CONFIDENCE IN DISGUISE

Feminism is also heavily involved in fighting other
inequalities and areas of oppression, such as racism and
ableism. There is a lot of intersectionality in inequality.
Feminists fight for everyone’s rights and always have.
Take early feminists like Susan B. Anthony, Ida B.
Wells, Alice Paul, and Frederick Douglass, for example.
They not only championed for women’s suffrage but also
for abolition in the time of slavery.
Alice Paul also co-wrote the Equal Rights
Amendment, a proposed constitutional amendment that
simply states, “Equality of rights under the law shall not
be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State
on account of sex.” The amendment was first proposed in
1923 and still has not been passed to this day. AKA, women
are not equal to men in the eyes of the Constitution.
Another common misconception is that we live in
a post-feminist society. Women can vote and have babies
and jobs and wear pants and drive cars, hooray! Yes, we
have more freedoms than we ever have, but we are far
from equal.
Not only are men and women not equal in the
Constitution, we are not equal in the workforce. Only 26 of
the Fortune 500 CEOs are female. That’s only 5.2 percent.
According to the White House, women who work
full time make, on average, only 77 percent of what their
male counterparts make. The wage gap widens for specific
ethnicities such as black women and Latina women. Now,
there is a big debate about whether that statistic is accurate,
but there are years of research and data that prove a wage
gap does exist, even if the exact percentage is disputed or
exaggerated.
Women are also not equal in government and
media. Only 19.4 percent of the 535 Congress members
are women. We make up half of the population but not
even one fifth of our government. We have never had a
female president. Women aren’t even on any paper money
(though that soon may change with the campaign Women
on 20s).
In the media, women are still very underrepresented.
Women comprised only 16 percent of the writers,
directors, producers, executive producers, editors, and
cinematographers of the top-grossing movies in 2013,
according to the Women’s Media Center. Specifically, only
9 percent of directors of the top 250 domestic-grossing
films were women. On TV, women played 43 percent of
the speaking roles in 2013 while women played only 28.4
percent of speaking roles in the top 100 films, according to
the WMC.
The New York Film Academy studied gender
inequality in the top 500 films from 2007-2012 and
found only 30.8 percent of speaking roles were women,
28.8 percent of women wore sexually revealing clothes
as opposed to 7 percent of men, and only 10.7 percent of
movies had a balanced cast with half the characters being
female.
Advertisements outrageously sexualize women
and alter their bodies to unrealistic proportions. According
to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and
Associated Disorders, “The body type portrayed in
advertising as the ideal is possessed naturally by only 5
percent of American females,” and “Women are much
more likely than men to develop an eating disorder. Only
an estimated 5 to 15 percent of people with anorexia or
bulimia are male.”
The most serious consequence of gender inequality
is sexual violence. According to the Rape, Abuse and Incest
National Network, 293,000 people ages 12 and older are
victims of sexual assault every year and 29 percent of
these victims are between the ages of 12-17. In 2003, 9 of
every 10 rape victim were female, according to the U.S.
Department of Justice. Sadly, 98 percent of rapists never
go to jail or prison, according to RAINN.
The Center for Disease Control’s 2010 National
Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey estimated
nearly 1 in 5 women and 1 in 71 men in the United States
have been raped at some time in their lives. The number of
victims grows for college-age women and men. I graduated
with 113 other girls from high school three years ago. By
the CDC’s estimate, more than 20 of us will be raped in
our lifetime. That’s more than 20 too many. Feminism is a
scary word to some people. Rape is scarier. Feminists fight
to end sexual violence. You should too.
We do not live a post-feminist society. Yes, we can
vote and wear pants but we are not equal. Feminism is still
needed. Let’s go back to those myths: Feminists are…
Angry: Feminists may be angry sometimes, but if
you think of all the inequalities I just named and many
more I didn’t, can you blame us? Stupid: Some people are
smarter than others but being a feminist does not mean you
are stupid. Ugly: Feminists all look differently and believe
that physical beauty should not equate to a woman’s worth.
Annoying: It may be annoying for feminists to bug people
about inequality all the time. Give us our rights and we’ll
go away (maybe). Sexist: Female feminists can’t be sexist.
See above argument for more.