We Should All Be Feminists (Kindle Single) (A Vintage Short)

My own definition is a feminist is a man or a woman who says, yes, there’s a problem with gender as it is today and we must fix it, we must do better. All of us, women and men, must do better.

Feminist: a person who believes in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes.

Culture does not make people. People make culture. If it is true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we can and must make it our culture.

What is the point of culture? Culture functions ultimately to ensure the preservation and continuity of a people.

bottom power. (This is a Nigerian expression for a woman who uses her sexuality to get things from men.) But bottom power is not power at all, because the woman with bottom power is actually not powerful; she just has a good route to tap another person’s power. And then what happens if the man is in a bad mood or sick or temporarily impotent?

Gender and class are different. Poor men still have the privileges of being men, even if they do not have the privileges of being wealthy.

Some people will bring up evolutionary biology and apes, how female apes bow to male apes—that sort of thing. But the point is this: We are not apes. Apes also live in trees and eat earthworms. We do not.

Some men feel threatened by the idea of feminism. This comes, I think, from the insecurity triggered by how boys are brought up, how their sense of self-worth is diminished if they are not “naturally” in charge as men.

For centuries, the world divided human beings into two groups and then proceeded to exclude and oppress one group. It is only fair that the solution to the problem acknowledge that.