On being a feminist

When I was a little girl, I thought I didn't want to be a little girl. None of the little girls I read about or saw on television were anything like the way I wanted to be. When I played, I was Peter Pan, Aladdin, Batman, or, more often than not, a character I had created who was a sort of Victorian urchin boy. I had some female role models too; Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, Minnie the Minx, but I never played at being them. For a while I thought I wanted to be a boy.

It was many years later when I first heard about suffragettes, women's lib, feminism and all the things that went with it, and I realised that I didn't want to be a boy, I just didn't want to be feminine in the way that a thousand television shows, dolls and books portrayed. I wanted to be a girl but to do all the things boys did in stories: to be the hero, to lead armies, to climb trees, catch the bad guys. And who wouldn't? Catching bad guys is far more interesting than being a frilly pink love-interest.

And that's part of the reason I consider myself I feminist and insist on rallying against sexism: women of all ages shouldn't feel restricted by their gender (and nor should men, for that matter). In recent years there seems to have been a backlash against the feminism of the 70s and 80s, and with the world falling on hard times people are falling back into those comfortably constrictive cliches, letting women become attractive but vacuous sex-objects and little girls become frilly pink princesses, neither of which is particularly healthy. Most of the women presented as role models today are just as dull as the women I refused to look up to as a child: miniskirted pop stars who sing someone else's songs; footballer's wives; it-girls. Even serious and respected sportswomen, actresses and other ladies in the public-eye are expected to appear in pretty frocks and racy underwear when interviewed in magazines (not that there's anything wrong with wanting to look nice or whatever, it's just it gets rather tedious when every woman has to be fashionable when very few men feel the need to).

I know I'm not what many people would think of as a feminist, or even a tomboy for that matter. I wear skirts a lot and very rarely wear trousers, I wear far too much eyeliner, I like violent horror movies (even the ones where most of the victims are women), I like burlesque, I wear low-cut tops. But that's the thing; I dress the way I do because I like it, because I want to look a certain way, not because I want to be "beautiful". I also credit myself with the intelligence to know the difference between trashy catharsis and what is genuinely damaging. To my mind slasher movies are far less dangerous than the "harmless" female cliches in romantic comedies, for example.

Anyway, I realise I'm rambling aimlessly, so I'll point you towards some people who address these problems far more eloquently than I do. PinkStinks is a fabulous campaign that aims to highlight and eradicate the "world of pink" created for young girls. They have nothing against the colour pink, incidentally, just the way it's used. They regularly link to interesting newspaper articles on the subject, so it's well worth checking back regularly.

The F-Word is probably my favourite feminist blog, closely followed by feministing. Also lovely, though not solely feminist, is the UK magazine Filament, a sex-positive girl's mag full of pretty pictures of pretty men.

And, just because I'm not above self promotion, you might be interested in my article about women and pornography and my article about a dreadful romantic comedy film and why it's sexist.