F-Bomb

by Lauren McKeon

  But soon, women and men from around the world were sending in their own photos. Buzzfeed, Mashable, and Huffington Post called. Good magazine named the campaign its Good Gone Viral national winner. High schools and colleges around the world have now participated in their own versions of the campaign. In 2013 Oxford University organized a photo shoot and more than five hundred people showed up. Today, years after the class graduated, the Facebook page is still active. The conversation has moved past “the already converted,” as Seidman put it, and connected many people who’d never otherwise meet to discuss feminism.

  And that isn’t the only example of social media getting loud. In Canada, the hashtag #BeenRapedNeverReported became a global phenomenon within twenty-four hours, with nearly eight million people taking part in the conversation, many of them young women. (I wonder if Antonia Zerbisias, one of the women who first sent this hashtag into the world, and also the former Toronto Star journalist who’d ridiculed fourth-wave, intersectional feminists, realized that many of them were the ones carrying on her hashtag.) The hashtag #MMIW was created to draw attention to Canada’s many missing and murdered Indigenous women and to pressure the federal government into launching an inquiry. Toronto teens Tessa Hill and Lia Valente started the online We Give Consent campaign in 2015 to get consent into Ontario’s provincial curriculum. They won. The hashtag #YouKnowHerName trended after Canadian courts enacted a publication ban on Rehtaeh Parsons’ name, the Nova Scotian teen who died following a suicide attempt after she was mercilessly bullied when a photo of her rape was shared around her school. Saying her name was a way of honoring her and keeping the conversation about cyberbullying, rape, and consent going. And then there’s #YesAllWomen, the global movement that arose after the Elliot Rodger killings and also in response to the reactive #NotAllMen chorus. It continues to underscore women’s daily experiences with misogyny. These online conversations aren’t the only way young women are engaging with feminism, but it’s time we stop discounting them. Perhaps what’s truly outdated is thinking that these conversations don’t make it offline into real, live action. Thousands of young women are practicing their feminism every day in their communities and in their lives. I know that because, despite all the women I’ve met who say feminism is passé, I’ve also met a whole helluva lot of young women who say it’s not.

  I returned to my old high school to meet with a few of Crawford’s students and hear more about their lives as teenage feminists. I met them in the library, a huddle of feisty, thoughtful sixteen-year-olds in plush red chairs, positioned at the back of the two-tier room, next to the manga. The group who volunteered to chat with me was diverse, including two young women of color (Victoria and Areeja), two young white women (Kaitlyn and Josie), and one teen named Sam who identified as genderless and prefers the pronoun they/their. (“There’s male and there’s female,” Sam told me, placing one hand to the far left and one to the far right. Then Sam stretched one arm far to the back. “Then there’s me. I’m, like, outside getting McDonald’s.”) When the term started, Sam told me, Crawford had asked the class to raise their hands if they were a feminist. The only person who did so was Sam, whose mother is the president of the board of directors of their local chapter of Girls, Inc. Even so, Sam once recoiled from the word, too, particularly when Sam’s mom tried to send Sam to a Girls, Inc. summer camp. “I told her, ‘I don’t want to go to a quote-unquote feminazi camp—especially since I’m genderless.’ I didn’t want to be surrounded by girls because I knew I’d get called ‘she.’” But that wasn’t what Sam experienced at all. “One, everybody called me ‘they,’ and that was great. Two, I learned more about what feminism is. It’s not what some people might think it is. It’s not all about ‘women are better than men.’ It really is about equality and raising girls to believe they are equal—they are strong enough.”

  “I didn’t raise my hand,” said Victoria. “I don’t really think I thought about it ever. You pick up on little things that people do to put down girls. You don’t really think you need to do anything about it. It just happens all the time so you just go with it. Being in this class and being aware of what happens to women everywhere—I am a feminist.” Kaitlyn added that the stereotypes about feminism had also stopped her from raising her hand that first class, but the more she realized the word is not “what people have made it,” the more she changed her mind: “I would say that I identify as a feminist now.” Areeja agreed. She had always questioned the “girls are supposed to” thinking she heard, but until she got to class, she said, “I never questioned it too much.” Now, she’s more confident in her opinions. Josie, who played on the boys’ hockey team for six years growing up, and was the only girl on the ice, said that she always identified as a feminist but never understood why it was important to voice it out loud. Plus, there was a stigma. Still, if asked that question today, she and the rest of the group would all raise their hands—at least, if they were in class.

  “Although has anyone noticed that when you tell somebody you’re in the gender studies class they give you the look?” asked Sam, demonstrating a facial expression that conveyed disgust for all things losery, a look I perfected during my high school years but have never been able to effectively pull off since. Sam called it the look of “Oh, really?” The others murmured assent, and stories emerged in rapid fire.

  “A friend was like, ‘Ugh, really?’ Are they teaching you that there are two genders?” said Sam, referring to an internet meme that pokes fun at the assertion there are more than two genders.

  “That’s the number one question that I got,” added Josie.

  “Or that it’s a girls’ class,” said Victoria.

  “Or it’s like, ‘You actually like that class?’” added Kaitlyn. “Stuff like that.”

  When I asked them what issues are most pressing for them and their peers, and how increased awareness of feminism might help tackle those issues, the group didn’t hesitate. Slut shaming. Sexual harassment. Consent. Josie, who told me it was the first week she’d come to school without makeup on since grade six, felt that girls in the school were taught not to complain if they were assaulted. “A guy can come up to me and grab me by any part of my body, and that’s okay because he wants me,” she said. Victoria smirked, “It’s flirting.” If sixteen-year-olds were encouraged to dismiss this kind of stuff, Josie wondered, how would they react when they were older? She added that she was thankful she’d never been harassed or assaulted at school. She let the words hang in the air for a moment and then reconsidered. Actually, she added, that kind of behavior was so normal at school, she had experienced it; she’d just never known to call it that before. Someone once grabbed Sam’s crotch to “see if I had a dick.” A teacher once said it was okay for students to ask Sam about genitalia because the students might be curious. Sam had been called a “special snowflake” a lot.

  Then there was that Instagram thing. The year before my visit, they told me, a group of male students from the schools in their region started posting nude photos of girls online. Everyone was talking about it. Girls were named and rated and called fat sluts. Victoria spent a lot of time blocking on social media people who were following the account. Eventually the ringleaders were caught, and it fizzled out. But boys at the school are still constantly asking girls for nudes and then sharing them as soon as they get them. The group was disappointed by the administration’s response, which, they felt, was often to simply delete the photos. Girls were told not to send them. Fair enough, they said, but what about the culture of pressure, of learning consent and respect? What about that?

  Victoria added that she’d been the target of slut shaming. “It happened to me. I had a bad reputation in grade nine,” she told me. “People would yell ‘slut’ to me in the hallway. No one ever stood up for me. Because I had a bad reputation, they had no respect for my body. A guy would talk to me and be like, ‘OK are you going to send me nudes?’ Or people would come up to me and just grab my waist. Even though I did do dumb thing
s it didn’t mean that anyone could touch me. I was just supposed to take it. If I didn’t, guys would get mad at me: ‘Oh, you’re ugly anyways—you’re gross.’” Then she said something that made my skin prickle: “And like it was my fault.” On some level, it seemed, she still hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that she’d deserved it. My mind flashed back to the “positive posts” that decorated the entrance to the gender studies classroom. Suddenly, the little affirmations of “You’re worthy” and “Love” scrawled on the pale yellow squares didn’t seem the least bit hokey. They seemed vital. This, I realized, was a feminism of healing.

  The most important thing many of them had learned in gender studies, they agreed, was that things can change, even if it starts out on the tiniest of scales. I’ve learned this, too: once young women start engaging in feminism, amazing things can happen, whether they’re aiming big or small. Victoria, like others in the gender studies course, has started to live by a creed she’d learned in that unique classroom: Little things do matter. “When you speak up, just in little groups,” she told me, “or in response to things that you hear in the halls, it does make a difference. Even though they may not change the way they think or believe, you may get them to start thinking about it.” In these small ways, the group agreed, you can make progress. Just then, the bell rang out through the library. We’d lost track of time. I was supposed to have met with a second group, but there had been too much to say. They could have talked for hours more.

  As they packed their bags and headed to lunch, Sam lobbed out one more thought, an endnote to the conversation: “Consent and respect, my friends!” They all nodded. Consent and respect. And then they walked away, each back to their own friend groups, soon swallowed up in the crowded hallways.

  Minnah Stein held up a colorful drawing of a woman with a very big head. “This is Marie Antoinette,” the sixteen-year-old told me. Her smile stretched wide as her hand dipped to grab the next drawing. “And this is Catherine the Great.” When Stein was little, she loved the book Lives of Extraordinary Women, written by Kathleen Krull and illustrated by Kathryn Hewitt and first published in 2000. “I drew all the women in it,” she explained. Around that same time, her parents would bring her with them to the voting booth, explaining why it was so important to vote and what the suffragists had done so she could have that right. They told her how hard it had been for those early feminists: the violence, the beatings, the jail time. “Feminism isn’t just a label that I put on myself,” she told me. “It’s part of my core beliefs. It affects who I am, the decisions that I make, and how I interact with other people. Feminism is something that I was taught, but now growing up it’s a choice I make to practice every day through my thoughts and actions.”

  Stein founded the organization EMPOWER U to help other students in Sarasota County, Florida, take a stand on the issues that mattered to them. For Stein, that issue is sexual assault, which she calls one of the biggest civil rights issues facing youth today. She easily rattled off the statistics for me: one in five girls and one in sixteen boys will be sexually assaulted in college; it happens in our elementary, middle, and high schools at the same rates. Two years earlier, she said, she held a pledge drive at all the high schools in her county, encouraging students to stop sexual assault in their schools. Last year, she screened the documentary It Happened Here, which tells the stories of five young women who were assaulted on their college campuses, throughout high schools in her county—a total of more than 1,500 students. That’s not to mention all the volunteering she does.

  When I asked her how she keeps motivated, Stein responded that she has ambassadors at schools across the county who help her spread the word and get things done. Even so, it wasn’t like they were talking about the f-word 24/7; it was simply an ethic by which they lived. Besides the occasional remark at a debate event (the very classic “Girls can’t do X because they’re girls”), she stressed that she hadn’t even experienced much sexism in her own life. But that wasn’t the point. She wasn’t trying to improve only her own life. “My friends and I don’t sit around and talk about how we’re feminist and all the feminist things are going on,” she said. “We support each other in our feminist views, and I think that’s something that’s really important. I think some of that is because we’re still young and as we start to get older, we’ll start to see sexual discrimination more and more, especially in the workforce and the colleges. Maybe that is what leads to being more vocal about identifying as a feminist. When you see things like this happening, you want to get involved and make sure that you can help stop it.”

  And she’s far from the only young woman who’s getting involved. In Toronto, Kasha Slavner took six months off school to travel around the world with her mother, Marla. They documented the adversities people faced worldwide as well as how they triumphed over them. Her idea was to tell these stories through a feminist lens but also through a teenager’s viewpoint. Kasha raised funding for her documentary journey, called the Global Sunrise Project, through crowdsourcing and in-kind sponsorships. When I spoke to her after the film’s completion, she told me that the response had been so great that she had decided to delay university so she could ride the momentum and keep working on the project. The idea for the project first sparked when, at fourteen, the organization Canadian Voice of Women for Peace selected her as a youth delegate to attend the United Nations for the fifty-seventh annual session on the Commission on the Status of Women. Surrounded by eight thousand men and women who were passionate about women’s rights, she realized that almost every issue could be tackled through a feminist or gender-equality lens. “I was seeing people from almost every kind of community in the world, every continent, both rural and urban settings,” she told me. “And the fact they were so knowledgeable and passionate about the issues was really inspiring—to learn from them and hear their stories and what drove them. I felt really empowered coming back from that.” She’s never missed a UN Status of Women session since.

  Although young women like Slavner and Stein are extraordinary and raising awareness on a large scale, I also spoke with many other girls and young women who were all practicing feminism in their own ways—working, through routine actions, big and small, to shift the conversation. When I put a call out for interviews in 2016, I was inundated with responses. For days, my phone buzzed frequently with new email notifications from girls who were eager to talk about their views on feminism and the issues affecting them. In the grocery store. While I was in kickboxing class. Out for drinks at a Harry Potter–themed bar (yup). I got the sense that these teenagers were thankful for the opportunity to parse their feelings on feminism and to have someone listen enthusiastically to the concerns they had about issues facing them and their peers. I heard from women all over the world. I spoke for nearly two hours with a young blind woman in Brunei who wanted to start a feminist club, even though, she said, such a thing was unheard of. An Indian teenager going to school in Dubai told me about heading and co-founding a forum called Fem that holds talks and competitions related to gender equality, as well as campaigns that focus on different themes. She had faced a lot of flak recently, she shared, because she’d decided to make a career in biological research. People had been telling her it would harm her marriage chances. “My success,” she told me, “will be my rebuttal.”

  I heard from a young woman who was in the process of starting a girl-only model UN club. She was tired of the boys always talking over and interrupting the girls in her school’s current club. Another young girl living with a physical disability talked about the need for intersectionality and why it must expand to focus more on those with disabilities. Many of the girls I spoke with named slut shaming and rape culture as the issues they’re most urgently fighting. Body image came up frequently. Reproductive rights were high on the list of issues they wanted feminism to meet head-on. They talked about transgender rights and defying the very construct of gender. One seventeen-year-old in New York told me she was going to be the firs
t woman president, but then, laughing, said she hoped it wouldn’t take that long. “The future of this is bright,” she said, speaking of her generation. “I think it’s an unstoppable thing.” They were hungry for change.

  These young women inspired me. They made me think. And they challenged my own biases around our new generation of feminist activists. These girls and young women are all giving misogyny the middle finger. They’re doing it on their own terms. And in all the many reports I read, historical accounts I unearthed, and conversations I had with women of all ages, perhaps my favorite definition of feminism came from a fourteen-year-old girl in central Indiana who was too nervous to tell her mother she was a feminist. “I was thinking about this before,” she paused and let out a long mmmmmm. “What is feminism?” She went quiet, thinking. Suddenly, she smiled broadly as she landed on it. “It’s about uplifting those around you.”

  Bingo.

  Thank goodness my own answer to the question “What does feminism mean to you?” has evolved in the fifteen years since I first discovered it. And yet I think back tenderly to that young girl. I smile at her spiked hair and her wide-leg pants, purchased from the boys’ department, of course, with money from her summer job as a camp counselor for kids with special needs. I laugh at the way she thought to defy beauty standards with safety pins in her ears and various found objects, including little plastic Barrel of Monkeys toys—I joke not—in her hair. But it’s not a cruel laugh. I want to hug her when I think of the way she stayed up late writing poetry, chatting with friends on instant messaging, and burning mixed CDs filled with riot grrrl music, searching the depths of her young soul for the answer to the question “What does feminism mean to me?” These might be big questions for a young girl to ask, but then again, she’s not precisely a girl anymore, is she? Certain things have a way of making you grow up, of making you realize feminism isn’t a word or a theory but a way of living, of seeing the world as the place it could be. Idealistic? Sure. But ask her and she’d say: only if you stop working to make it happen. So, as much as her feminism—my feminism—was clumsy and narrow, as much as she needed to learn and be challenged and grow, I cherish her. I respect her.