I’m not a feminist because I hate men. I’m a feminist because I hate my dad.
1. The idea the beauty industry sells us an ideal of unattainable beauty is a ruse and a puzzle piece of a larger conspiracy. The whole point is it’s attainable. If you didn’t think it was attainable, you wouldn’t buy the stuff. The whole “beauty standard” thing was probably invented by a 1980s executive who was setting the stage for a wave of self-esteem oriented marketing strategies 20 years in the future. The goal isn’t to be an ideal but to be a version of you that’s that much closer to being worthy of love.
2. Emotional manipulation is generally a blunt instrument when wielded by boys: “I feel bad and now it’s your problem.” Usually it isn’t even requisite to make some girl feel responsible for your nonsense. Be kind of distant and she’s already got her fourth extracurricular activity. She’s spreading herself thin but she’s committed to organizations and, if you play your cards right: you! What’s she getting out of it?
Maybe she’s bored. Maybe she wasn’t raised into a baseball card mentality of intelligence like her male counterpart, and doesn’t have the framework of collecting facts and books and the status that comes with the facts and books. So instead that mental energy goes to wondering about you. Just like how Matilda moved things with her mind because she was bored with the first grade. Of course, y’all aren’t as smart as Matilda Wormwood from Roald Dahl’s classic novel, “Matilda.” Boys wouldn’t be telekinetic if they weren’t so busy telling me “the thing” about the Israel-Palestine conflict.
So maybe she’s bored. Or maybe she’s tricking you.
Girls are wily. Boys can be tricked — and boy, are they. Dude, you’ll get in over your head and six months after the fact you’ll bolt up in your bed: “I’ve been had!” after some other girl tells you.
3. Mainstream feminist discourse dictates the man you should be afraid of is the dumb macho man, steeped in toxic masculinity. You fools, it’s the tricksters you need to keep an eye out for. If you know a boy heavily involved in social justice and feminist activism: RUN. They tell you it’s the guy who refuses to talk about his feelings that you should worry about when really it’s the one who will selectively reveal his feelings. Be doubly wary around your friend’s ex-boyfriend, who expresses his profound sympathy for women and their emotional labor. Or maybe you hate all your friends’ boyfriends, ex and otherwise. Of course you do! They’re taking valuable resources away from you.
4. When looking back on history, it’s incredible to think the pioneers of second-wave feminism made so many gains, and it would seem the main gain was earning the right to work. The first thing I would have asked for would have been the right to free stuff. Working? Let’s ignore the fact that women were already working, socioeconomic divides, Intersectional Feminism 2010, etc. Let’s think about the narrative of archival women with middle parts asking to go into the workforce. It can’t be. This has to be some kind of rewriting of history done by the Illuminati. The faction of the Illuminati that was originally planning to put Hillary Clinton in power and then ended up settling for building an industry around Tina Fey.
Maybe someday feminism will complete its ultimate mission in my mind: somebody’s got to mess up Woody Allen. It’s not that he married his ex-girlfriend’s adopted daughter (although: fair). It’s that “Annie Hall” is vastly overrated and I don’t like his face.
Charlotte Raskovich is a Humor editor. She can be reached at c.raskovich@cavalierdaily.com.
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