The Elephant In The Room (Not The Republican One!)

Select what you identify as:

• Liberal (feminist)

• Conservative (anti feminist)

• A human who understands that my political party does not decide whether I respect women, I do

Now I understand that there is a large range of political ideology, however, for the sake of trying to prove a point, bear with me.

Now you’ll remember that I just met, for the first time in my life, an openly feminist teenage male. It’s shocking I know but they exist, and I found one. He had discussed that since he was from Alabama he grew up pretty conservative and he wanted to learn more about feminism. He was then criticized by another girl in the group asking how it’s possible for someone to be a conservative feminist. This started an uphill battle of everyone trying to agree on an idea, and since there’s 500 people in the group chat this wasn’t possible. I was mad because the poor guy is probably hoping he’d never brought anything up in the first place. But it got me thinking, can there be conservative feminists?

Now as someone who doesn’t really identify with a political party I knew you could have conservative feminists, but I needed a better way to explain it.

I opened my messages later to see that the guy had messaged me separately asking why he was being attacked. I had to apologize to him and explain that he wasn’t wrong or offensive for being curious. He has the right to learn, and I would be happy to explain slut shaming to him. This launched one of the most difficult conversations I’ve had about feminism in my life.

I asked him to honestly answer what he would call a girl that dresses promiscuously and sleeps around a lot. He said “a hoe.” Perfect! Exactly the answer I was looking for. Then I asked him what he would call a guy that sleeps around a lot. He said “a man hoe.” Okay….. Not the response I was expecting. I usually get something like “player.” Now I explained that society paints the guy who can get a ton of girls as a player, who usually has a better reputation than a hoe. The hoe is judged and called dirty while the player is praised for his ability. This confused him because he thinks anyone, no matter the gender, should be judged for sleeping around. I was getting frustrated. Like come on this is so obvious! This is so obvious....to me. I have lived a life in fear of being judged. He hasn't. He is genuinely trying to understand and I need to respect that. I didn’t really know how to respond until it hit me. I just figured my problem. That view is what makes him more conservative but still a feminist. How an individual views the act of sleeping around is what makes them more conservative or liberal. But that doesn’t mean you can’t keep women on the same playing field as men. He actually asked me many challenging questions that I had to really think about, and if I'm being honest I was not loving it in the beginning. But seeing him slowly understand the points I was trying to make helped me realize that we can solve a lot of issues by simply talking. I could not be more thankful for our conversation which I have to say was one of the most insightful conversations about feminism I've had in a while.

You don’t need to be a liberal to be a feminist. You don’t need to a conservative to be a feminist. You need to be a mature human to be a feminist. You need to have the understanding that you are not above anyone and no one is above you. We’re all human and so we’re all equal. We can’t keep letting the idea of political ideology disrupt from the main argument of feminism. Because if we make feminism a “liberal” thing, we’re going to lose a lot of support from people who don’t even know what feminism is. And let's be real, do we really want to put the fate of feminism in the hands of some male politicians? Yeah, that's what I thought. Let’s not make it a politics thing, let’s make it a human thing.