F-Bomb

by Lauren McKeon

  I’d badly wanted to sit in on those first classes, and in January 2017 I finally got a chance. What kind of young women and men would sign up, I wondered? Would this new generation of budding feminists sense the fault lines across generations? How did students engage with these new feminisms, and how had the class changed in the fifteen years since I’d been a high school student?

  On the day I arrived, freezing rain had slicked the sidewalks and popped my umbrella open like a muffin top. Pathetic fallacy: something I’d learned in high school. I walked up the front steps, paused. Reoriented to the office. Nausea swam through my déjà vu, a physical feeling that started at my toes and made my hands lurch a lopsided signature when I signed my name on the visitors’ log. Then Erin Crawford, teacher of the grade eleven gender studies class, appeared, carrying a clock (seriously—pathetic fallacy!), and her presence saved me from folding time in on itself like an accordion.

  We walked down the same sticky linoleum hallways I’d walked down every day for five years (I went to school when there was still a grade thirteen). I was chatting away about how long it had been since I’d been back, when suddenly my insides dipped. We were passing it: the locker, my old one, the one that my teenage rapist had pushed me up against, his hand to my throat, warning me not to tell. In that instant, I thought: And still we question whether these young women and men really need gender studies—if they’re ready, if they’re interested, whether they’ll relate.

  In the classroom, Crawford hoisted herself onto a desk, hanging the clock, while I looked around the room. The desks were old, with the same seafoam green and faded blue hard plastic chairs that I remembered, arranged in a fan. At the back wall, fluorescent paper letters demanded “Be the change!” They hung over a long, rainbow-colored grid of pictures of famous people captioned with phrases like “She happens to be a lesbian” and “He happens to be gay.” Another wall was decorated with posters the students had made. One said “Feminism is not a bad word”; another “Be happy, be comfortable, be yourself!” A few simply prescribed “love.” One stated “Love is love.” Posters celebrating transgender rights and trans love decorated every wall. On these walls, body shaming was condemned, feminism was intersectional, and both J. K. Rowling and Ani DiFranco held places of inspiration.

  A poster asking “What is wrong with this picture?” featured a collage of magazine cut-outs showing hypersexualized men and women (Axe ads had their own special column). Another, tucked beside Crawford’s desk and taped to the blackboard, read “Feeling uncomfortable is a necessary part of unlearning oppressive behaviors.” On the way into the class, I passed a small alcove covered in yellow Post-its. A sign reading “Positive Posts” invited the students to leave some nice words. There were more than fifty, with short bursts of solidarity. “Smile.” “You matter.” “I love you.” “Shine.” “You are worthy.” The class credo had even spilled out into the surrounding hallway. Giant sheets of paper advised fellow students on consent, gender fluidity, and preferred pronouns; slut shaming, anti-feminism, and not staying true to yourself were all told to take a hike. It was Instagram feminism meets intersectionality, and damn, was it effective. Combined with a truly barrier-breaking, highly inclusive brand of feminism, the self-love side of this new feminism ceased to irk me. It seemed more about protecting mental health and real self-worth—valuable goals for high school students—and less about superficiality. It’s something I could have desperately used as a teenager. This was nothing like my gender studies class fifteen years ago; this was so much better.

  The students shuffled in at 10:20 AM, a bundle of sweatpants and leggings, mostly young women, but also a few men, chattering giddily. Racially, they were a diverse group. Crawford opened the class by asking the students for updates on their independent study unit, a research project for which each student must investigate women’s rights in a particular country. Students talked about femicide, access to education, domestic violence, women’s legal rights, sanctioned rape, cultures of obedience, and more. One young woman summarized the problems facing women in her assigned country as such: “But it’s, like, so whack.” The comments made her classmates laugh and also bob their heads in agreement. Crawford stood up. Tall and lithe, she wore an eggplant hoodie, gray skinny jeans, and oxblood Blundstones, which she called “Blunnies.” Her hair was short and asymmetrical, and when she lifted her arm to gesture I noticed a small tattoo on her wrist. In a word, Crawford was cool. “I think in this class we’ve taken away our rose-colored glasses and thrown them out a long time ago,” she said, miming a toss toward the door. “But sometimes, it’s still like, ‘Holy smokes!’”

  Next she handed out an infographic showing statistics on women worldwide. Example: “Women preform two-thirds of the world’s work, yet receive only 10 percent of global income.” When Crawford asked the class what struck them about the numbers, more than half a dozen hands flew up. They were particularly bothered by the wage gap and the implications of earning less, not to mention the idea of possibly picking up the domestic slack. One teen, her eyes rimmed with black kohl and a Monster Energy drink perched on the corner of her desk, remarked that if the wage gap didn’t budge, “like, change won’t happen.” The students were engaged, thoughtful, and daring. They were so much more daring than I had been in class at that age. While watching Sheryl WuDunn’s TED Talk on the Half the Sky movement to help women and girls, a conversation erupted over periods and the high costs of menstrual products. Crawford had just commented that many women in India drop out of school once they begin menstruating because they can’t afford pads and are ashamed.

  “What do they do then?”

  “Shove a towel up there?”

  “Oh god.”

  “Pads and tampons should be free!”

  “Nobody wants to bleed everywhere.”

  The conversation evolved, touching on the stigma associated with periods and how more light needs to be shed on homeless women’s access to menstrual products. It’s not something I ever would have mentioned in high school, especially not in class and especially not in a class with boys. But these students dug in with aplomb. When the class bell clanged, they dragged their feet, still chatting. WuDunn’s talk on women who’d overcome oppression inspired them. One student with long blond hair remarked, “How they’re rising above—it gives me the chills.” She sat for a moment, thinking. A quick current shuddered through her. The chills. She grabbed her backpack and slung it over her shoulder. As I started to pack up my own stuff, Crawford told me about how she was the first person to teach the official gender studies course, HSG3M, in the school board district. Every year, about twenty students enrolled—not a big class, but an invested one. I was scheduled to come back tomorrow to interview the students about their thoughts on the class and feminism. We mused about what they would tell me, and I remarked that her class was so different from the one I’d taken. We agreed that was an incredibly good thing; feminism has to evolve.

  I navigated the hallways out, dodging the teeming students. To complete my high school redux, I’d planned lunch with one of my oldest and best friends, whose family home sat across from the high school. She happened to be there and to have the day off. We used to head to her house almost every day at lunch, dodging across four lanes of traffic (this time, I crossed at the light), cutting through the apartment cluster we called the Red Bricks, then through the alley and into the shelter of her house. Once, we laughed so hard, mushroom soup shot out of my nose. It was that kind of friendship: the kind that fades out the bad parts of your day, and we both had many of those bad parts in high school.

  I burst through her front door, rain clinging to my hair. “They’re so young,” I said, by way of greeting, peeling off my coat. I thought about it. “We were so young.”

  She didn’t miss a beat. “I know.”

  In March 2015, when This Magazine boldly declared, “Canada needs more feminism,” we were, quite literally, saying “fuck that” to the previous year’s heap-ton of messe
d-up stuff: the charges of violent sexual assault against Jian Ghomeshi, the Dalhousie University dentistry students whose private “Gentleman’s Club” Facebook group talked about using chloroform on women and polled which female classmate they’d like to “hate fuck” the most, the multiple rape allegations against Bill Cosby, and, yes, the rise of anti-feminism. This advocated for intersectional feminism, strong alliances with men, and universal child care. We challenged the idea that feminism needs one woman to be its brand ambassador, celebrated pluralities and grassroots movements, and cheered the power of social media. As editor, I was nervous about how it would be received—I, of all people, knew what a charged issue feminism had become—but it became one of the best-selling issues we ever did during my five years at the magazine (though I did receive a couple of middle fingers and one very angry monologue from a woman anti-feminist at that year’s Word on the Street festival in Toronto). The launch party, which featured talks from two women of color and a transgender woman, was packed.

  The perception that young women don’t care about feminism stubbornly persists, but that’s an unfairly broad characterization. The Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation poll reveals that young women, on the whole, are actually more likely to say they are either a feminist or a strong feminist. A full 63 percent of women aged eighteen to thirty-four embraced the f-word, the second highest out of all age groups; women aged fifty to sixty-four nudged them out of the top spot at 68 percent. The younger group was, however, far more apt to say it felt the current movement focused on issues that mattered to them. Nearly 60 percent of them agreed feminism had zeroed in on the right issues, and more than 80 percent agreed the movement was empowering—a marked difference from older generations. They were also the least likely to call it outdated, at only 16 percent. If anything, a closer examination of all the “Are you a feminist?” surveys shows that young women care deeply about feminism; it’s just that their feminism may often not resemble that of those who came before them. As discussed in previous chapters, that difference, when expressed in individualistic or even commodified attitudes, can be problematic. But, frankly, it can also be incredibly inspiring.

  I created my own informal survey in January 2015 and largely promoted it, on purpose, through social media. I knew it wouldn’t be the most scientific study, but I didn’t just want to know the numbers; I wanted to know what women today thought about feminism. I wanted millennials, those who grew up with, and were now possibly even entrenched in, our digital culture, to answer me. To my surprise, the survey received over one hundred responses in the first few hours it went live. In the end, more than three hundred people answered, and most of them weren’t even trolls! On average, those who filled out the survey were close to my age: in their late twenties and early thirties. All genders responded (close to 15 percent of those who completed the survey were men, actually), but I was most interested in the answers of those who identified as women, transgender women, or gender fluid. The idea was to hear how women themselves, and particularly the age segment we seem to puzzle over the most, interacted with the f-word and what it meant to them.

  Of the women who answered, 88 percent said they identified as feminists. Though I didn’t give them the option of choosing the degree to which they were a feminist, these variations emerged anyway. The word “feminist,” I acknowledged, can be loaded. Tell me more, I asked. Why do you identify with it? Some of the answers were so short and to the point, they made me laugh. “I believe in equality for women, duh,” said one twenty-four-year-old. A twenty-eight-year-old responded, “Equality yo,” and a thirty-four-year-old offered possibly my favorite answer: “Next.” It really should be that simple! I also appreciated the bit of snark I received: “I believe in equality and I know what the term ‘feminist’ actually means,” said a thirty-year-old. Some were emphatic and fed up, for example: “Because gender equality is not a reality. I’m sick of accepting the status quo,” said a thirty-seven-year-old, and, “The idea of not standing up for my own rights to equality, not to mention the rights of women and girls around the world, is reprehensible,” said a twenty-nine-year-old. Women talked about reclaiming the word and taking it back “from people who have twisted it or turned it into something negative.” They talked about the importance of intersectionality and elevating long suppressed and oppressed voices within the movement. And they talked about the importance of doing more than just using the word: “Feminism is an everyday life practice, not an identity to slip on and off whenever it suits you,” observed a twenty-nine-year-old.

  By far, though, the most common answer I received relied on the dictionary definition of feminism, with many young women born in the 1980s, ’90s, and ’00s asserting they believed in feminism because they believed in equality and equal rights—no elaboration necessary. At the same time, some of the more interesting answers came from those who were grappling with the term and what it meant to them. In some cases, these women actively positioned their use of “feminist” or “feminism” against perceptions of the wider movement, both external and internal. There were a lot more of these answers than I anticipated, such as those included below, all from women under forty, across the LGBTQ spectrum:

  “I consider myself a feminist in the original meaning of the term: absolute equality in work, life, and relationships as well as complete control over one’s own body. I do not advocate aggressive blaming or finger-pointing at the opposite gender, and I do not believe in women perceiving themselves as perpetual victims of the patriarchy. Sisters need to do it for themselves.”

  “Yes to equal rights, pay, treatment. Not picket signs.”

  “I haven’t completely unpacked that yet. Injustice and inequality infuriates me. What infuriates me more is how passively we all accept it. Rape culture and sex shaming are so deeply ingrained in all of us and I want it to stop.”

  “I do, but I didn’t always. I find many people who identify as feminists go to the extreme to identify women as victims or do not acknowledge the intersectionality of gender. After all, white women only have so much to complain about; we need to be listening to our sisters of color.”

  “I believe in equality, although the term ‘feminist’ is starting to annoy me.”

  The uncertainty revealed many things: a fear of doing it “right,” a retreat from the traditional political expressions of feminism, a frustration with the trappings of the word, a need for a fuller commitment to intersectionality, and worry over whether they could take ownership of a term they felt was historically rooted in fights outside their everyday experiences. But nowhere did I sense a complete ignorance of what feminism meant, nor any sign that post–Mad Men–era women had collectively hit themselves on the head and suffered mass amnesia. They knew the political actions from which they benefitted. Though today’s feminists may have shifted their focus to different issues, many of which reflect our modern, messy anxieties over gender, and some of which can be considered trivial, they had not, as is sometimes suggested, forgotten that it mattered. Young women have spearheaded some of today’s most energizing campaigns, utilizing social media and technology to connect, share, and discuss on an immense scale. Some of us like to dismissively call this “slacktivism,” that catchy portmanteau of “slacker” and “activism.” Pop science writer Malcolm Gladwell disparaged it in his 2010 New Yorker article “Small Change,” in which he argued, “We seem to have forgotten what activism is.” I think we’re underestimating how powerful and courageous a loud, expansive, public conversation on feminism can be, particularly at a time when we’re so averse to dropping the f-bomb.

  In spring 2012, a group of Duke University students who enrolled in a class called “Women in the Public Sphere: History, Theory, and Practice” underwent a feminist awakening. While they learned the history of women’s activism in the US inside the class, outside there was a renewed focus on sexual assault on the Duke campus and much discussion about the university’s party culture. The move to defund Planned Parenthood was just getting
started. Rush Limbaugh had called Georgetown University law student and birth control advocate Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute.” As a result, classroom discussions were lively, in-depth, and intersectional. “But,” wrote course instructor Rachel Seidman in a later analysis, “when my students tried to talk about these ideas outside of class, they were often shut down by their peers’ refusal to engage or by accusations that they were ‘man-hating feminists.’ Deeply frustrated, they asked, ‘How can we make any progress on any of these issues if we can’t even talk about them?’” As a solution, the students decided to open dialogue on campus through a social media “PR campaign” for feminism.

  Together, the class recruited a diverse cross-section of their family, friends, and acquaintances, giving each a black marker, a small whiteboard, and instructions to finish the sentence “I need feminism because . . .” Each posed with their answer for a photo, which the students used to launch the campaign “Who Needs Feminism?” On the morning of April 12, 2012, they plastered the Duke campus with campaign printouts and wrote an op-ed for the school newspaper. “But as these posters remind us,” students wrote, “the goal of equality is not yet achieved . . . It takes a lot of people to change a stereotype.” Online, students created Facebook and Tumblr pages to share the photos. They were not prepared for the reaction. Even now, wrote Seidman in her analysis, “Who Needs Feminism? Lessons From a Digital World,” they have no idea how the campaign became so popular so quickly.