Growing a Feminist

I was riding around today, listening to Ani DiFranco (her old stuff...the angry feminist stuff...the stuff from back in my college days) and thinking about giving birth to a daughter.

I started thinking about being a feminist and what it means and why I still call myself one. I realized that to be female and present in this world is to be a feminist. There is a line in one of her songs that says "If you're not angry, you're just stupid...you don't care. How else can you react when you see something so unfair?"

That makes sense to me. I watch the news every night and every night there is a new story about women being killed by boyfriends/lovers/husbands. Or raped in alley ways. One particularly gruesome story was about a woman who was raped in broad daylight while a second man held her three year old daughter to watch. Or the story about the man that called his wife after picking up their two children and told her to meet them in some rural area. She arrived to find that he had hung his two children and then himself.

There are a million acts of a violence against women in this world every day - these are just a couple from our local news.

How could I not be a feminist? I'm bringing our daughter into a world that tells her she's a sex symbol to be used and fucked and thrown away. She's a commodity. She's LUCKY if she finds a man (if she's straight) who will love her with respect and dignity. Kelly and I have taken on the task of combating the zillion images of sexually explicit women that she will see and trying to show her that she can choose something different. We are tasked with giving her self esteem in a world that DOES NOT value women.

Just think, we live in a world that is more comfortable with teenage girls prancing around in bathing suits that barely cover their nipples and pubic hair, than with a woman breast feeding her child in a public place. Jesus. Think about that for a second. It's better to see living, breathing acts of child pornography than it is to see my breast for five seconds while I latch a child to it???

To not be a feminist in this world is just plain irresponsible. If we don't open our eyes to the challenges women face, how can we EVER hope to help our daughters navigate through it?? I'm not giving up. I'm fighting every chance I get.

And I hope to hell that we are able to raise a daughter who uses her voice, who speaks up when she sees injustice and who is not afraid to give the bird to anyone who tells her that she can't. And if she isn't like that, she's got me and her Mommy to back her up. And I dare the world to fuck with us.

Some thought I was extreme before...LOL. Just wait...now I have a REAL reason to speak up and fight the wrong that I see.