My Feminism Is: Justice Everywhere

Dear 17-year-old Sam,

Right now, it’s 2am on a Thursday night during your senior year. You just finished baking cookies and making signs for a football player, your cheerleading “locker buddy,” that you will never be thanked for, let alone have reciprocated. You haven’t gotten into your dream college yet, so you’re also stressing over homework.  And you’re nervous for that huge competition on Saturday.

Life as a competition cheerleader is different than cheering for football players under the Friday night lights, and or in the gym for basketball players and wrestlers. During competition season, it’s all about you and your accomplishments and how hard you’re working. You get your own awards and recognition. This time, the crowd is cheering for you.

Those few minutes on the mat give you the escape you need and the power and control you crave. But outside that, you’ve been struggling with everything else around you.

You see your mom working multiple jobs to scrape by. You see your sisters dealing with everything that comes with growing up as a girl. You see your friends coming to terms with their identities. You watch the news with the voracity of the future International Affairs major you are. You see dismal statistics everywhere, about sexual assault and the wage gap. You cry out for the people taking to the streets in Tunisia and Egypt.

You see injustice everywhere. And one day, you’ll have a word for what you’re feeling, a word for what you’ve been all along but hesitate to call yourself – “feminist.”

When you finally find feminism, you’ll find the incredible community of it. You’ll connect with so many people over the simple belief of equality. You’ll grow to recognize that there are systems in place that keep not only women down, but people of color, people with disabilities, and people of lower socioeconomic status down, too.

You have always been driven by the desire to help others. You’ve always been driven by seeking to right the wrongs you see everywhere. You’ve always known the power of words. You’ve always known that words and ideas and that feeling deep in your gut that something’s not right here can change the world, or at least change a person. Soon you’ll discover a word and a community that will accept you just as much as you accept it.

You’ve come from a long line of women who didn’t always have the word for feminism but always had the strength of a thousand men – no, not a thousand men. The strength of a woman. Your grandmothers, your mother, your aunt, and everyone before them. Their jobs may not have been glamorous or historic, but they worked hard without complaint. Whatever life throws at them, they bear with gritted teeth and the determination you have inherited.

Your feminism began by seeing unfairness in your own life and in the lives around you. How is it fair that we have to decorate the whole school at 7am on Friday mornings and receive no recognition or thanks? How is it fair that few spectators come to the girls’ basketball games, and even fewer at our cheerleading competitions?

In the next few years, you will grow to recognize how other kinds of oppression work. You’ll see how injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Soon, you’re going to see just how big the world is, and how many different kinds of people there are outside your small town. There are so many lived experiences out there, so many viewpoints to hear, so many opinions to agree or disagree with and so much hatred to battle. Feminism isn’t always an easy road, but you are going to be so glad you pulled out of the metaphorical driveway.

To me and you, feminism is justice – people are being mistreated and oppressed and kept down, in direct and institutionalized ways. There has to be something we can do has always been our refrain. In feminism, we’ve found tools to make the world fair, and friends and colleagues to work with through it.

There is so much inside of you right now, Sam. Your strength is in correcting injustice and the determination your legacy offers. And you are going to use your strength and determination to beat one of the best teams in the Northeast this weekend.

(By the way, you actually will).

So stop being afraid of saying you’re a feminist. You know who you are.

Much love,

22-Year-Old Sam

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This piece was originally published on the National Women's Law Center blog as part of the Ms. Foundation for Women's #MyFeminismIs campaign (http://forwomen.org/my-feminism-is/) on November 20, 2015.  http://nwlc.org/my-feminism-is-justice-everywhere/

Comments and “Compliments:” The Many Shades of Sexual Harassment

The internet — both my battleground and my home, as a millennial feminist — has given new meaning to the term public space. When I think public space, I think of streets and parks and the Metro. But now message boards and comment threads have also become places we exist for others to see and to interact. Harassment has found a home in this new public space, too.

What is Harassment and Why is it Awful?

Any member of a marginalized community — women, LGBTQ individuals – who has dared to exist in public knows that harassment is an all-too-common occurrence. Unwanted comments, “compliments,” and come-ons are as commonplace as Starbucks in today’s world. Above all, harassment is disrespect — people are dehumanized, turned into objects for another’s viewing pleasure or discussion.

Internet harassment has been around practically as long as the internet itself. Conversations about cyberbullying largely focus on school-aged children and how their arguments and tensions play out in school hallways. But the people who harass strangers online are far from school-aged.  They are grown adults — they shouldn’t be behaving like children.

Different Ingredients, Same Formula

Some online harassment can seem simple and relatively harmless — obscenities and the like. But when it turns into slurs and insults and threats, it feels different. Sticks and stones can hurt our bones — and words have the power to hurt us. Harassment can make its target feel directly attacked, or embarrassed, or hurt, or angry, or insecure. Additionally, much of the harassment I’ve seen online is highly gendered — from slurs used specifically for women to threats of sexual assault.

When it comes down to it, is there really a difference between the man who shouts “praise” about my body on my way to work and the internet troll who calls me slurs on Twitter? One might seem less harmful than the other in different ways, but both are an attack on what people see, not the real me. The man who yells “compliments” at me while it’s raining and I’m trying to balance coffee and my textbooks sees me for my body, not what I’m reading in those textbooks. The troll who thinks my publicly stated opinions conflict with his own beliefs isn’t attacking my personality or how I’m arguing my points, but is lumping me in with a stereotype of a group he disagrees with. I’m not Samantha Kovacs — student, friend, daughter, Gilmore Girls fan, coffee drinker — to harassers in real life and online. I’m only my body, or my Twitter handle.

How Do You Solve A Problem Like Harassment?

How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?

How do you find the word that means harassment?

A flibbertijibbet! A will-o’-the wisp! A clown!

(The Sound of Music, of course.)

It’s a complicated question. Teaching people to respect others — to fully see their humanity, not bodies or Twitter handles — is easier said than done. Raising awareness and educating people about why harassment is wrong could be a good start.

But the problem is more complicated than that. There are plenty of people who would never catcall someone in public but feel comfortable using abusive language online, where they have a mask to hide behind — and don’t recognize how the two are actually the same. We need to make it clear to the people who move within public space (AKA all of us) that harassment can take many forms, and that harassers and victims can be anyone. These forms are as harmful as the rest, and none of them are acceptable.

It’s easy enough to say that people shouldn’t harass others because it’s not nice. But it’s not only a matter of ethics and morals, especially when it comes to online conversations. We need a higher standard for how we conduct our healthy online debates. Most people engage in internet commentary because they believe in something, or because they have an opinion that wants to be heard. And we should want to hear them

But when people turn to insults and threats instead of real arguments, we can’t have constructive conversations about the issues that matter. When online users are too busy trying to protect themselves from violent language and reporting people who would rather insult and threaten them, we can’t have constructive conversations about the issues that matter. After all — when people turn to insults, they have nothing left to say.

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This blog was originally posted on the National Women's Law Center's blog on November 10, 2015, in my capacity as Online Outreach Intern. http://nwlc.org/comments-and-compliments-many-shades-sexual-harassment/