Feminism and The Negative Idea on The Gender Theory

Feminism is an umbrella term for many theories, but the central idea is that feminist theory emphasizes equality between the gender binary, and how the experiences of women are reflected in society. In the early days, feminism focused on defining sex and gender, and the differences between them. Many conventional ideas regarding societal gender norms were challenged, and the broader ideas of what sex and gender really are were questioned.

In the last couple years, there seems to have been a resurge in the ideas feminism. Women have started to realize how unfairly they have been treated in many facets of life, including the workspace, the federal government, and just society in general. More powerful and influential women started to speak out about these issues, and celebrities spoke out about it during events that would certainly get their voices heard. Patricia Arquette made her Academy Awards acceptance speech about the pay gap between the genders, Beyonce included a whole segment in one of her concert tours about feminism empowering women, and these actions inspired many other celebrities to speak out.

However, despite all of the positive ideas of feminism, it comes with a lot of backlash. In popular culture, especially on social media, people that identify as a feminist are believed to hate men and to only care about women, which is literally the total opposite of what the word means.

I have personally seen so many awful comments directed to both men and women that are feminists, and it’s upsetting to me because I know it all stems from ignorance of what the feminist ideals actually are. Yes, there are people that may take things too far, but I do not think that the unnecessarily radical actions of few should invalidate the pure and good intentions of many.

There have even been people that claim to be “meninists,” which is a really sad group of men that think feminism is making them seem inferior to women, so they feel that they need to reassert their dominance in society even though it so clearly obviously exists. One simple google search could show people that feminism is, in fact, “the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary). The fact that equality has been reduced to a theory and not just plain fact is sad enough, so having people that are so strongly against feminism shows how much work our society still has to do to inform people on what is right and how to work together cohesively.

Feminist theory was started in the 1970’s and its goal was to normalize women and to put men, women, and all genders on the same plane in society. Now, 46 years later, it seems as though almost nothing has changed. If feminism were viewed by many as a positive thing instead of negative, I think that our society could really move forward and improve exponentially.

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