I am 17 years old and I am a feminist. I believe in gender equality,
and am under no illusion about how far we are from achieving it.
Identifying as a feminist has become particularly important to me since a
school trip I took to Cambridge last year.
A group of men in a
car started wolf-whistling and shouting sexual remarks at my friends and
me. I asked the men if they thought it was appropriate for them to be
abusing a group of 17-year-old girls. The response was furious. The men
started swearing at me, called me a bitch and threw a cup coffee over
me.
For those men we were just legs, breasts and pretty faces.
Speaking up shattered their fantasy, and they responded violently to my
voice.
Shockingly, the boys in my peer group have responded in exactly the same way to my feminism.
After
returning from this school trip I started to notice how much the girls
at my school suffer because of the pressures associated with our gender.
Many of the girls have eating disorders, some have had peers heavily
pressure them into sexual acts, others suffer in emotionally abusive
relationships where they are constantly told they are worthless.
I decided to set up a feminist society at my school, which has previously been named one of "the best schools in the country",
to try to tackle these issues. However, this was more difficult than I
imagined as my all-girls school was hesitant to allow the society. After
a year-long struggle, the feminist society was finally ratified.
What
I hadn't anticipated on setting up the feminist society was a massive
backlash from the boys in my wider peer circle. They took to Twitter and
started a campaign of abuse against me. I was called a "feminist
bitch", accused of "feeding [girls] bullshit", and in a particularly
racist comment was told "all this feminism bull won't stop uncle Sanjit
from marrying you when you leave school".
Our feminist society
was derided with retorts such as, "FemSoc, is that for real? #DPMO"
[don't piss me off] and every attempt we made to start a serious debate
was met with responses such as "feminism and rape are both ridiculously
tiring".
The more girls started to voice their opinions about
gender issues, the more vitriolic the boys' abuse became. One boy
declared that "bitches should keep their bitchiness to their
bitch-selves #BITCH" and another smugly quipped, "feminism doesn't mean
they don't like the D, they just haven't found one to satisfy them yet."
Any attempt we made to stick up for each other was aggressively shot
down with "get in your lane before I par [ridicule] you too", or
belittled with remarks like "cute, they got offended".
I fear that
many boys of my age fundamentally don't respect women. They want us
around for parties, banter and most of all sex. But they don't think of
us as intellectual equals, highlighted by accusations of being
hysterical and over sensitive when we attempted to discuss serious
issues facing women.
The situation recently reached a crescendo
when our feminist society decided to take part in a national project
called Who Needs Feminism. We took photos of girls standing with a
whiteboard on which they completed the sentence "I need feminism
because...", often delving into painful personal experiences to
articulate why feminism was important to them.
When we posted these pictures online we were subject to a torrent of degrading and explicitly sexual comments.
We
were told that our "militant vaginas" were "as dry as the Sahara
desert", girls who complained of sexual objectification in their photos
were given ratings out of 10, details of the sex lives of some of the
girls were posted beside their photos, and others were sent threatening
messages warning them that things would soon "get personal".
We, a
group of 16-, 17- and 18-year-old girls, have made ourselves vulnerable
by talking about our experiences of sexual and gender oppression only
to elicit the wrath of our male peer group. Instead of our school taking
action against such intimidating behaviour, it insisted that we remove
the pictures. Without the support from our school, girls who had
participated in the campaign were isolated, facing a great deal of
verbal abuse with the full knowledge that there would be no
repercussions for the perpetrators.
It's been over a century since the birth of the suffragette movement
and boys are still not being brought up to believe that women are their
equals. Instead we have a whole new battleground opening up online
where boys can attack, humiliate, belittle us and do everything in their
power to destroy our confidence before we even leave high school.
It
is appalling that an institution responsible for preparing young women
for adult life has actively opposed our feminist work. I feel like the
school is not supporting its girls in a crucial part of their evolution
into being strong, assertive, confident women. If that's the case for a
well-established girls' school, what hope does this generation of women
have in challenging the misogyny that still pervades our society?
If you thought the fight for female equality was over, I'm sorry to tell you that a whole new round is only just beginning.
•
Altrincham Grammar made the following comment about the feminist society:
"Altrincham
Grammar School for Girls has supported Jinan in setting up the society,
providing administrative assistance, guidance and proactively
suggesting opportunities to help members to explore this issue which
they feel passionately about.
"We are committed to protecting the safety and welfare of our students, which extends to their safety online. We consider very carefully any societies that the school gives its name and support to.
"As
such, we will take steps to recommend students remove words or images
that they place online that could compromise their safety or that of
other students at the school."
