Do I sound bitter lately? Do I come here just to be bitter? I am not, I assure you. In the spirit of updating you on Creeps Bothering Me, this morning on the bus I was buried in Girl Genius #8 with my teal earbuds in (very noticeable) and this guy started talking to me. I kind of genuinely missed it, because I was Billie Holiday and Agatha Heterodyne and he POKED ME ON MY SHOULDER. Who does that? He got the frowny brows and I popped out an earbud.
“What kind of shoes are those? I have never seen shoes like those.”
“I dunno, it’s the guy who designs for Ed Hardy.”
“Huh, those are cool.”
YEAH YOUR MOM’S COOL.
Okay, I am going to Canada this weekend, but I am podcasting before I go. I posed this question to the FYCL Facebook group, but I will ask you here: If you are a lady, and you consider yourself a feminist, what is your feminist hypocrisy? What is the one thing (or more) you do/say/think/buy/feel that contradicts your identity as a feminist?
Also I am enjoying the pudding out of this today:
My feminist hypocrisy is not being able to leave the house without makeup.
And sometimes I’m guilty of wearing high heels, but only on really rare occasions and I usually end up changing into flats after about an hour. I have no tolerance for being uncomfortable.. I still buy the shoes though.
“what is your feminist hypocrisy?”
Oh, god, I have a ton of those. It’s mostly harmless (I think) stuff, though. Like, I sometimes get this ridiculous urge to be a June Cleaver-style housewife. My tastes for hip hop and ghetto tech music and stand up comedy lean toward the wildly misogynistic.
Thanks you two! I will mention this in the podder.
If anyone else wants to comment, great. I know it is early yet.
Ever since you wrote about your experiment to reclaim your space/ not “be a nice girl” and respond if you didn’t feel like it, ala like a MAN would, I have been exploring this more and more in my life, and oh my word is it enlightening. I had No Idea how much I just smiled and put up with shit, and the times, they are a changin. So I guess my answer is that secretly I am programmed to be a really good girl who cares if someone doesn’t think she is nice, but who is working on that.
I have also been known to use my boobs to get what I want. OOPsie!
I was JUST thinking today about this! I realized that I have so many un-feminist feelings that maybe I shouldn’t think of myself as one. i think i’m going to crawl into my Shame Closet and decide what the best version of me can be. But to add to the examples: I occasionally get sexually harassed at work and let it slide b/c the idea of a whole “THING” doesn’t make a fight worth it for me….also I think if I made more money than a male partner I would not be as generous with it as every man I’ve ever been with has.
I’m repeating myself from the Facebook group, but 1. Product addiction (oh Sephora, you are so wrong yet so right) and 2. Law & Order:SVU. It is so offensive and I can’t quit.
My feminist hypocrisy is that I’ve been unemployed for a year and I’ve sort of fallen into the housewife roll, cooking & cleaning & laundry, all that bullshit. It sucks, and I’m terrible at it, and I LOATHE it. I am like HOUSEKEEPER FAIL. I think I have a lead on a job (OMGTHANKYOUBABBYJEEBUS) and I can’t wait to stop vacuuming all the time and let the house revert back to its natural state of vile disgustingness.
There are others. I am wary of working for high-powered women-bosses because I have been burned by female superiors who try to keep me in my little glass ceilinged cage. Why can’t we lift each other up and build a ladder instead of you standing on my head alla time? I guess this is more about being burned than it is about being a bad feminist. Maybe my beef is with other bad feminists? I just feel conflicted whenever I know that a workplace is mostly women, especially if there’s a woman in charge. I am not competitive with other women, I do not want to eat anybody else’s lunch, and I guess that makes me WORKPLACE FAIL.
Sexual harassment fail: I once totally busted a dude being crazy sexually harassment style in a public work environment, and I reported it to his (male) boss, instead of HR. I have always regretted that—he kept doing it, and nobody else ever reported him. I feel bad that I did not have the tits to say ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. However, I once got a dude fired for showing me his balls at work. Weirdly, he was gay, but I told him NO repeatedly and he kept trying to rub his balls on me and show me his junk? So, yeah, sorry charlie, not work-appropriate there with the penis-showing-game.
I am a pretty bad feminist. It’s hard to get it right all the time. I mostly just want us ladies, as a group, to be able to work together towards injustice like the LEAGUE OF SUPER HEROES or some shit. I read too many comic books as a kid.
Um. roll = role. and AGAINST injustice, not towards it. TYPING FAIL.
My feminist hypocrisy is that I care way too much about being a Nice Girl and people not thinking I’m rude or mean or aggressive. Which means I don’t challenge authority nearly as much as I theoretically should.
Dating men… at all!
dodgy erotica.
and being a doormat. not speaking up when someone does/says something that is not cool. only just realising thanks to your podcasts and posts just how bad this one can be.
I’m a little late to the party, but…
Shaving my legs, even though it’s stupid and unnecessary and a pain in the butt.
Not necessarily speaking up when people are saying or doing stupid and/or offensive shit.
Desperately wanting to be thin and pretty (relatively standard definition of pretty), even though I KNOW that it’s all bullshit,
And worse, sort of-maybe-kind of judging other women based on how well they live up to the bullshit (and then getting even more judge-y if they fit in too well). (But… I also tend to judge men by the same standards, so this might just make me a bad person, not a bad feminist.)
The older I get (currently I’m 29), the less I care and the more I speak up. Still not enough, but… maybe by the time I’m 60 or so I’ll be a rocking feminist.
I sometimes slip into that tiresome passive-aggressive thing, with the “No, it’s ok, go, go!” and then making my significant other feel like crap for it. I’m trying to be more truthful and let my “go aheads” be “go aheads” and my “I’d love it if you’d stays” be “I’d love it if you’d stays”. Man, it’s a rough habit to break.
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This is late, but I will say it anyway.
The first time I realized I could just simply say no when I didn’t want to do whatever someone else wanted me to do, was so amazing to me. No, with no explanation, no excuses, just a polite direct no. Since then, I have tried to practice often as part of a personal policy of directness rather than the passive aggressiveness my family so often practices. But sometimes people get all pissy and argumentative about it because I am doing something they don’t do. And I wonder if they would do that to a man. My guess is no. I don’t usually budge from my no, but sometimes I feel the guilt.
“Just say no”–words to live by, thanks, Nancy Reagan!
My Feminist Hypocrisy, and I recognise that I am not technically a lady. Actually not a lady at all. In fact the complete opposite…..hmmm focus…
My feminist hypocrisy has to do with the makeup as well. When I was younger, like last week, I used to tell close friends/girlfriends not to wear makeup. I thought that it looked fake and they all had natural beauty that needed to be shown. This is, of course, as bad as if I told them that they _must_ wear makeup. Fortunately, a good friend told me off for this as not allowing the women involved to make up (ha!) their own minds. Still, I often look at someone and think: “WTF is _she_ wearing makeup?”
ohh, I should have said, long time listener, first time writer :-)
I must confess that I feel guilty about not knowing if I am a feminist or not. I try to go to Jezebel and Uppity Women every once in a while. But, that’s about it. I haven’t read the Second Sex or the Feminine Mystique. I’m not sure what it means to be a feminist and I haven’t tried that hard to figure it out. On the other hand, I am reading The Haindmaiden’s Tale. Does reading an allegory of What Goes Wrong If We Don’t Speak Up make up for my ignorance? No, prolly not. So that is my confession. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa.