At the age of roughly 14 I became aware of Marxism. It was my Dad who taught me about it and it is a huge part of my personal beliefs about what the world should be like. I have spent my time since then within the left field of political thinking with my ideals of the world maturing and changing as I am exposed to more and more stories about the planet on which we live. Over the next three years, no doubt, those opinions and beliefs will be refined more and will continue to be so for the rest of my life. My Dad had always told me about equality within class and how the worker is oppressed by capitalism, I then took that viewpoint further when I started to form opinions based on issues regarding race and how white supremacy was still an active and dangerous part of our culture.
The biggest shift for me happened roughly a year ago when I came across two twitter accounts, the first being: @NoMorePage3 which as you'd expect, is a campaign to stop the objectification of women in tabloid newspapers and magazines such as the Sun. Although I knew about misrepresentation of women in the media and I was outraged by it, I didn't really think that it was something I could change. To find something that today is actually having a huge influence on the media industry and be part of a community of just under 200,000 people who have signed the petition (as of 16/07/14) is an amazing thing. The second account was that of Laurie Penny who is a journalist, author and the contributing editor of the New Statesman. When I read Penny's work, I completely agreed with what she was saying about women and how they are treated by the world we live in. I watched her lectures and was amazed at how much she was speaking to me. Eventually, I finished a YouTube video of Laurie Penny talking at Oxford and thought "Shit, I am a feminist!".
As a girl who wants to enter the media industry, I feel it is important to understand it. I just went on a tour of MediaCityUK yesterday and also went to the tour around the BBC in London with school earlier this year. I travelled to Goldsmith College from Leicestershire after school one day last month to she both Laurie Penny and the No More Page Three Campaign talk about sexism in the media. I buy myself papers, watch the news, read books, anything I can to understand what the world I live in does and why it does it. At this point in my life, I want to consume as much knowledge about the world around me as I possibly can so that I can grow up to be a cultured individual that is breaking the mould of modern living. The reason I think Media Studies is such an important subject is because it lets me do that and as my Media teacher said to me recently, you can't do Media Studies and not be a feminist.
When I first realised that I was a feminist I was confused because feminists were loud mouthed, militant women who didn't shave their armpits and hated men. Now I have friends who call me militant and at times I can shout about my point of view for hours but I didn't and still don't associate myself with that stereotype of "the feminist". I certainly don't hate men, a lot of my friends are men, I have a loving boyfriend, I am in a class where, apart from me, every member of it is a man. Currently I am reading Unspeakable Things by Laurie Penny and even one chapter in, the book is one of the most influential and important texts I have ever read. In the book she talks about how you don't need to be that stereotype, you don't need to not shave, not wear make up, not wear deodorant because with feminism comes individualism and we all have the right to be who want to be and believe what we want to believe.
I was inspired to write this after reading something a friend on Facebook said about the feminist movement. She was saying how we don't need feminism in this country and instead of British and American feminists focusing on equal pay and getting stuff handed to us on a plate, we should focus on "a country like India... when you get stoned to death because you didn't marry who your family wanted to.". Yes, the feminist movement does focus of Asian countries "like India" - only days ago the whole feminist movement celebrated the first ever Malala Day (July 12th) which honours Malala Yousafzai who was shot in the head last year after she stood up against the Taliban for her right for an education in Pakistan. Having made a full recovery, Malala (now 17) is a key feminist figure with a worldwide best selling book about her experiences. Yes, women in middle-eastern culture do face worse problems than those in western culture but that's not to say that the issues aren't universal.
Forced marriage and female genital mutilation are huge issues abroad but they are hugely prominent in the U.K too. Equally, workers rights and gender stereotypes are huge issues abroad. The reason we don't see it abroad (ie: on the news and in newspapers) is because we don't see it here. Patriarchal media forbids coverage of such nature being the greedy, capitalist industry it is. Universally, all of these problems exist and the feminist movement is fighting all of them. If you come across a feminist who believes feminist issues are more important in the U.K than abroad, that is not a feminist, that is an elitist and a racist. The feminist movement is essentially a socialist one - as Laurie Penny says: "Socialism without feminism, after all, is no socialism worth having.".
The feminist movement is a collection of ALL WOMEN standing up to be counted. Just because you are a white girl of privilege doesn't mean you can't be outraged by the world we live in. Feminism isn't a hate movement that is necessarily militant. It isn't about men, it is about culture. Feminism is standing up for what is right.
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