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What happened when I started a feminist society at my school

by ArticlesStorytelling

This article was originally featured in The Guardian. You can read the full article here. 

I am 17 years old and I am a feminist. I believe in gender equality, and am under no illusion about how far we are from achieving it. Identifying as a feminist has become particularly important to me since a school trip I took to Cambridge last year.

A group of men in a car started wolf-whistling and shouting sexual remarks at my friends and me. I asked the men if they thought it was appropriate for them to be abusing a group of 17-year-old girls. The response was furious. The men started swearing at me, called me a bitch and threw a cup coffee over me.

 

For those men we were just legs, breasts and pretty faces. Speaking up shattered their fantasy, and they responded violently to my voice.

Shockingly, the boys in my peer group have responded in exactly the same way to my feminism.

After returning from this school trip I started to notice how much the girls at my school suffer because of the pressures associated with our gender. Many of the girls have eating disorders, some have had peers heavily pressure them into sexual acts, others suffer in emotionally abusive relationships where they are constantly told they are worthless.

I decided to set up a feminist society at my school, which has previously been named one of “the best schools in the country”, to try to tackle these issues. However, this was more difficult than I imagined as my all-girls school was hesitant to allow the society. After a year-long struggle, the feminist society was finally ratified.

What I hadn’t anticipated on setting up the feminist society was a massive backlash from the boys in my wider peer circle. They took to Twitter and started a campaign of abuse against me. I was called a “feminist bitch”, accused of “feeding [girls] bullshit”, and in a particularly racist comment was told “all this feminism bull won’t stop uncle Sanjit from marrying you when you leave school”.

Our feminist society was derided with retorts such as, “FemSoc, is that for real? #DPMO” [don’t piss me off] and every attempt we made to start a serious debate was met with responses such as “feminism and rape are both ridiculously tiring”.

The more girls started to voice their opinions about gender issues, the more vitriolic the boys’ abuse became. One boy declared that “bitches should keep their bitchiness to their bitch-selves #BITCH” and another smugly quipped, “feminism doesn’t mean they don’t like the D, they just haven’t found one to satisfy them yet.” Any attempt we made to stick up for each other was aggressively shot down with “get in your lane before I par [ridicule] you too”, or belittled with remarks like “cute, they got offended”.

I fear that many boys of my age fundamentally don’t respect women. They want us around for parties, banter and most of all sex. But they don’t think of us as intellectual equals, highlighted by accusations of being hysterical and over sensitive when we attempted to discuss serious issues facing women.

The situation recently reached a crescendo when our feminist society decided to take part in a national project called Who Needs Feminism. We took photos of girls standing with a whiteboard on which they completed the sentence “I need feminism because…”, often delving into painful personal experiences to articulate why feminism was important to them.

When we posted these pictures online we were subject to a torrent of degrading and explicitly sexual comments.

We were told that our “militant vaginas” were “as dry as the Sahara desert”, girls who complained of sexual objectification in their photos were given ratings out of 10, details of the sex lives of some of the girls were posted beside their photos, and others were sent threatening messages warning them that things would soon “get personal”.

We, a group of 16-, 17- and 18-year-old girls, have made ourselves vulnerable by talking about our experiences of sexual and gender oppression only to elicit the wrath of our male peer group. Instead of our school taking action against such intimidating behaviour, it insisted that we remove the pictures. Without the support from our school, girls who had participated in the campaign were isolated, facing a great deal of verbal abuse with the full knowledge that there would be no repercussions for the perpetrators.

It’s been over a century since the birth of the suffragette movement and boys are still not being brought up to believe that women are their equals. Instead we have a whole new battleground opening up online where boys can attack, humiliate, belittle us and do everything in their power to destroy our confidence before we even leave high school.

It is appalling that an institution responsible for preparing young women for adult life has actively opposed our feminist work. I feel like the school is not supporting its girls in a crucial part of their evolution into being strong, assertive, confident women. If that’s the case for a well-established girls’ school, what hope does this generation of women have in challenging the misogyny that still pervades our society?

If you thought the fight for female equality was over, I’m sorry to tell you that a whole new round is only just beginning.

 Altrincham Grammar made the following comment about the feminist society:

“Altrincham Grammar School for Girls has supported Jinan in setting up the society, providing administrative assistance, guidance and proactively suggesting opportunities to help members to explore this issue which they feel passionately about.

“We are committed to protecting the safety and welfare of our students, which extends to their safety online. We consider very carefully any societies that the school gives its name and support to.

“As such, we will take steps to recommend students remove words or images that they place online that could compromise their safety or that of other students at the school.”

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It’s time for Muslim women to embrace vulnerability

by ArticlesStorytelling

This article was originally featured in gal-dem. You can read the original article here. 

Recently an image of a woman, Saffiyah Khan, protecting another Muslim woman went viral. In this photo, Saffiyah is seen standing up to a raging EDL protester, unphased by the abuse being hurled at her. This image has fast become a symbol of Muslim women’s resistance to Islamophobia. Saffiyah was defending a fellow Muslim woman in a threatening situation and she should be applauded for her bravery. But we should not restrict ourselves to solely celebrating Muslim women’s defiance.

Women in broader society have begun embracing the value of vulnerability and Muslim women also need the space to express their whole selves. In a TED talk that went viral in 2010, American Professor Brene Brown explained the power of vulnerability. In her research, she explains that “we associate vulnerability with emotions we want to avoid such as fear, shame, and uncertainty. Yet we too often lose sight of the fact that vulnerability is also the birthplace of joy, belonging, creativity, authenticity, and love.” This message had a profound impact on women all over the world, with her talk racking up almost 30 million views.

“But this defensiveness shuts down the space that Muslim women should be allowed in order to question things”

For Muslim women, however, it still feels too dangerous to be vulnerable. Hate crimes have doubled since Brexit, and Muslim women who wear headscarves are particularly at risk. In March, the European court of justice ruled to ban the hijab in the workplace. With attacks from all sides, Muslim women around Europe, understandably responded with fervour, protesting outside the French embassy in London in March, and across Sweden on International Workers’ Day.

As others tried to threaten or control them, Muslim women answered with the defence of symbols like the headscarf – extolling its virtues, celebrating it as a form of liberation, and protecting it as a core part of their faith. But this defensiveness shuts down the space that Muslim women should be allowed in order to question things like the headscarf, to wonder if it is the right choice for them, and even to change their minds about whether or not they want to embrace it.  

The need to present a unified front in the face of challenges to their identity is stifling Muslim women. Muslim women deserve to have a space to explore their multifaceted identities. They should be afforded the same nuance that others are given. They should not feel like they have to carry the weight of defending Islam on their shoulders and silence the parts of themselves that are uncertain in the process. It is time to develop spaces where vulnerability is allowed, accepted, and celebrated alongside defiance.

“Muslim women are complex, multidimensional, and have layers of identities”

A recently published anthology entitled The Things I Would Tell You: British Muslim Women Speak, is a valuable start. This anthology, filled with poems, plays, articles and short stories celebrates the art created by a variety of Muslim women in all media. It is not prescriptive, it does not make every writer talk about their experiences of being a British Muslim woman. Instead, it offers a space and platform for Muslim women to openly express their vulnerabilities through their art. The anthology showed that Muslim women are complex, multidimensional, and have layers of identities. They’re not one monolithic force.

I have been embracing my own vulnerability by sharing my own experiences. I wore a headscarf for years. I defended it to the hilt when people questioned it – despite being unhappy with wearing it. Then I decided to take it off. As a result, I felt like I had lost a part of myself, and like I had betrayed my family and my Muslim friends. Living as a Muslim woman can be a wonderful thing, but it can also be frustrating, complicated and confusing. Admitting that makes me feel stronger.