A Confession

Hey, a girl here.

Talking about feminism...

Yeesh...

I'm just glad to see other people are bringing up different things about it.  Especially the boys.  Thank you guys for talking about it.  And honestly, too.  Most of the time when I hear guys talking about it, they just passively agree with women.  I don't know if it's what they really believe or if they are just too scared to form their own opinions.  But, believe me, your side of it matters just as much as the female.  We're all human here.

But, well, this is a difficult subject for me because, well, I usually disagree with the popular opinion.  A lot, actually.  I mean, by definition I am a feminist.  Everyone should be.  It's just simply believing that both sexes are equal.  Duh.  However, I just don't relate to the feminist movement.  This whole "men are all stupid and women still are mistreated terribly" movement.

What I'm trying to say is that feminists are just terribly misinformed women unsure how to correctly solve a problem.  They're still calling for government reform when sexism is a social one.  They call all men sexist pigs and all women who don't agree with them old-fashioned and uneducated.  And, unfortunately, I don't have the time to explain how the numbers and statistics don't really show much and how they don't properly represent how women are treated.

However, I believe the films we watched Thursday actually did what feminism should.  It introduced a problem.   And respectfully showed the implications of it.  No name-calling, static numbers, or angry, clucking women.  Just accurate portrayals that make its audience think.

But, even further than this, they made me feel proud to be a woman.  And, I realized though I originally believed that I have never really been affected by sexism, it turns out I have.  Though I have been proud to be a girl in those middle school tug-of-war contests or the elementary "cooties" epidemic, in an adult sense, I don't really feel it.

Until I watched things like Un Jour.  That was so strange, honestly at first, but as it went along I realized, yes, that's it.  That's how it feels.  It's a perspective I didn't know I had until I saw it.  But, what was even more amazing, was the reaction it got afterwards.  The way Leeper said it offered a perspective men could never have come up with.  And that was a good thing.

And then, I read Jonathan's post on Steven Universe.  How he thought that there was a new perspective in it that wouldn't have resulted if a man had written it.  And that surprised me, because one, I love that show, and two, because in a network dominated by men (one of the few ongoing cartoons written by a woman) this show is still so highly rated.

Okay, confession time:  I purposefully chose a male pen name for my webcomic.  When releasing it just a while ago, I considered the prejudice that comes from female authorship and I knew I didn't want to be grouped with that.  What do women write?  Twilight and Divergent.  Ew.  Even worse:  Fifty Shades of Gray.  I'm not associating myself with that.  So, I created a new name, so that both sexes come into the comic without any real prejudice.  Because men are more capable of writing well.

But now everyone's saying that women have a different perspective?  And what's more, I'm proud of that fact now?  Was it okay for me to use that pen name?  Does it mean that I'm running away from something that I have that no one else has?  Or is it still my perspective?  Does using a male name change my perspective?  I don't believe it does.

However, as I look up at my bookshelf, I realize how many of my books are written by men and women.  I've got J.R.R. Tolkien, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Orwell, Bram Stoker, Alexandre Dumas, Charles Dickens, and Fyodor Dostoevsky.  But I also have Arakawa Hiromu (a woman who purposefully changed her name to a male one (because only a man could write Fullmetal Alchemist)), Jane Austen, Kusanagi Mizuho, and Harper Lee.  There's even J.K. Rowling, who published her name so people would assume she was a man (and who later used a male pen name for a later book).

So, maybe, there's a good way to sum this up, but honestly, I'm still figuring this all out.  But, maybe, there is something that we can bring to the world.  Maybe both sides have something new to bring.  And maybe that's what makes the conversation so beautiful.  Maybe it's what makes us so human.  And maybe that's something I can be proud of.  :)