Some thoughts and feelings on the fear of calling yourself a feminist (and how Ellen Willis can help you with that) from yrs truly.
by Zan Romanoff
For many years I did not consider myself a feminist. If you had asked me I would have denied that I was one; I would have equivocated about “not being sure what that meant,” about equal rights vs. exceptionalism, about the various particular feminists I’d met or read and disagreed with. The quibbles themselves were more and less legitimate, but it would be a long time before I learned that picking holes in the argument and finding a nuanced little isle of opinion for myself wasn’t the point: if I couldn’t admit to being part of that messy, difficult, and yes, sometimes humorless tribe in the first place, all of my equivocating added up to very little: I was refining myself right out of the conversation by pretending that my voice didn’t belong there in the first place. I still wouldn’t want a place in Feminism as I imagined it (somehow both monolithic and incoherent), but that was an edifice I constructed out of whole cloth because I found feminism compelling but embarrassing and I wanted a smart way out of it, thanks.
Hey I wrote this!
(Also, from Dress Me to Girl Crush to the Paris Review Daily— couldn’t be more stoked to have been included in each of these publications.)
