What if feminism got a new name?
After reading in the Womack article about Drew Barrymore’s non-feminist ideals for the movie Charlie’s Angels, I looked up an interview online with her about it in which she says she isn’t a feminist, because:
"Feminism scares me because it seems like it bashes males," Drew says. "I love men. I want to be ..." she pauses, "... equalists!"
As misguided as her ideas about feminism are, she does make a point when she says she would rather be called an “equalist�.
This woman embodies and is speaking in the voice of pop culture. Although we in a women’s studies class may know better that feminism isn’t at all about bashing men, the rest of the culture at large has come to associate the word with a time in which women had to be radical crusaders against men in order to further their cause for equality. These days, although things are still far from perfect, some people may feel it discredits the progress that has been made and insults those who make an effort toward achieving equality by referencing a time in which women were fighting for rights from a society unwilling to give those rights to them.
Feminism has become a dirty word in the last two decades. People associate it with where things were in the 60s and 70s, when it was still very much a man’s world, and Charlie’s Angels were constantly fighting “male chauvinist pigs�. Men of course still have greater advantages, but we have all been trying to attain gender equality for quite some time, and a word that associates men collectively with a time when men wanted to keep women in the kitchen and home pregnant rather than actually move over and make space for them may be too outdated. Most men these days want women to have more power, too. The contemporary feminist movement could gain more followers by putting the spin on its ideals of gender equality rather than retaining a title that references the advancement of women only. Men have some sticky stereotypes into which they are pigeonholed and need to be freed from as well - they are supposed to be stoic and never cry, they are supposed to treat women as sexual conquests, they are supposed to earn more money than women, etc. In a society in which women are rising, men need to be encouraged to let go of these stuffy old gender roles as well, because they also serve to keep women down.
Just an idea. I personally don’t have a problem with the word feminism and ideally we perhaps should reclaim it rather than allow it to die associated with a bad taste in the mouth. However, as time passes and things change and growth happens in a society, the words we use for things need to evolve too. For example, the NAACP, though its acronym retains its same meaning, refers on its website only to “persons of color�. We just don’t say it the other way around anymore, because the term “colored people�, although once considered politically correct, is now a racial slur. (I don’t mean to equivocate all the horrors associated with racist terminology with the mere snickering and occasional disgust that accompanies the term feminism.) But would losing the f-word really be so bad?
On the other hand, would giving the cause over to a more palatable word risk losing some of the cause’s potency, much in the way that Fudge explains "girl power" took the riot out of riot grrrl? If we put Drew Barrymore in the same category as feminists, then we’ve got the type of woman who would make a movie like Charlie’s Angels in it. However, if Brittney Spears has been called a feminist, as was noted in an earlier blog entry, what have we got to lose? And do we want feminism to be like an exclusive high-school clique that allows entry to only the most radical among us?