Guest blogger Courtney E. Martin is the book editor of the feminist blog Feministing.
After Debra Dickerson caricatures young women as pole dancing, attention-starved idiots, she then quips: “Harsh, you say? Uninformed? OK. Tell me exactly what today’s feminists are doing for the struggle.”
Glad you asked Debra, because it’s clear you haven’t had the benefit of knowing a real, live, breathing, thinking young woman and you’re really missing out. Indeed, some of us like to blog about the political and social issues of the day (as it appears, do you). We actually see this as part of the struggle—an effort to speak on our own behalf about issues that affect us in a corporate conglomerated media landscape that too often trades in stereotypes like yours.
You write, “Blogging about your sex lives ain’t exactly what we previous generations thought feminism was. We thought it was about taking it to the streets.” At feministing, we get frequent emails from young women, often in isolated parts of the country, who read about sexual politics on our blog and get the courage to speak up about their rape or incest experiences, advocate for comprehensive sex ed in their schools, or come out to their parents and friends. We think that’s profoundly feminist.
Outside of our media activism and public intellectual work, we’re joyfully and dedicatedly going about all sorts of action to make women’s and men’s lives more just, equal, and authentic:
We are providing support and shelter for former teen prostitutes. We are training to be abortion providers and midwives and social workers. We are mentoring low income girls to write about their experiences. We are falling in love with feminist men and women and having our hearts broken and doing it all over again. We are running shelters for LGBTQ youth who have fallen through the cracks of a homophobic society. We are educating one another about STIs, STDs, and reproductive justice. We are doing community organizing. We are rebuilding New Orleans. We are going dancing all night with our girls. We are, indeed, protesting in the streets. We are starting organizations to provide support for women veterans of Iraq, 15 percent of whom have been sexually assaults. We are drinking beers on Saturday nights with our friends and talking about feminism. We are donating money to causes we believe in, voting for leaders we respect, getting political and media training. We are queering gender and getting sex change operations and delighting in our sexuality on a spectrum. We are dancing burlesque downtown to demonstrate our rejection of oppressive beauty standards and explore our sexuality on our own terms. We are writing op-eds. We are painting and break dancing and making documentary films and writing on one another’s Facebook walls and refusing to let our friends date assholes and reinventing or rejecting marriage all together and speaking out at Take Back the Night and deluging corporate email accounts when they use sexist advertising. We are honoring our mothers and grandmothers with our wide-eyed, creative, tenacious spirits. We are feminism.
So that’s just some of what we’re doing for the so-called struggle. How about you?
Courtney E. Martin is a writer, speaker, and teacher living in Brooklyn. You can read more about her work at courtneyemartin.com
