Put down the dictionary and open your eyes. The world around you is not printed on paper, to be stored neatly on your bookshelf or coffee table.
People are not books, or dictionary definitions, and the world is messy, and full of assholes.
And I’m sorry, but no.
The feminist movement does not get to carry around some invisible dictionary, to continually open up and point to, when confronted with problematic individuals within the movement.
I don’t care what your dictionary says.
So keep your semantics, as actions speak louder than words, and people are who they say they are.
Dr Mary Koss, who reshaped sexual violence laws to exclude men from recognition as rape victims – is a feminist.
Ellen Pence, who did the same within domestic abuse, by writing the Duluth Model to explicitly erase male victimhood and female perpetration, so too is a feminist.
Sally Miller-Gearhart, well she co-founded the first women’s studies programme in America… she also believed we should reduce the population of men to 10% of the human race – boom, a massive feminist (maybe she got the wrong dictionary?)
And if a political movement creates warped, sexist ideas, theories and perspectives, that embolden these problematic people, then these awful *individuals* should be shunned, pushed into the limelight and exposed by their peers – as I try to.
Change and growth doesn’t come from shirking responsibility through meaningless thought experiments, it comes through self reflection and accountability.
‘Accountability’ - why don’t you look that up in the dictionary?
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Image by emmanuel from Unsplash.