This is my first post with hopefully more to follow. The Fem Word is a feminist blog that will encompass all issues that affect women and I hope to expand the posting power to more people soon. I've been thinking about starting a feminist blog for a while now, but only until recently did I decide to actually do it. Here's why.
As a student at a college with a prominent Greek scene, I've been extremely active in my sorority (which I will from here on out call "the soror" for simplicity, and because I think that's funny). But due to the particular position I held within it, I never felt like I could say what was truly on my mind when it came to controversial issues like sexual assault and abortion. Now I no longer hold an officer position in the soror, and as a senior at the beginning of my last spring term have ruminated about a lot of questions on my school's campus that I've always found especially problematic. Despite nothing holding me back and perhaps because I have matured over the past year, I no longer feel it necessary to yell diatribes at this whole, sexist world. But this sexist world keeps on turning and if I'm not going to hate it, I need an outlet.
Example? A fellow sister emailed the entire soror a link (http://thoughtcatalog.com/2011/the-funny-thing-about-the-slutwalk-feminism/), believing that the author made "some valid points." The blog's author, reporting on a "Slutwalk" in Toronto organized in protest of a police officer's claim that women should not dress "like sluts in order to not be victimized," claimed that women understand the risk they are taking when they dress in a certain way. Wait, what? Apparently when women dress like they want to have sex (whatever that means...), they are implicitly agreeing that there is some chance of them being raped. Umm, I don't think so. This line of reasoning is incredibly dangerous in that there is the potential to ignore the role of the rapist. In The Purity Myth, Jessica Valenti, editor of Feministing.com, writes, "Women do not get raped because they weren't careful enough. Women get raped because someone raped them." The editor of the blog, Thought Catalog, issued an apology (
Need another example? How about the abortion debate that inevitably arose within the soror during the GOP's attempted defunding of Planned Parenthood? Despite some anti-choicers claims, no, a fetus (a deliberately chosen word) cannot suck it's thumb at five weeks (since, guess what, it doesn't have a thumb at five weeks), nor is abortion linked to breast cancer, nor is it a systematic genocide of minority babies. The last straw however, was a Facebook event a religious sister created, to which the entire soror was invited, of course. It was called "I stand with Hannibal Lecter." An obvious attempt at satire directed at the "I stand with Planned Parenthood" event, it asked attendees to support the cannibal's work despite the fact that he eats one third of his patients since he provides valuable mental health services to the others. After the wall of the event became overwhelmed with negative comments (after no more than three hours), she took it down, but not before a small number of people could choose to "attend" and "maybe attend" the event. What does it mean when you think you might attend an event called "I stand with Hannibal Lecter?" Food for thought.
And so I've created The Fem Word. Not too original of a title, but what's left after "Feministing" and "The-F-Word" are taken?
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