WE STILL NEED TO BE FEMINISTS

I recently reunited with two of my childhood friends, one I hadn’t seen in years and the other a few months, when visiting my home in Buckinghamshire. We sat in an over-priced coffee shop and began catching-up. I asked them how long they’d been with their boyfriends, both replied a year or just over. When the question was returned to me, I didn’t get the chance to answer. Instead my latter friend interjected, placing a patronizing hand on my shoulder, and said, ‘Claudia is yet to meet any milestone in her life.’ Both gave me a look of utter pity. I felt worthless, inferior, ashamed, simply because I had never had or wanted a serious relationship at twenty. It didn’t matter the other milestones I had achieved in my life, that I had reached my final year of university or recently secured an internship. No. A milestone wasn’t significant until I had a man to knock it into the ground and make such a measurement.

Now, the British tend to be known for being judgemental – I don’t know, maybe it’s our lack of sunshine that makes us like this - but I didn’t realise how close-minded we still are. Patriarchal values and conventions are still ever present in our society, one we believe to be so ‘developed’. Women can be independent but their value, happiness, and sense of self is still dependent on having a romantic partner.

A stigma is still attached to women who prioritise their career over other areas of their lives. Men don’t face nearly as much judgement. If a man wishes to focus on his work it is considered normal, there is always time for him to find a wife after he has achieved success. But for women, time is of the essence, the clock is ticking, you won’t be young forever you know.

What we still fail to realise as a society is that women are entitled to be individuals, to have their own desires and goals that don’t fit conventional expectations. A woman can be happy on her own and we shouldn’t pity her for this.

‘Feminist’, a person who believes in the social, economic, and political equality of the sexes, is still a word with negative connotations for many. A BBC article recently stated that fewer than one in five young women call themselves a feminist in the UK and US. This may be due to the fact that, like me, we are brought up with the perception that feminism is synonymous with man-hating, bra-burning, hairy, scary, women, and only women.

I have attended British all-girl schools my whole life, schools that taught their female students to strive for success. But never once did I meet someone who called themselves a feminist. It wasn’t until I was seventeen, after studying the works of Carol Ann Duffy and Angela Carter in sixth form, that I discovered how wrong my perception of feminism had been. It surprised me, then, that a school that taught such feminist texts still made us adhere to an impossibly strict dress code.

One hot summers day, I asked my teacher why it was that I could not wear a strappy top. I expected her to reply that it didn’t look smart enough. But instead she said, ‘it makes the male staff feel uncomfortable, it’s not very fair on them.’ I was shocked. It was as if these male teachers had no knowledge that women possessed arms, or legs, or collarbones, or cleavage, or worst of all, bra straps. We were made to feel ashamed of our bodies and were punished for showing any part of them. Perhaps the school, instead of chastising young women for being women, should have taught the male teachers not to sexualise their students.

Our culture of ‘modesty’ demands that women dress in a way that avoids arousing men. We teach girls that their ‘worth’ depends on the way they dress. We teach girls to cover their bodies and only then will they deserve respect.

‘We don’t need feminism, women have it just fine,’ is a statement I have heard multiple British people utter. But women’s experiences are in no way universal. In many parts of the world women are still considered second-rate citizens and denied fundamental human rights. Laws are still in place that restrict women and girls from getting an education, from driving, from saying no to an arranged marriage, from leaving their abusive husband, from having an abortion, from living as a free human being and not someone else’s property.

But women are fighting back. Earlier this year, five million Indian women of all ages and occupations formed a ‘women’s wall’ in protest of young women being stopped, shoved and stoned when trying to enter the Sabarimala temple in Kerala. In Japan, the singer Maho Yamaguchi was met with waves of online support from women who demanded justice after she was made to apologise for ‘causing trouble’ when two men grabbed her face outside her apartment.

As a white, British female I am aware that I am privileged, that my experiences don’t even compare to the suffering that women face all over the world. I can only speak of my experiences in ‘Western’ society, where it is predominantly believed that gender inequality is no longer a major problem. But this isn’t true. Prejudice and discrimination are still very much prevalent, we’ve just been made to think them invisible.

An 8.4% gender pay gap still exists in the UK. A misogynistic, orange man now sits in the Oval Office. A powerful film producer sexually harassed and threatened more than eighty women. Milano’s #MeToo tweet received half a million responses of sexual assault in twenty-four hours. Do women really have it ‘just fine’?

As women begin to feel more confident in reporting sexual assault and harassment, less frightened of losing their jobs or being blamed, many men have voiced their fear of being falsely accused. But, you see, women are afraid to walk anywhere in the dark alone. Women are afraid of taking the train. Women are afraid of getting a taxi. Women are afraid of going drinking. Women are afraid of going on a date. The fear you face of false claims doesn’t compare to the fear women feel just trying to live their lives.

In my first year of university, I visited a friend in hospital whose lung had just collapsed. He asked me to take the bike he’d been riding back to his accommodation to lock up. As I reached campus, three men started shouting at me – hey you, what you doing? Oi, isn’t that my bike? What are you doing with such a big boy bike? – I ignored them, but this only spurred them on. They came closer. Their comments became more aggressive and sexual. One man threw a beer can towards me and shouted that he’d like to ‘ride me like that bike’. Clever. I was so relieved when they finally lost interest that I burst into tears. When I told my friend about the incident the next day, she didn’t understand why I was so upset. ‘So what,’ she said, ‘some guys thought you were attractive? Take it as a compliment!’

This behaviour has become normalized. It has become part of women’s everyday to be made to feel uncomfortable and unsafe. To be degraded, objectified, and humiliated. Women are told not to let words affect them, to enjoy the attention they receive from men. We must change our mentality. We must assess what we consider normal in our society.

Last year, an online group chat consisting of eleven male Warwick students was exposed, featuring comments such as, ‘Sometimes it’s just fun to go wild and rape 100 girls’, and, ‘Rape the whole flat to teach them a lesson.’ Five students were suspended, but only recently it was revealed that two would return early and study alongside the girls they threatened to rape. What does this say about our society? It says we still have a long way to go.

Some may excuse their behaviour as private jokes; ‘it wasn’t right but they weren’t actually hurting anyone, this could ruin their lives.’ But whether private or public, joking or deadly serious, the threats made by these students cannot be condoned. Boys will not be boys, boys will be held accountable for their words and actions.

Such incidents as these are not rare. My friend recently discovered that some boys at Cardiff University had made a physical list ranking the attractiveness of the women on her course, notably excluding any non-white women.

Harmful and destructive expectations of masculinity must change. We have a responsibility to inform boys that the ‘masculine’ image sold to them by the media isn’t realistic. Men shouldn’t be called ‘pathetic’ or ‘wet’ for not giving in to peer pressure, or for speaking up when they recognise a friend’s behaviour is wrong. Men too can be feminists and this must never be forgotten.

We teach men to suppress their emotions, to hide their vulnerability. We say to them ‘man up’, ‘tough it out’. But this can be deadly. Men are three times more likely to commit suicide in the UK than women. We must break down poisonous masculine stereotypes, and as a result threatening behaviour towards women will be alleviated. We must stop teaching boys not to feel and stop teaching girls to endure their suffering.

We still need to be feminists. We need to challenge the toxic norms that have become invisible to us. There is still a problem, still prejudices and stereotypes ingrained in our society that must be challenged. We, women and men, must all continue to fight for change. Even if we think we won’t make a difference, we still must try and, eventually, we will succeed.

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