On boundaries

I am down right fed up and angry today. The anger isn’t a sudden thing, it has always been there, but today I read something in the Guardian that brought it back into the open. I have always described myself as a feminist, ever since I became political animal. For that reason ‘I’m not a feminist, but …’ are five of the most depressing words to be found in sequence in the English language, especially when used by my students, who seem to think all the battles have been won and think we live in a ‘post-feminist society’. On top of that, there has been a steady drip, drip of worrying news for women, particularly in relation to pregnancy, employment rights and opportunities for women in minority groups, but equally insidious is the rise of ‘raunch culture’ and its knock on effects. Just after Christmas, the Guardian published a small piece in its ‘Women’ section on ‘Random acts of feminism‘ that kept me smiling for a couple of days, largely because I’d turned round all the lads mags in the service station shop on the way to my parents for Christmas. However, such small acts of defiance have never been enough and after another semester of female students using what I now refer to as ‘five words banned in sequence’, combined with an atmosphere of sexism in the archery club Reivers and I attend that, at times, has made me feel incredibly uncomfortable, and latent (not so latent?) misogyny in other areas of my life, I have joined the Fawcett Society and will be encouraging other men and women of my acquaintance. I think I will also buy a job lot of Jackie Fleming cartoon postcards and distribute them around the place (particularly the archery club).