Spending an entire week in Washington DC with 97 other girls from all over the United States was quite the experience. I really enjoyed the company of some of the girls, but one thing I did learn while I was there was that… basically everyone was a feminist, and if you weren’t a feminist, then you were super weird…. Which means that I’m super weird.
Here’s what I heard all week long:
“I am SO ready for Hillary Clinton to be president. It’s
about time we had a woman president.”
“Women are the only ones whose healthcare decisions are
being made by men in the work place”
(asked to me): “Doesn’t being a Republican women make you
feel oppressed by all the men?”
“I’m so happy to be in a room of feminists!"
(my personal favorite): “Women will and should rule the world someday”
(When we met up with Boys Nation):
A White House reporter, who was a woman, decided to let us
ask her some questions. She answered a boy’s question first, which several of
the girls got upset about…“I can’t believe the boys were allowed to go first,
we should have been allowed to go first.”
When President Obama was shaking hands with some of the Boys
and Girls Nation senators: “He shook more boys’ hands than girls’ hands!”
The general stance on men: They’re all mostly misogynists.The funny thing about this is that if you ask them about it, they will deny that they "hate men"... and maybe they don't actually hate them, but seriously, that's how they act quite a bit of the time.
^That went on the whole week. Yeah. Now maybe it’s just the
fact that I’m a homeschooled-republican-Christian from Nebraska, but never have
I heard so many extreme feminist statements in one place in one week. To my
knowledge, it was only myself and the other Senator from Nebraska who did not
identify ourselves as feminists.
Don’t get me wrong – I do firmly believe that yes, women
should be respected, and that yes, women should be treated equally. But I also
understand that men and women can both play different roles in society, and that’s okay. WE DON’T ALL HAVE TO BE
THE SAME. Women don’t have to serve in men’s roles. And I don’t think that just
because a woman is capable of something that she should do it or that she
needs to feel obligated to do it.
The main problem that I see with the feminist movement today
is that women are demanding to be respected and elevated to the highest of
positions, just to prove that they are as capable as men. Annnnnd… that seems
like a really dumb reason (that we’re only doing it to “prove” something to
other people). In addition to demanding this respect, a lot of times the
feminists show little or no respect for men, because they blame them for all
the “problems”. Men, on the other hand, try to show respect to women, but I
feel like a lot of times women reject it. Men try to do nice things for women…
like opening doors, giving compliments, etc. and they always take it wrongly
(like with the opening a door thing… women seem to think that because a guy is
doing that, he doesn’t think she’s capable of doing it on her own… seriously?
Maybe the guy was just trying to be nice and respectful. None of the guys I know offer to open doors for girls because they think girls are incapable).
Personally, I’d rather spend my time and effort into fixing
problems in places of the world where women really ARE suffering – like, you
know, the Middle East, or India, or some place like that… where women are
actually commonly treated as animals, where abuse is not uncommon (and isn’t
punishable), etc. It seems to me (and maybe it’s just me…??) that spending time
helping those women gain self-respect, help society to view as human beings,
and help them gain rights, is a much more worthy cause than me marching around
saying that the world is an unfair and unjust place, because in America, we don’t
yet have a woman president and women sometimes get paid a few cents less per
hour than men do.
We really don’t have it as bad as some people say we do.
And, let’s be honest, in just 100 years, we’ve come a LONG way… we have the
right to vote, we can run for offices, we have women governors, women
representatives and senators, and women are serving in job positions that men
used to hold exclusively.
Don't get me wrong here, everyone. If you have great big aspirations and dreams, and you want to run for a big political office or whatever - go for it. That's totally cool, and I admire you for doing that. But I won't vote for you just because you're a woman - if you have good ideas on the other hand, that's a reason for me to vote for you.
Basically I think that: 1) It’s not as big of a problem as
everyone thinks it is, and it’s waaaay worse in other places. 2) If you
want to focus on this problem, then be kinder about it, and please, please, don’t
come across as someone who hates men and thinks women are far superior. 3) If you're good at something, by all means try to get a high position in a company or whatever... good for you if you can do that. But don't demand that you receive the position just because you're a woman.
The End
P.S. Yes, I know this post was a generalization. I know that not every feminist/woman is like this, but that's the general feeling I got from this past week. :P
