We Are All Feminists

I wake up in confusion because in just a week, I’ve seen three posts bashing feminism. The third post welcomed me to Facebook this morning and I do not understand what the fuss is about.

The one that confused me the most was a lady draped in Legal regalia talking about how she’s not a feminist. Hers must have been the second post I saw last week. Why confused? You may ask.

The first time I heard about the word feminism was probably in my Jurisprudence II class in Law School. How it was explained had me thinking about both my dead great-grandmother & grandmother. They fit the description of the movement and all I had in mind was “oh that life then, had a name to it”. And I said “then” because to me, most of us lived (and continue to live) a life they fought to have.

I may not have paid a lot of attention to the different classes of feminism but I do not remember any that worked as a euphemism for misandry.

A couple of months after law school, I noticed people actually stand up at events and introduce themselves as feminists.

Feminism to me, is just all of us relying on the functionality of our prefrontal cortex. Why? Because that’s the part of the brain that’s responsible for both critical thinking and moral reasoning.

Now this is not me thinking that we all exercise our right to use our brains wholly but if most of us are as logical as we claim ourselves to be, then we are all feminists – the generation is or should be – and not just a select few.

In simpler terms really. If we can walk our daughters to schools and they sit on the same desk with boys. That’s feminism. If no one rolls their eyes at us – women – for being on social media where many men are, THAT IS FEMINISM. If as a man, you feel like your daughter has a right to education, you fight for her to get into high ranked offices for work and even stand on business if she is ever battered in a marriage, THAT’S FEMINISM DADDY!

My great grandmother had a last daughter (grandmother) at the time girls were allowed to be educated. She had her with a man different from the other older daughters’ father. She lived in her own house – different from the homestead of her baby daddy. They fought for the girl. My grandmother had her parents stealing her from each other. My great-grandmother wanted to have her educated while her father thought that would spoil her. The man finally gave up when my grandmother was deep in school.

My grandmother as an adult, went back to her home one weekend (because she worked far away from home) and her darling husband who had picked her up on his Vespa scooter informed her that one of his students is pregnant and that “the pregnancy is ours”. She stayed in the marriage for some time until she could not stand the young bride’s abusive serenades.

She left and started her own home. Raised and educated her children and on the days she had to travel out of the country, she called the father of her children to watch over the children. He always came through. Most of what they had between each other were letters. Their children weren’t subjected to the abuse of their stepmother and neither did they see their parents fight.

Feminism is dignity. It is the belief that a woman is first and foremost a human being – free to make her own choices, raise her children in a healthy environment, earn her own money, and, as in my grandmother’s case, travel without restrictions simply because she has breasts. It is the right to live fully, without apology.

Someone talking about Beyonce being valued at almost a billion dollars and her not being a feminist because she’s married to Jay-Z is a claim that’s not only flawed but misinformed. Beyonce is 101 a women rights activist. She embodies this and communicates it in her music. The fact that she can be identified as in her own person, is something the feminism movement would be proud of.

From another angle though, I do understand where such a person is coming from.

It scares me how I was met with women that shit down conversations with a “I do not have time to talk to a màñ because they’re inherently vile” or ” I do not understand why she talks about her future husband as if marriage to a man is a prize”.

I do acknowledge that social media has introduced to us a form of feminism cloaked in misandry. And for many, this is the first time they get to hear the word feminism. The idea that the màlë gender should be overshadowed or done away with, is where some women get confused and choose to declare to the world that they are not feminist. A lawyer doing this makes me wonder if at all they studied Jurisprudence or whether they understood anything in it.

There’s another argument that feminism is not what gave women a voice but just like someone suffers from depression before getting a name for it, doesn’t mean that the years of suffering from depression only start with naming what is eating them up.

Let us normalize advocating for misandry without hiding in feminism. It becomes easier to distinguish who is who.

It is also boring to cling to a movement as if it sets you apart from others. The fight shouldn’t be to be seen as a feminist but rather advocate for all of us to treat each other with dignity.

This fight shouldn’t also have been existent if men didn’t practice selective feminism. To raise their daughters with autonomy and then turn around and muffle the voice of the ones they marry or pursue – is a failed cause. You do not expect your daughter to be safe in an environment where you encourage fellow men to not let a woman speak. You do not expect your daughter to be valued in a society that is quick to brand them ungovernable for taking up space. As long as you fight for your daughter to acquire quality education, you should also work around creating room for them to thrive.