Feminist Concerns

I've been spending quite a lot of time browsing through feminist sites and getting more confused with every passing day. Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined what passes for feminism today. So I made a list of the most pressing feminist concerns (according to the amount of attention paid to them in the feminist media):

1. The absolute winner is a defense of "natural" home births. Women who choose to give birth at a hospital or even have (the horror! the horror!) a scheduled C-section are presented as the devil (at worst) or not really women (at best).

2. The second favorite topic is weight. I read some version of the sentence "Society stigmatizes every woman who is bigger than size 2" a scary number of times. As a woman who has been wearing size 12 for years, I can say that this statement is a wild exaggeration. Not only do I not feel stigmatized for my weight, I would never agree to being a size 2.

Another popular chant within this issue is that excessive weight doesn't cause health problems. I have seen several very well-argued and detailed articles proving that even weighing 300 lbs does not harm you in any way. Since I'm not a health professional and know nothing about the subject, I'll reserve my opinion to the time when/if I know more.

3. Defense of male circumcision. Sometimes, it even transforms into a defense of female circumcision (a polite term for female genital mutilation). Yes, I kid you not, feminists today do not necessarily condemn FGM. Some are ready to accept this practice as a perfectly acceptable alternative way of being female.

4. Defense of breastfeeding until the child is at least 2. Yet again, women who can't/choose not to are presented as a lesser kind of women.

5. The right to fake an orgasm I already discussed in this blog.

6. The right not to shave your legs (I mean, seriously? Still?? No more important concerns have surfaced in the decades we have been discussing pressing issue?)

7. Cosmopolitan magazine as an embodiment of the new type of feminism. Anybody who has ever opened this silly rag would know how stupid it is to equate it with feminism. This admiration of Cosmo and Sex and the City as feminist contradicts the whole "fat is beautiful" rhetoric but nobody seems to care.

Visiting these feminist websites and blogs has left me confused and disoriented. If this is feminism, then I'm definitely something different.

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