Do I Dress Feminist Enough?
For better or for worse, a good deal of my internet presence was shaped by Tumblr. Specifically, Tumblr 2012-2014, aka The Golden Years. It was there, at the incredibly malleable age of 19, that I became aware of the concept of social justice, and, through comics calling out white privilege and memes explaining non-binarism, started down a path to radicalization that kinda enveloped my personality for a good while.
As a sex worker, at the time, of course, I focused the majority of my attention on feminism: mostly the question of whether sex work was “empowering” or if I, in the way I chose to make a living, was doing women and our global fight for equity some kind of disservice.
That topic has been hashed and rehashed to death, so, I won’t get into it, here, but, with the resurgence of conversations about whether a woman’s individual choices can be considered feminist and the insistence on reducing said choices (and, indeed, women themselves) to “for the male gaze” or “for the female gaze,” we are, once again, confronted with the sad fact that what passes for feminism here on the internet is truly, sadly, kinda f*cked.
Maybe I was naive to think we were past the whole “eyeliner sharp enough to kill a man” brand of feminism that was rampant back in 2012-2014, only for that very Tumblr post to re-emerge as a Taylor Swift lyric in the year of our Lord 2022. Having been conscious for both the rejection of beautification and femininity as the pinnacle of feminism and the wild swing into not just embracing but exaggerating traditionally feminine presentation, also as the pinnacle of feminism, I have to ask: How exactly does a feminist dress?
The History
You know those quotes that you randomly remember and immediately go to pieces laughing? Jenifer Lewis’s character in Black-ish proclaiming "I couldn't afford to burn my bra — I only had the one!” in The Big Feminism episode is that for me. But, beneath the hilarity of Ms. Lewis’s delivery lies a very necessary conversation about intersectionality in feminism, or, rather, a frequent lack of it.
The line itself is, of course, referencing a famous 1968 protest of the Miss America pageant where it was reported that dozens of women were burning their bras. The problem is: that never happened. What did happen was protestors were told to bring “objects of female torture” and symbolically throw them into the “Freedom Trash Can.” According to witnesses, one woman took her bra off from underneath her shirt and tossed it in to wild applause. There was no burning—it was illegal on the boardwalk where the protest was held—and there were plenty of other things in the trash can, including lipstick, mops, and heels, but, still, thanks to one line from a female journalist trying to cover the protest while still satisfying her male editors’ desire for some salacious story about hysterical women, the bra-burning feminist became a pejorative that has stood the test of time.
The line, by the way, was: “Lighting a match to a draft card or a flag has been a standard gambit of protest groups in recent years, but something new is due to go up in flames this Saturday. Would you believe a bra burning?” Funny how the simple parallel between a well-established form of protest done primarily by men (burning draft cards) and the idea of a protest done by women was so easily turned into a way to insult any woman who dared fight for her rights, huh?