Because it Hurts: Why Women and Men Aren't Feminists

I started crying on the bus this morning. Because of a book. My Feminist book club’s selection for this month in Robert Jensen’s Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. I can across a passage describing a discussion group on pornography that Jensen had lead with a group of women who (like me) work in centres that work with battered women and rape survivors. He describes the sadness in the room at the end of the session and quotes a woman who had been mostly silent until the end. He writes:

Throughout the workshop she had held herself tightly, her arms wrapped around herself. She talks for some time, and then apologizes for rambling. There is no need to apologize; she is articulating what many feel. She talks about her own life, about what she has learned in the session and how it made her feel, about her anger and sadness. Finally she says: ‘This hurts. It just hurts so much’.

Since my rant on Feminist apologism I have been getting into more conversations about why exactly it is that most young women do not identify as feminists. And why both men and women scorn the word and those who use it as an identifier. As I said in that post, I am an optimist insofar as I believe that if most people understood what feminism actually is, they would identify with that label. I do not think, however, that the only thing holding us back from this is a lack of dialogue surrounding the negative stereotypes and ideas that have come to be associated with modern feminism. Why are young men so resistant to learn the realities faced by women? Or so reluctant to discuss their own terrible experiences with gender policing and sexism? Why do young women remain silent about their own experiences? Why are more women not active in the feminist movement even if they do espouse their goals? Because it hurts. It hurts so fucking much.

Every woman’s personal experience with sexism hurts. Verbal, Physical and Sexual violence are terrible, painful realities that women experience in their lives. But when you get connected to frontline feminism workers you are confronted with just how frequent and widespread those attacks are. You connect all these personal painful experiences together into a web of pain that joins all women together. You stare right into the contempt that this society (men and women) have for women. You hear details about attacks on women and children that are so cruel that they are incomprehensible. Incomprehensible cruelty on a daily basis. The statistics demonstrating male violence are ugly, disheartening and terrifying. The lived stories are worse.

Once you really become involved in your feminism you can no longer ignore the reports that arrive day after day about the cruelty and gender policing that we are teaching our children. And the effects they have on young boys and girls. The psychological damage our culture inflicts on children is deeply disturbing. You see how young children have been trained to hate people who are homosexual, who are disabled, who are different races, and female. You see how they ruthlessly enforce the ugly society that we live in. Children are more open about it than adults. You see children as young as thirteen taking their lives because of the pain of it. And this becomes not a single tragic event but one connected to the pain and reality of children all over the world.

You are truly forced to take a good long look at yourself. And this look hurts. If you are like me, you had cherished liberal beliefs about pornography, freedom of speech, and the legality of prostitution. Those beliefs were better left unexamined. It hurts to look at them. It hurts to learn of the damage that prostitution does to women and children. It hurts to know that you contributed to the damage by being indifferent or openly supporting harm reduction policies without examining their efficacy. It hurts to think you thought of porn as no big deal without understanding the true contempt that mainstream porn has for women. It hurts to read about the actual acts and scenarios in mainstream porn. It hurts to look at your own attitudes and interactions that were profoundly shaped by the misogyny of the society we live in. It hurts to look at yourself and find that you were a willing instrument of a culture that destroys lives.

So of course more people don’t work in frontline feminist organizations. Of course most people do not identify as feminists. To learn about feminism is to face real, horrifying human pain and acknowledge your own complicity in that pain. It is incredibly easier to live in a bubble and assume that if *some* economic equality has been gained for women than the battle is over. Who wants to think about these things on a daily basis? Who wants to think about the missing Aboriginal women in Canada and how little our police force and government are doing to help them? Who wants to read books like I Never Told Anyone (Eds. Ellen Bass and Louise Thorton) and face the reality of a four year old raped so brutally by her father that her pelvis was broken? Who wants to volunteer on a rape crisis line and feel helpless as a woman sobs out her feelings of pain and bewilderment when a beloved partner beats her? Who wants to face all these things and then be told that feminism is irrelevant? Who wants to be this angry on a daily basis?

I have to do those things in small doses. I volunteer at a rape crisis shelter once a week. I read books like Getting Off and I Never Told Anyone in small chunks. I cry whenever I need to. I try to be happy about sunshine and love and cookies whenever I can. (Yeah that's my radical self alright. Taking a stand for cookies.) I try to trust in this world. But it hurts. It hurts so fucking much.