Adam

When was the last time you saw someone protesting something on campus and made fun of them in your head?

Have you?

More importantly, does that make you a bad person?

For one reason or another, I was recently talking to a friend about feminism and recent feminist happenings. We casually discussed our thoughts, how we saw things going, etc. Near the end of the discussion, I was introduced to the idea of “womyn,” a respelling of the word woman/women in order to remove any sort of historically hierarchical relationship between males and females. I’ve tried to Google the actual connection of the two words – man and woman – but can’t find anything concrete about it, which helps to clarify my reaction.

I laughed. A lot.

I don’t stand for gender inequality – as I hope no one would – but to someone who uses  “woman” as purely a word without more than its simple definition,  it came across as ridiculous. Someone actually constructed a way for me to sound awful without my knowing it. Someone decided that I should be a bad person.

It wasn’t laughter spawned from some fictional, evil part inside of me that thinks women should – for no logical reason – get paid less than men and face other unfair disadvantages. It was the kind of laughter that happens when I see a middle-aged person harassing a 16-year-old cashier about an expired coupon at HyVee. Nothing more, nothing less.

Once I calmed down, my friend asked why I had found the idea so funny. I explained that some people are what I would call “nut-jobs.” But then I realized that although they might seem obnoxious or in-your-face, we kind of need those sorts of people. They remind us that problems exist. That something’s wrong. Plus, we’ve all been that way at some point in our lives, so who am I to make fun of them?

At the same time, it’s this radical behavior that can also gimp progress made by a social movement like pro-feminism. At the most extreme level, when a group gets violent to gain what it wants, it loses respect very quickly. More often than not, anyone who represents a group in a radical form might behave in a way that only slightly harasses or may come across as annoying, and that’s a subjective decision to make. To use the feminist idea as a continuing example, I can respect the fact that, legally and socially, women shouldn’t be lesser in any way. I applaud when the group wins cases in court that lead to fair pay and stronger sexual harassment laws, or when a female celebrity acts as a positive role model about body image. I’ll vote for someone who stands for those kinds of fixes. However, when someone says I’m a bad person for using what is – in a contemporary setting – a harmless word, I forget what’s actually being accomplished. Even if it’s just for a second, it’s easier to pay attention to the person yelling at me.

So…the point is…

The next time you see someone on campus preaching something or protesting for something in a way that comes across as ridiculous, go ahead and laugh to yourself. If they’re behaving in a way that hurts the credibility of a worthy cause, they’re not really worth taking seriously. In fact, learning to ignore this kind of radical behavior actually helps show respect for the issue being rallied for. Learn about what a movement is trying to do before judging. If you see someone on the street screaming about how “woman” is an evil word into the ears of passersby and you think they’re crazy, you’re not judging feminism. You’re judging that individual person.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 10th, 2013 at 2:54 pm and is filed under General, and tagged with Feminism, Protests, Rallies, Stand up, Think, Womyn. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.