I am woman, hear me roar

When I first signed up for Women Studies, I didn’t quite know what to expect. Sure, I believed in equal rights for women in the workplace, but I’d never thought about women’s rights much more than that. After all, I didn’t really see any other gender inequalities. What did I have to fight for? It isn’t the 1950’s anymore. However, I quickly started to change my thinking. In fact, it was the questionnaire on the first day of class that made me begin to reevaluate my views. Actually, it made a little uncomfortable to think about gender issues in that way. Over the course of time, however, several of the articles we read really had me thinking: “Is gender inequality still as prevalent today as it was fifty years ago?” Yes, it is, I found out. With this newfound knowledge, I found myself – albeit subtly – changing how I believed and even acted around others. I was a bit quicker to call people out when they would make a sexist joke or saying something negative about the opposite sex, regardless of the gender of the person speaking. That is something else that was truly surprising: I always believed that most feminists hated men and believed them to be the reason for all our troubles. That’s absolutely not the case. Most feminists believe in true gender equality, with neither sex putting down the other. After all, that’s counter-productive.

The “Tough Guise” movie was my favorite thing we looked at in the class, as I knew many guys who acted like that, and it made so much more sense that it was as detrimental to the quest for gender equality as extreme feminist is.

I used to think that those who were always advocating for gender rights or boycotting a certain ad because of its “sexist connotations” were just unhappy people who had a need to complain about everything. I had since learned that this is not true at all. They only want males and females to be truly equal, and they realize that today’s pop culture does nothing to help them with that.

With my understanding that gender inequality still exists, I can go out and help change how men and women view other by not allowing those around me to be sexist – even jokingly – and not letting my friends believe that, just because they don’t fit in with the media’s idea of what a woman looks and like, then they are not a true woman.