Perfection

I think people tend to expect this of each other. I was scrolling through the "feminism" tag recently, and there was a lot of criticism in there- fair criticism.

The feminist movement is not perfect. It never has been. It probably never will be. Neither is its opposition, and nor will it be. Criticism is fine, yes, but sometimes I feel like it takes the vein of imperfections in a movement being used to work against it and to claim that the movement is useless, not working properly, or full of shit (especially when those criticisms aren't even valid, but that's another can of worms).

I think I have been especially guilty of this. I don't take criticism well. I never have, but I'd like to think that someday I will. I take everything too personally. It's one of the things I don't like about myself and is my biggest stumbling block.

The reason I was thinking about this was because of those posts that say "don't bully anyone, being mean to anyone is wrong!" because on one hand I think people who apply this attitude to feminism are massively missing the point but on the other hand, I still feel like some part of their argument has validity. This is mostly because of the kids in middle school who thought it was okay to make me feel like shit because I came from a family that was well off. While I can understand that my being bullied about this was not the same as facing disadvantages that actively held me back (b/c coming from a family that has money to support me gives me advantages and thus privilege, which I am immensely grateful for), I can still acknowledge that what they did was not cool and they shouldn't have been doing it. I'm still not sure how to apply this to feminism, but I'm sure it has its place.

Perhaps it's that actively making men feel bad for being men is a bad idea? I'm not sure if I do that as a feminist- I really hope not. Obviously there's nothing wrong with being male, my problem is with the societal ideal (and the one you see commonly presented in media of all sorts) of what it means to be male. I think a lot of people subscribe to that ideal and that worries me. And then obviously there's real men who have been shitty by living out that ideal (and by, say, being abusive) when they're smart enough to know better. Men aren't stupid, and I guess perhaps feminism doesn't give them enough credit. I think perhaps it's important to recognize the line between shitty masculinity and shitty men, or something along those lines?

It's late. I'm not entirely sure what I'm talking about, and I've been listening to a mix of pop songs I made on youtube for the past two hours. It's fascinating how all these songs from different time periods in my life comes together to present an amalgamation of something that resembles how I see myself.

yer pal,
swegan