I'm a Feminist and I'm Proud!
Liz Funk, 18
New York
I am a feminist.
I say this openly because it's something I am proud of. While many young women who look, talk, and act just like me nervously twirl their necklaces and shift in their platform shoes and say, "I'm not a feminist, but..."
I stand up in my heels and say, "I'm a feminist!"
I've been a feminist for as long as I can remember; I grew up thinking The Little Mermaid was a gigantic loser, loathing that there was a "Hooters" restaurant in my mall, and eagerly awaiting the first woman president. I also grew up painting my nails, curling my hair, and obsessing over fashion. I am a feminist and a girly-girl. Something that I work to assert is that being a feminist doesn't automatically make a woman a "man-hater" or an "unfashionable hippie"; feminists are working to make women's relationships with guys better... how can we be man-haters! And frankly, most of the feminists I know promote equality with style.
On a more formal level of activism, I am a member of the National Organization for Women's (NOW) Young Feminist Task Force. Through NOW, I organized protests, spoke at rallies, and traveled to colleges and feminist conferences to talk about feminism to teen girls and young women. My biggest project within NOW, however, was the two protests of MTV that I organized.
I'll admit it-MTV can be pretty entertaining, and I don't blame anyone who wants to watch it as their guilty pleasure (after all, I personally can't resist Sex and the City). However, MTV does some pretty negative things that most young people don't take seriously: they promote a set standard of beauty, exploit women as sexual objects, reinforce negative gender roles, advocate risky behavior, and promote racism in their hip-hop videos. In my opinion, MTV witnessed the negative aspects of Generation Y, inflated them, made television about them, and sold it back to us so the things that were originally negative became cool.
Not cool, MTV, not cool.
So, on two different occasions last year, my feminist friends and I took to the streets and protested MTV. The reactions we got from people on the street were great-some people who were walking by even grabbed a sign and joined us! Although MTV has yet to respond to our letters and protests, hopefully they will make a change as they receive the hundreds of postcards that my friends and I are collecting, signed by people frustrated by MTV.
I feel, however, that my writing is my biggest form of activism. I have published articles, op-ed columns, and letters to the editor on feminist subjects ranging from female genital mutilation* to sexual harassment to pornography, in newspapers and magazines ranging from Newsday, to The Village Voice, to The New Humanist. Last summer, Teen People ran a profile of me and how I overcame anorexia; I am currently working on other feminist pieces for some very mainstream publications, as well. I write a blog on feminism for the Albany, New York newspaper, the Times Union (check it out at blogs.timesunion.com/lizfunk), and I am currently working on a book about young women and feminism.
I will be a sophomore at Pace University Honors College in New York this fall, studying English with a minor in gender and sexuality studies. I hope to spend the rest of my life working as a writer and promoting sassy, savvy, and very cute feminism.
It is so important that girls and women today realize that working for equality is worth it. I have full faith that if every young woman who believes in equality decided to work for it, by 2020 MTV would be progressive, "Hooters" would refer only to owls, and…we would be swearing in Ms. President (insert your name here).
*Female genital mutilation: a cultural custom in which the external parts of the female genital are partly or fully removed.
|
|
