Also, welcome! Good to have you.

I think often many women who haven’t read feminist books, readings or taken a women studies class have a watered down, misguided and backlash-influenced perspective of what feminism is. This article is EXACTLY how I feel and what I want to say to women who proclaim: “I had breast implants for ME and not for society”

Awesome.

I myself do things that adhere to/perpetuate the current standard of “femininity” (e.g. shaving my armpits, wearing lipstick when I go out). And while I do most of them for “my own reasons”, I am always conscious of the fact that their foundation lies in the patriarchy. I would never have *thought* of shaving my armpits if female hairlessness wasn’t taught to me. I wouldn’t dislike the paleness of my lips au naturale if I hadn’t learned that color was “preferred”.

As you said, there is no separating ourselves from our patriarchical culture. My only hope is to try to teach and maintain neutrality with my nieces and nephews (and thoretical future offspring). Not that I think they will be exempt, but I’d like to instill the notion of questioning the “standards” as early as possible.

P Soul, I understand your wariness of intersectionality, to a point… It is often used to try to blur lines and de-emphasize important points, but a lack of intersectional analysis is what I believe led to many Feminists of color abandoning or never joining the “mainstream” feminist movement and seeing it as a movement for middle class white women. An excellent example of this being how mainstream feminism is adamantly for access to abortion while many women of color have found abortion nearly forced upon them. Not the opposite side of the coin, the may still be pro-choice, but the common pro-choice platform barely takes into forced sterilization some minority women may encounter. And it leads also, for trans feminists (such as myself) to feel heartily included in some venues, and pretty violently rejected in others. I think there are definitely feminist issues that are experienced by most women and mostly only women, but so many oppressions are a tangled web between gender, sexuality, race, class, ability, religion etc… My feeling is what we all need to do is keep our minds open and our listening skills up so we can take into account the experiences of others as it is easy (as I’ve seen on many blogs) to react defensively and all of a sudden it’s just a back and forth recrimination-fest.

Anyway, I read many of the main feminist blogs and I’m such a fan of the writers here from seeing them on Jezebel that I’m excited to see how this blog develops.