Sarah Khan

I’m proud to say my mother is a supporter of SlutWalk, is staunchly against victim-blaming, and all for empowering women. But when it comes to me, her ideals seem to change.

It isn’t until I actually sat down and thought about it that I realized that the badass feminist babe I am today is predominantly the creation of a mixed bag of women I’ve encountered in my life.

I’ve been doing the online dating thing for a little over a year now, and it’s the first time I’ve been doing it as a staunchly, outspoken, won’t-take-any-bullshit feminist. That’s how I discovered the curious system of “revenge flagging,” which is when guys don’t take rejection gracefully or can’t deal with a bruised ego — they flag the woman’s profile as revenge.

For the last six years, I have been living with depression. Despite the fact that I have extremely low moments when there is an inexplicable and unreachable pain inside me that demotes me into a sobbing, self-harming, low self-esteemed shell of the person that I actually am, there are a number of ways that living with (not suffering from) depression has improved my life and made me a better human being.

Recently, my poop schedule got a little wonky and instead of going first thing in the morning (like I prefer), my bowel movements have unfortunately been at work. Usually, this wouldn’t be any issue, except the time I got unintentionally poop shamed.

I live, work,and was also raised in Canada, where abortion has been legal since the late '80s. And before that — since the late '60s — it was legal with the permission of a committee of doctors who would agree whether or not an abortion was necessary for the mental or physical well-being of the mother.

Thanks to a number of different stressful factors, I was sent to the Centre For Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) emergency department recently at the "professional advice" (read: insistence) of my general physician. This all happened because I admitted to planning the care of my beloved cats in case I killed myself.

It’s International Women’s Day, which means we get an entire day to celebrate the accomplishments of the millions of women in the world.

I invite you to become feminist allies instead of continuing to selfishly throw all minorities under the bus in order to protect your fragile little male egos and incorrect sense of self-entitlement. If our interactions are any indication, I suspect that you see me as an overly emotional “feminazi bitch” who takes things too seriously. Let me tell you why you’re utterly wrong (and maybe assholes, too).

What a lot of us don’t realize is that the patriarchy also makes us think it’s OK to objectify men.