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Artwork: ghost
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My Feminism

Author: AJ '18
As seen in: Once in a Blue Moon #

Even though it’s harder than ever before to be a woman, it’s easier than ever to be a feminist. Back in the olden times, being a feminist meant not wearing any makeup, not shaving your legs, and shaving your head in order to be more equal to bald men. Nowadays, it is also feminist to blow all the guys on the basketball team (I am one away from achieving this). People shouldn’t call me a slut, but if they did, that would be fine with me, because of my feminism.

One big achievement of my feminism is that men can be feminist too. Let’s do a little thought experiment. Imagine a feminist. Did you imagine a man, or a woman? A woman, right? No. The feminist I was thinking of was a gay man. That’s fucked up. Men can be feminist in lots of ways, such as being gay, working as a male nurse, and saying thank you after sex.

Another part of my feminism is “leaning in,” and the main tenet of “lean in” feminism is leaning in so hard to the boardroom table at a business meetings that you repeatedly bash your head into the table, rendering yourself unconscious and allowing the men to have the meeting as planned without hearing the voices of women.

True, corporate feminism only benefits a small, select group of women, but this is not a problem if you are a part of that group. You should demand to be treated so much like a man that you are then able to subjugate other women. As such, if you choose to have children, you should forget about their existences as soon as they are born and pass them off to a female caretaker of lower social status than yourself. Try and remember your children’s names at least until they’re seventeen years old, so that you can give their names to admissions officers when you’re making the large donation that will assure them a spot at an Ivy League college.

Maybe my feminism doesn’t sound so great. But just remember, it is great. And even if it was not, it’s the best that I have, and also gender is made-up concept which does nothing but limit the range of human possibilities, and also all theoretical discussions are irrelevant and futile given that we live in a Matrix-style virtual reality in which certain unknowable godlike forces determine what we take to meaningful or even existent at all.

This being said, the key platform of my feminism is these 100 issues:

Emergency contraception. Plan B should be renamed Plan A.

Body image. Women can come in all shapes and sizes, like pear, apple, pineapple, inverted triangle, helix, small square, tallpointy, backwards, sconce, scone, moan, pone, and those are all of them. Advertisements set an unrealistic standard for women’s bodies; for example, when I see an ad for a sleek car or a silver watch, I think to myself, “There’s no way I could look like that.”

Telling women to smile. Whenever I get my photo taken, people tell me to smile. As a feminist statement, I always stick my tongue out and pretend to choke to death as the picture is being taken. This ruins every photo that I am in. It’s so unfair that there aren’t any photos of me in which I am not pretending to choke and die.

Sex. Sex is power, power is electricity, electricity is when a charge is placed in a non-zero electric field whose magnitude is given by Coulomb’s Law, and… I lost track of where this was going.

Representation. It is so important to see women around you. However, I almost never see other women, especially when I’m standing alone in the middle of a large cornfield. Why are all scarecrows men? When I turn on the television, I never see women; I only see static, because I haven’t paid my cable bill in months. However, I can tell from reading old copies of TV Guide from 2002 that women are only offered certain roles: the hot sidekick, the hot love interest, the hot crazy girl, the hot nerd, and the hot old crone feeding pigeons on the street who appears in the background in one scene. Women should be able to play whatever roles they want, especially if that role is stuffing their clothing with hay and standing in a field for 24 hours a day to ward off birds.

Abortion. I know that as a feminist, I’m supposed to support abortion and get as many abortions as possible. But do I have to like it? To be honest, I feel kind of weird about impregnating myself every month, only to get an abortion the next. Six abortions a year (seven on a leap year) takes a toll.

Mansplaining. Whenever I go to Planned Parenthood to get my free abortion, as was promised to me by the Founding Mothers, the male doctors always says, “I think you are getting too many abortions.” Then when I plug my ears and scream unceasingly for as long as I can, the male doctors are always interrupting me, saying, “Stop!” and “Hold her down!”

Gendered toys. Why do boys and girls need different toys? When I was a kid, my brothers all got chemistry sets for Christmas, while I got no gifts and instead fashioned a small doll out of loose hairs I gathered from the floor. It kept falling apart. I think anyone could play with that toy, and grow up to be the accomplished chemist I am today.

Gendered soaps. Why do men and women need different soaps? When I was a kid, the only soap I used was thrown to me in a bucket as I was kept in a very deep hole.

Wage gap. Every time I make $1, I immediately deposit it at the bank. After I hand it over, I have no idea where it goes, and I have no money.

I know that we said there were 100 issues facing women today and I have named 10, but this, in itself, is an important lesson about being a woman: always exaggerate how bad it is, or else no one will listen to you