Feminist: a person who believes in the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes.
When you’re growing up in a country where woman, still to this day, have difficulty to speak up, you learn to understand why feminism is such an important topic to embrace within yourself.
I remember been picked on by some of my closest guy friends from a young age, because I was a strong, confident girl who wouldn’t make anyone step on her toes. They would tell me “stop being such a feminist” when I would ask our teachers to be the leader of a group. For them, being a feminist was to try to control everything, put man down with force, a concept that was for women by women.
A couple of years later, I asked some of them why they would make fun of me for stepping up, but only one seemed to remember what I was talking about and opened up to me in a way I never thought would happen.
“It was just something we did to annoy and to get a reaction out of you. But to be honest, I think it was also because we were a little bit intimidated. Not because you were a girl, but because you would tell us to do something and we did without giving it a second thought. ”
Those were his exact words, and I know this because it was what I wrote in my journal, with a side note saying “be proud girlll!”
Today, all of them tell me that they believe women should be equal to men, but won’t admit on the fact that they’re feminists. That word still scares them, because they know that once they admit it, they might be picked on too.
