We Need Feminism

“Why do we even need feminism?”

There’s only one way to answer a question like that.

We need feminism because the bra strap of a 13 year-old makes her 45 year old maths teacher uncomfortable. We need feminism because when my 7 year old cousin came home with a black eye, the school excused it by saying “boys will be boys”. We need feminism because there are countries where young girls are mutilated for the crime of being born a woman. We need feminism because women are still objectified by men and treated as prizes in order to demonstrate dominance. We need feminism because people still believe that a woman’s appearance is more important than any other of her qualities. We need feminism because young girls are shot for trying to obtain an education. We need feminism because trans-women are still being told that they aren't “really women”. We need feminism because the most offensive thing you could tell a child is that they are “like a girl”. We need feminism because gender roles are still forced upon us. We need feminism because every day young girls are being married to men three times their age. We need feminism because girls are constantly forced into competition with one another. We need feminism because young girls are still being solved into the sex and slavery trade. We need feminism because women are judged for the same activities that men are praised for.

I am aware of how privileged I am. I am a white, cis-gendered; heterosexual from a middle class background in a first world country- I am extremely lucky. I have never been abused for my skin colour, or the people I love- I have never gone hungry- I have never been threatened by societies expectations of me. However I am a woman, which means that I am at a disadvantage in the world’s patriarchal society. However because of all of the other attributes I have on my side, I am not faced with the worse end of the bargain and because of these advantages in the first world many other people are convinced that “we don’t need feminism”. And to some extent they’re right, in the society I live in I am not worse off- I can get an education, I am not forced into marrying an older man and I am not threatened with FGM daily.

However there are women who are threatened with these things. There are women who are killed for defending their basic rights as human beings. There are trans-gendered women who can’t even use the bathroom designated to women. Girls are turned into sex objects and forced into industries that promote their sexualisation. But these women don’t have a position to voice their problems; they aren't at as high an advantage as women like myself and many of you. Why would you waste that advantage by not fighting for you fellow females and their rights to the benefits that we have? These women don’t have the platform that we have. By fighting the problems we are faced with like the objectification, health and rape of women we are able to slowly raise awareness to the sexism of our society and the patriarchy we live under and once that has been accomplished we can apply this on a much wider, more revolutionary way. We need to fix the immediate problems in order to gain the power to fix the global problem.

We must follow in the footsteps of Maya Angelou, of Virginia Woolf, of Malala Yousafzai. These incredible women have given us a spark, a starting point, a platform for change and now we must use it.