My Experience and Feelings About Feminism

I don't have much experience with feminism! But as Matt said today in section it is a pertinent issue, for sure. I remember when I was working at a grocery store I was on register one day, and I had a somewhat feminist woman supervising that day. My friend walked up to me while I was on register and told me that a job I had applied for in janitorial at a local school had been filled. And he emphasized "By a girrrl." And i mimicked back "by a girl?!" I didn't realize the sexism in this statement until my supervisor flashed an upset look at me. My friend went on to explain that the school had to hire a certain number of men and women for the job and even though I was more qualified for the position because I had lots of heavy manual labor experience in the past, she was hired to fill quotas. Later my supervisor called me over and said, "What do you mean 'by a girl'?!?" She was upset that I was surprised that a girl has been hired over a man. Looking back I see that my natural reaction was in fact sexist. And from that point on I always made sure to be more aware of these tense subjects such as male and female job placement. I didn't mean to offend her but my natural reaction was not "ethically sound."

Matt talked about ethics today in class and how when we wake up in the morning we have to make choices. As i ponder (in a quite uneducated way) about feminism I realize that it comes down to more than just intellectually elite arguments and armchair philosophizing. Feminism in a practical sense is ethical, it comes down to how you treat the people around you, in time, in the moment, so as to shape a collective memory of love and not abjection or hatred.

Now, Professor Wilson said, in class, something along the lines of "You people" are in a post-beat, post-hippy, post-punk, post-feminist state. He said "You people" are "Post-everything."

"Now you need to find SOMETHING to stand for and DO SOMETHING with IT"

I think that "SOMETHING" is the beats, the hippies, the punks, the feminists, ect..And what we need to "DO" is SYNTHESIZE. We need to take the feminist movement as a reaction to a very real misogyny and synthesize it into a responsible ethos. Again, I am not caught up on contemporary feminism, so maybe it's already been synthesized and i'm sure it has been. Maybe contemporary feminism IS a set of ethics.