Let’s Bake a New Pie
When I was fourteen, the city I lived in had a public unveiling of a collection of statues commemorating the Famous Five, the five women credited with the suffragette movement in Canada. Before this event the vice-principal at the Junior High I was attending invited any ‘girls who were interested’ to apply for a ticket. I put myself forward but not without making a point of asking why only girls were invited. Since this was celebrating part of everyone’s history and I thought it was important that boys should have the chance to go too.
I was not the enlightened teenager I appeared to be for making such a demand. My two closest friends in junior high just happened to be boys; I wanted to go with a friend, not with a group of girls who bullied me. My question, however, was dismissed. I was given some ironically sexist reasoning about it being more valuable for girls to attend, and that was that.
At this time I didn’t think of myself as a Feminist, or even a feminist. I was a victim of misinformation, as so many of us are, and bought into the media trope of feminists being man-hating or ‘angry’. This simplistic view led me to use the offensive term ‘feminazi’ and regularly state that I was against sexism, in all its forms, not just what women faced. I didn’t realise that to be against sexism, and gender inequality, was the very definition of feminism.
In my youthful naïveté, I claimed that sexism just ‘ wasn’t that big of a deal’. I had it in my head that my age was the greatest barrier I faced. I was convinced that until thirty, people were simply not given credit for their accomplishments. When I was denied a raise under the pretence of being ‘unskilled’ — despite putting in a forty-five hour work week and doubling the income at the charity I worked for at the time — I figured it was because I didn’t have post-secondary qualifications. When a new employee, a graduate with minimal experience who I would train and who would report to me, was hired at a higher wage than I was on, I didn’t think that sex or gender might have something to do with it.
The thing about sexism in countries like the UK or Canada or the United States is that it’s so very subtle nowadays. We think that ‘ism’s’ only count when they are blatant and conscious. It’s impossible to prove that I was denied a raise because I’m a woman. I cannot say that it was my gender that ranked me as ‘unskilled’ or that being a man automatically qualified a new starter to a higher wage in the minds of the senior staff.
I no longer discount that gender had something to do with it when, in my next role, I was belittled, demeaned and regularly gaslit by the manager to whom I reported. I was hired based on my track record, but my ideas were dismissed. I was hired because I could also do design but attempts I made to do so were discouraged, and I was told to leave it to ‘a real designer’, despite having taken design courses at Chelsea College of Art & Design and Central St. Martin’s. I was accused of lying and being manipulative, even when I had emails and paper trails proving what had been said, by who and when, clearing me of any wrong-doing. Mediation from human resources did little to resolve the situation. If anything the experience merely solidified my resolve to move on when the manager refused to take on board any of my concerns on the basis that “no one had ever complained about him in seven years of being a manager”.
It made me think of how, when I’ve raised concerns about a manager gossiping or refusing to listen to the concerns of their team, I am told I have a problem with authority and my concerns are ignored. Here was another thing I’d always thought had to do with my age, rather than pervasive sexism due to implicit bias. While there is never a singular cause to any outcome — my age probably did factor in — I came to realise that I could no longer discount gender and sex, nor rank them as less significant than age. I did not have a smoking gun, but the accumulation of these experiences and hearing similar stories from other women made it impossible for me to maintain the idea that sexism wasn’t a problem.
I began reading more about feminism, to fill in the gaps in my understanding and wade through the misinformation put out to discredit its value and importance. Just as we should not fool ourselves into believing we live in a post-racial world, we would be naïve to believe we live in a post-sexist world.
Like any concept, it is open to interpretation and therefore in need of clarification. I am critical of those who claim to be feminists and then exclude trans* people or men from the conversation. I don’t consider it to be feminism if it ignores the multiple forms of discrimination a person can face. Feminism that wants a piece of the pie just doesn’t do it for me. I’m the sort of Feminist that intends to bake an entirely new pie. It’s one thing to be marginalised for being a woman and quite another for being a Black woman or an Indigenous woman or a woman who is also in a wheelchair or a woman who is working class. All of these factors need to be accounted for if we’re going to have the conversations we need to be having about gender and sex. For equality to apply to all people, we must see how currently it only applies to some people, and how no one is free of the harm this causes.
Today, on International Women’s Day, I’m declaring myself a Feminist, loudly and without hesitation. I want to live in a world where human beings, regardless of sex or gender, are treated with respect, kindness and care. May our various embodiments be recognised and celebrated as wholly human and equally valuable.
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Originally published on Medium.
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