feminism

“Okay, we have these new bell bottoms with a red tank top, jelly bean leggings, or the purple dress,” I say.

All men at work benefit from what Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell has named the “patriarchal dividend.” This is the unearned social or professional capital that men accrue. [...] This dividend doesn’t just happen — it has to be reproduced and maintained for future generations. If men recognise this and take responsibility for it, then we can start to make positive changes to workplaces.

If I let everyone off the hook for extenuating circumstances like, “He’s over 50, so he probably just doesn’t know any better,” no one’s ever going to stop calling me “sweetie.”

When I was a teenager, I felt very certain that I was not a feminist. I didn’t exactly understand the textbook definition of feminism, but I had a pretty good sense from the negative connotation I had gleaned while growing up in a narrowly Christian setting.

[CN: misogynistic online harassment; death threats; mentions of rape and child abuse] You shouldn't have to go to a great imaginative effort to humanize a woman to treat her like a human being. Spoiler alert — she's already a human being without you knowing her or caring for her or seeing her as a long-lost relative or even agreeing with her.

I’d like to think my son won his first (and only) beauty pageant because of his sparkling personality, curly mop of hair, bright blue eyes, and adorable tuxedo — but the truth is that he won because he was the only boy in the entire pageant. He won every category I entered him in, regardless of his looks, personality, or actions. He literally won just for showing up. It was the embodiment of both white and male privilege.

I spent my undergrad years as the president of the feminist organization, so I have a lot of experience spending time with feminists. The people I worked with were passionate, thoughtful, and often downright hilarious. And a lot of these people became my very good friends and people I admired.

Still, as my school was majority white, a lot of these feminists were white. And, sometimes, they were White Feminists.

As a woman of color, this was something that became difficult for me to navigate.