beyoncé can be a method to disseminate that information, then I welcome “Flawless” and her flashing “FEMINIST” sign, so long as her proclamation is not absorbed into the torrent of other celebrity proclamations like Hayek’s that stem from misinformation.