Anti-Feminist Feminists: Huh?

She started as a cocky little know-it-all in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone when she was only a nipper, and is soon to be portraying one of the most iconic Disney Princess, like, ever.

Most recently however, she has used her voice as one of the most well known actresses on the planet as a dedicated crusader for feminism and equal rights. But the research she has done, the speeches she’s told and the differences she’s made are not what are being talked about at the moment.

No. It’s her tits.

Apparently, in 2017, a woman cannot possibly call herself a feminist and then have the temerity to get her baps out for a photoshoot in a prestigious fashion magazine.

Now, I wouldn’t label myself as a feminist necessarily – whether my beliefs would categorize me as one, I don’t know – but I absolutely agree with the “idea” that men and women are equal. Some men are shit, some women are shit, some men are amazing, some women are amazing; in my eyes there shouldn’t even be an acknowledgement of gender, race, religion, sexuality or anything else as we are all human beings – but I simply adore the men and women who do stand up and fight for equality for everybody. 

However, there’s always somebody who has to put 50p in the tosser. I have read a ridiculous amount of posts recently by “feminists” who appear to believe that Emma Watson is a “hypocrite” for showing a tiny bit of boob for her recent Vanity Fair shoot.

I may be a little sparse when it comes to the full background of the history of feminism but the last time I checked, feminism was about empowering other women. See, I was under this ‘apparent’ illusion that feminism was about embracing your womanly mystique, about inspiring younger women to be knowledgeable and successful, and about doing whatever the hell you wanted to do with your own body without fear of being ridiculed or raped.

But apparently, if we do want to call ourselves a feminist, then we simply can’t do all of the above. No, no. That would be absurd.

It would be utterly ridiculous to assume that you could be an intelligent woman and be beautiful. It would be laughable to assume that you could be successful in a respectable career and wear a bit of a slinky outfit. It would be completely nonsensical to assume that a woman could be empowering and influential, yet still flaunt a fraction of under-boob for a minimalistic and tasteful fashion shoot.

Honestly, have we gone bat-shit bonkers?

Are we really still so terrified of female nudity that we have to find any excuse to slander any woman who has the audacity to embrace the fact that she was born with breasts? Is it that these women intimidate us, and so in order to feel less inferior we have to degrade them to little more than a product for the wank bank?

Or maybe we just hate the fact if we do eventually concede to equality, then we’d have nothing to bitch about.

So sure, let’s slag off the woman who has dedicated years of her career to give herself an influential voice for women all over the world just because she showed some boob once.

Hell, why stop there? Why not scrap the idea of female empowerment altogether and just go back to when we were never even acknowledged as human beings?

Or better yet, we could just ignore the fact that women sometimes wear low-cut dresses, or have their photo’s taken with a few less clothes on than your every day shopping trip, or even – dare I say – talk about anything sexual in public without fear of “great offence”, and we could just love the shit out of each other.

You could tell that girl you’ve never met in the toilets of a nightclub that her make up is banging. You could tell that girl in the gym that she’s a badass. You could tell that girl at work that she’s charismatic as shit and she makes you laugh so much that you wee a little bit.

There’s enough hatred in this world at the moment to make us all give up any hope for a future with world peace and double rainbows.

Don’t incite hatred; fight it.

21st Century Living: It's All Downhill From Here

It’s difficult to live your life now without proving that you’re doing it properly by posting every move on social media. We all moan about it, we all cringe at other people’s posts, and we’re all just as guilty for doing it. Heck, I can’t remember the last time I had a cuddle with my dog and didn’t post it as my Snapchat Story, Instagram Story and on my Instagram Feed.

The thing is though; do any of us really care about other people’s day-to-day activities? Of course we want to see what our best friends are doing on their gap yah’s, what emotional memes our mum’s are posting because they “share because they love their daughter”, what incoherent comments our grandparents are posting on our friends mum’s doctor’s facebook wall asking how the kids are, and even the obnoxiously large meal that one skinny girl is claiming to eat while you writhe with jealousy because you’ve just put four pounds on looking at it and she’s still a size 8 angel. 

But do we really care? The truth is – yes, we do.

We care because we want to know that we are living life as well as everybody else. In the world of social media, if you’re not posting fancy cocktails/lip-syncing videos with your pals/pictures of your steering wheel while driving – might I add, very fucking dangerous – then you’re not doing anything remotely enjoyable because you’re not flaunting it. We all want our peers to know that we are living a happy and fulfilled life, but is our narcissistic desire to flaunt our activities to the people we don’t really know outside of Facebook turning our real-life relationships into little more than a social puppet show?

In previous years, I’ve been for meals with groups of friends and not had a single conversation with any more depth than “have you seen so and so’s new car?” while languidly turning their phone around to show me the new wheels of somebody I’ve only ever seen on someone else’s news feed. However, I look on my Facebook feed after returning home and there are countless posts on how perfectly loquacious we’d been: “had the best lunch with my girls, haven’t laughed so much in ages xxxxxx #bestfriends #lunching #dayout”. When in reality, what they should have posted should have been something like this: “sat at a table for two hours on my phone posting about how much fun I was having rather than actually speaking #facebooksimportant #lookhowmuchfunimhaving #legitfriendshiprighthere #dontbelievemelookheresapictureofmyfood #ilaughedatapictureofacatfor2.5seconds”.

I’ve even seen young, attractive couples dolled up to the nines for a romantic evening in a beautiful restaurant with their phones so close to their face their corneas had their own keyboard. The majority of their evening dominated by taking 15 different pictures of each course, (if they’re lucky, they might even get their other half’s fancy watch in it), checking to see how many likes it had, and messaging their group chat about a football game or the last episode of Pretty Little Liars – before paying a bill of £85 for merely advertising the restaurant with a million hashtags of #datenight followed by a detailed description of each course.

Before I go too far in preaching holier than thou: I am guilty for it. Anybody who has me on any social media site will know that I am regularly posting pictures of my dog, plugs for my blog posts, and even the occasional selfie if my brow game is on point – but chances are I’m sitting in my pants eating peanut butter out of the jar so there is nobody there to neglect except for my own self-worth.

I spend a lot of time at home by the fire, I wear pyjamas more than actual clothes and I very rarely go out on the lash because my pathetic little liver will punish me before I’ve even left the house; but regardless of how content I am with being an eternally sleepy and anti-social hermit, I still envy the girls I see on weekends away with their boyfriends, or lunching with their best friend, or driving their sexy new wheels, and it makes my life appear to be that little bit less adequate. This compulsive desire to post monotonous hashtags to appear remotely interesting to others is not only making us envy the photographers of the better Instagram posts, but neglect the blessings that we already have.

Over the years, social media has developed from a convenient place to store photo’s and share your holidays with the family members you can’t be bothered to call, into a momentous, pansophical entity that thrives on our curiosity into the lives of strangers and our ignorance to the family sitting right next to us. Facebook, Snapchat, Skype and even Tinder mean we no longer have to venture outside of our house to socialise with anybody more than a few feet away, and this is our way of developing and maintaining a mountain of new relationships (yet often disposable).

It has its blessings of course, it means I can see my oldest friends bringing up their children, I can keep contact with friends I was once close with and know that we can still meet up if we want to, and I can get new make up tekkers by watching complete strangers pull stupid faces into a camera while blending their foundation and blinking too many times.

But it also means that we miss the important things. We can neglect our friends who are trying to talk to us about something important, we can lose days with our grandparents who just want to have a good old-fashioned conversation, and we can miss a movie revelation that is critical to the storyline so we end up pissing everyone off by asking why Gerard Butler looks like he’s just smelled a nasty fart.

I guess we need balance in every element of our lives, and this is one of them. The world won’t suddenly become a buzzing euphoria of flash mobs and conversations with strangers on public transport because some opinionated 23-year-old decided to rant about one time she went for dinner and didn’t get much attention, but if we all manage to find that balance somewhere within our own reason, then maybe, just maybe, technology won’t fully take over the world.

I doubt it though.

Mental Health: The Taboo No Longer

Being in your twenties and dealing with mental health is more common than you think these days. All you have to do is scroll through a few Tumblr posts or click on to a few articles from The Debrief and there is non-stop discussion about how to deal with depression, anxiety and other mental health issues that were formerly taboo.

The fact that what was once so fiercely shameful and private is now so prominent in day-to-day conversation is, I think, one of the most incredible things to come out of this generation. There are now countless charities and discussions about how to help those in emotional turmoil because their mind won’t stop telling them that nobody cares, and that is a wonderfully empowering thing.

I’m not claiming to have suffered with serious depression or anxiety or even compare myself to the severity that others experience, because I’m fortunate enough to have never been in a situation where I’ve truly felt like there was no way out. However, I have been in a situation where my head would simply not stop telling me that no matter what was happening, nobody gave a shit.

When I was 19 years old my parents split up, and although it was foreseeable, it didn’t make it any easier. We moved out of our family home that we had lived in for 16 years, and a divorce ensued. Shortly after, I moved into a new house at Uni with three friends I’d spent my entire first year with, but the honeymoon period was swiftly cut short when we had a monumental fall out and I ended up moving out, five months into our one year tenancy. At this point, I was alternating shelter at my then-boyfriend’s Uni house, one friend’s sofa and another friend’s bedroom when she went home on weekends. Not long after the divorce proceedings started, both parents then developed new relationships and my Uni grades were catastrophically falling.

I was at that point, and even today, very aware that although all of the above was difficult and all quite shitly timed, it would be categorized as a mere inconvenience in comparison to the problems of some of my other friends, who were going through traumas that were so incredibly worse than my own.

It was this mantra that made me tell myself on a daily basis that my problems were miniscule, and burdening my friends with such pitiful sob stories when they were fighting much stronger battles was utterly laughable. There were times where I tried to disclose my growing helplessness with select few individuals, but was often met with the terms “negativity spreads, you know”, or “at least you’ve got your health”. At that point though, I was truly beginning to feel like I didn’t.

It was at this point that I decided to take up counselling that was being offered to me by my University, and as relieving as it was to talk to somebody completely impartial, I knew in my head that I wouldn’t truly begin to feel better until I hit my lowest.

This followed shortly after.

I was back at my mum’s new house for Easter, and there was one night in particular where I’d argued with both my mum and my boyfriend – the only two people that I really spoke to about my situation. I was beginning to feel utterly helpless and even more frustrated because I felt like nobody understood. I spent the evening having an almighty battle with myself, rocking myself on the floor while crying floods of tears trying to fight the voice that just would not stop saying, “you could just end it all now you know, stop burdening others with your shit and just get it over with”.

That voice very nearly won that night - and a few nights thereafter - but I knew that this was it; this was my rock bottom. From that point on, I could win.

Looking back, I think I always was a bit of an oddball. Even as a child I reacted in the most awkward and embarrassing way possible to situations that most people would be able to simply shrug off – but people still loved me. I grew up with three best friends who lived next door; I had amazing friendship groups moving from first school to middle school, and middle school to high school; and from travelling at 18 and even through university and my working life thereafter, my life has been blessed with so many wonderful people whom I adore, who love me, and who – without even knowing it – pushed me through my darkest point.

I mean sure, I’m still a little bit weird; my mind is like a toilet, my language is foul and I’m one almighty needy fucker, but everybody has their own quirks, right?

The long and short of it is, no matter how widely mental health is recognised, it’s still happening; and it’s still happening because people think that their problems aren’t big enough to talk about. Well, if it’s doing anything other than making you enjoy the shit out of your life, then it’s big enough to talk about.

One major cliché we all come across in day-to-day life or on one of those wall stickers from Amazon that everybody has, is that “life is short” - and if 2016 taught me anything (by taking away my beloved Alan Rickman) it’s that this cliché is spot fucking on.

So talk about it. If you’ve lost your job, ended your relationship, struggling to find your feet or Aunt Flo is just taking the absolute piss with your hormones, then talk about it. The conversation might even end with a bag of minstrels – bonus.

Talk about it. Talk to your mum, dad, brother, sister, best friend, boyfriend, girlfriend, doctor or dog - even if you don’t want to do that, then talk to me. I understand, but they will too.

Writing this post wasn’t one of the easiest decisions I’ve ever made. This isn’t a topic I write about lightly and it wasn’t something I particularly wanted to be thrown across my Facebook feed for anybody to indulge in.

I may resent myself for telling you this story, I may re-read this in a few days and kick myself, and I may regret opening up that part of me again; but if there is one person who reads this relates to it and even uses it as ammunition to fight their own battle that little bit harder, then it was all totally worth it.