Why I’m tired of qualifying myself as the right kind of feminist

One time in my Spanish class, my professor asked us if we knew how to cook.

One of my peers responded with the claim that he did not possess this particular skill, as his mother and sister did all the cooking in his household. Going around the class, the consensus seemed to be that all the males didn’t cook and all the females did.

Except for me.

Now, am I capable of cooking? Of course. If you know how to read and your arms are functional, you can cook. The back of macaroni and cheese boxes are usually in English and do not use especially confusing language, so you should be able to manage that, even if you are saddled with the burden of male genitalia.

But just because I have the capacity to cook doesn’t mean that I do. Aside from macaroni and cheese, my repertoire includes scrambled eggs and frozen chicken nuggets, and sometimes I just microwave those. But I know that if I really tried I could probably become at the very least competent at it, so I am not going to make the claim that I can’t cook, just that I don’t, and that the men in the class were likely in the same poisition.

To my surprise, this stance was met with some degree of surprise and derision. As the only female who was not confident in my cooking abilities, it seems that I had failed, somehow. But I stood by it, because it was true, and I wasn’t too worried that my comments would make me unwifeable to any of my classmates.

Now this may seem relatively inconsequential. Who cares whether or not someone thinks they can cook? If that is in fact the case, these people will probably perish from starvation the minute there is not an available female to feed them. And one by one, the ignorance in the world will die out and all that will be left will be equal rights and lots of people making mac and cheese.

But that is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the kinds of questions, comments, and attitudes people have so generously offered about my beliefs.

“So if you’re a feminist does that mean you’re going to get mad if I open the door for you?”

“But don’t you think women are already equal?”

“Really? But you seemed cool.”

“Men might have some advantages over women, but women have a lot of advantages and opportunities that men don’t have.”

“Oh, so is that why you’re single?”

“Well you’re not the bad kind of feminist, are you?”

This last question is especially troublesome.

It is a classification I have encountered quite frequently, but that does not make it any less absurd. When I get to know someone and they realize that I am not in fact some kind of man-hating ogre, they often charitably offer the concession that I am not the “bad” kind of feminist.

From what I have gathered, it seems that the “bad” kind of feminist is one who believes that women are not equal but superior to men and will bite the head off of anyone who believes otherwise. She not only rejects but is angered by any offers of help from the opposite sex, whether it be opening a door or paying for dinner. One must beware of this kind of feminist, as the volume of her rantings have been known to cause hearing loss, and her grotesquely makeup-free face and masculine haircut sometimes provoke nausea in those who gaze upon them.

I would argue, however, that this kind of feminist is a lot like Bigfoot. I’ve never seen one personally, and I don’t know hardly anyone who has, even those who believe they exist. There might be one or two roaming around out there, eager to squash your manhood with their big, hairy feet. Because there’s probably SOME reason the myth exists, right?

But from what I can tell, they live more in the minds of the Internet and your crazy uncle who goes on drunken rants at Thanksgiving than in reality. But the myth is powerful, because people are afraid. Some (not all, by any means) men seem to view women who believe in and are vocal about gender equality as a threat to their own masculinity and position within society, while some women are reluctant to identify as feminists for fear of being classified as the “bad” kind, for which they would surely be ostracized and forced to live like a hermit in the woods with Bigfoot.

My question at this point is why we must cling to the myth of the Bigfoot feminist. Who is that helping? It makes me sad because it gets in the way of real discourse about equality and gender roles, and it makes men sad because they feel like I’m out to get them. But I’m not, even if I would like them to admit that they could probably make mac and cheese, and neither is anyone who has a real claim to the designation of feminist.

If you do encounter someone whose “feminism” makes you feel as though your gender is somehow being attacked, just know that she is not representative of the large majority of feminists. We are kind of nice and do not like to yell or shame people. We have brothers and husbands and dads and friends and dogs whom we love very much. Nobody stands to gain anything from putting down another group of people, so let’s all just stop doing that and focus on things that really matter, like working towards a world in which no one faces obstacles or suffering because of the sexual organs they happened to be born with. Or perhaps trying to find the real Bigfoot.

Because I have seen more evidence of him than I have of the “bad” kind of feminist.