Feminist. There. I said it.

I’ve been thinking about starting this blog for a long time.

Some of you reading this may know me in real life, many of you may know me only online, probably due to one or more shared interests, some of you may not know me at all.

But what this blog is about... what I want you to know about me is... I’m a feminist. There. I said it.

And I’ll be honest here, I’ve shied away from saying it publicly for a long time. Because somehow, feminist/feminism has become a dirty word – successfully tarnished by the male patriarchy with accusations of humourlessness, jealousy, over-sensitivity, lesbianism, man-hating... etc etc etc.

And I’ll admit, I’ve been afraid of attracting those accusations/slurs if I came out and said the F-word about myself.

But here’s the thing. My eyes have been opened. And once that happens, you can’t go back. You can’t undo that awareness of inequality in every aspect of our society. And you can’t help but get angry about it and want to do something – anything – about it.

For me, the starting point was the No More Page 3 campaign. As soon as I heard about the campaign, I signed up straight away. For me, it was a no-brainer. As the campaign puts it, “boobs are not news”. How can it possibly be considered normal and acceptable and okay, in this day and age, to have soft porn images of women printed on a daily basis in a newspaper? An alleged “family newspaper”? Since when is soft porn “family” consumption? And what are we teaching our girls – and our boys – by accepting and normalising this daily dose of soft porn alongside the news? That men are dynamic, important individuals who feature throughout the newspaper, fully-clothed, doing important things – running the country, winning sports events, making big business decisions. And women? Well, women are basically just a nice pair of tits to have a quick ogle at whilst you read about all the important things men have been doing. We are teaching our daughters that a woman’s primary role and value is her sexual attractiveness and availability and we are teaching our sons that a woman is an object – a silent, biddable, propulsion system for a nice pair of knockers – of value/interest only in terms of how attractive she (or her boobs) is.

Page 3 makes me angry. And the fact that it has become so normalised and accepted that people can’t seem to see (or perhaps wilfully refuse to see) how damaging it is, how not freaking normal or acceptable it is, makes me even angrier. I fully support the No More Page 3 campaign... and not just because of the campaign itself and what it stands for but also because of where it has lead me. From following the NMP3 campaign on Facebook and Twitter etc, I’ve found myself reading more and more incredibly intelligent, articulate blogs and articles about a variety of feminist issues.

It’s also lead me to the Everyday Sexism Project and that was the real eye-opener for me. If you’ve never taken a look I highly suggest you do. And I defy anyone to read the user-submitted stories on there – stories not only of horrific sexual assault and abuse but also, more insidiously, of the constant torrent of discrimination and objectification on a daily basis, to which women are routinely subjected – and not open their eyes and realise that, despite all the advances of the past years, we are a looooong way from women being treated with anything like equality and feminism, far from being a dirty word, is still very badly needed and still has a lot to achieve.

How can we possibly say that feminism is no longer needed, that equality has “gone too far”, etc etc etc when I don’t know a single woman who has never been inappropriately touched/groped in a nightclub, when some men still think it’s perfectly acceptable to catcall/comment on a woman’s body as she walks down a public street (and then get offended/aggressive if she doesn’t like it), when rape victims get blamed for being raped because of what they were wearing, when male bosses still think it’s acceptable to joke “Who did you have to suck off to win that contract?” to a female employee, etc etc etc etc ad infinitum. And this behaviour is so commonplace and “normalised” that women are expected to just take it in their stride, just shrug it off, accept it as e.g. an occupational hazard of going out dancing in a nightclub. No! Why should we?!! Why should we have to?!!

I am a mum to two gorgeous, bright, funny, pretty, young daughters and, quite frankly, it bloody terrifies me to think about the world they are going to grow up in and the challenges they are going to face. From gender stereotyping of toys right from pre-school age teaching them that girls are only supposed to like pink and frilly things and not be interested in cars or rockets or “action” toys, to the constant media barrage of images telling them that to be successful they’ve got to be thin and attractive and sexy (and to appear “willing/available”), to the soft porn lads mags and “newspapers” like The Sun telling them that getting their tits out for the lads is an aspirational career choice, to boys at school pressuring them to sext and then using the threat of disseminating the pictures to pressure them into sexual acts, to the statistics that 1 in 3 women, worldwide, will be the victim of physical and/or sexual violence at some point in their life.

It doesn’t bear thinking about. And I need to do something about it. Even if that something is, right now, the small step of “coming out” and saying “Yes, I am a feminist and this is NOT acceptable”. With two small kids and no real childcare I can’t go to meetings and rallies but I can and will do what I can to spread the word of the NMP3 campaign and to share important links and stories on social media – and to blog about important stuff on here. I can't hope to be as eloquent and articulate as the many awesome blogs I see linked to from the NMP3 page but I shall do my best.

This first post has turned into a major rant but boy, it feels good to get that all off my chest (no pun intended).

 

And before I go, there's another thing I’ve shied away from doing and that is getting myself a NMP3 t-shirt. I’m 40, I’m overweight, and I freely admit that I worry that wearing a NMP3 t-shirt is going to open myself up to the kind of abuse that we so often see from Page 3 apologists (including The Sun themselves – remember how they aggressively ripped into Clare Short when she dared to challenge the validity of Page 3 back in 2004, calling her a fat jealous killjoy?), accusing me of being jealous because the Page 3 “girls” are slim and sexy and I just wish I looked like that etc etc.

Well, fuck it. I’m done with hiding and I’m done with being afraid of being attacked for my views. I stand by them and I believe in them. And I’ve ordered that NMP3 t-shirt and when it arrives I shall wear it with pride.

XX Ali