How must she be a feminist?
There are two groups of people who are scrambling to answer this question.
The first is the people
who wants to teach you all the precepts that you need to follow to obtain the badge from true feminist.
The second, but no less irritating group, are the people who are not feminists, but care to tell you how you should do activism, i.e. in moderation.
Excuse me, when you ask to be treated like human beings, could you do it in a lower voice, otherwise there is a risk that someone will hear you?
Getting out of the normativity box is not possible, no matter how serious your problem is, you have to try to solve it within the spaces that the heteropatriarchal system has kindly granted you.
After all, now women can vote, honour killings are no longer allowed and they made the remake of Ghostbusters with women, what more do you want?
In bottom line, when a black man rapes you, there will be thousands of social profiles ready to insult him and call for castration.
Now there are even people who are indignant about feminicides.
To ask more, is to ask too much.
What is permitted is to fight for rights already acquired, occasionally to complain, but always good-naturedly.
This may sound like an exaggeration, but the reality is not that far off.
If something moves people out of their comfort zone and causes them to reason about their privilege, the counterclaim of victimhood is either denied or ignored through benignism.
These attitudes of closure have been expressed even when faced with simple issues, a recent example being the responses to #Tell us¹, the initiative calling for a greater presence of women in the Covid emergency task forces.
After a deep breath, I went to read the comments under the photos of the people who joined the flash mob.
Of the many people who thought to criticise the initiative, most aimed to ridicule it, denying the existence of the problem or claiming that protesting in period was just a whim.
Nothing new, disempowerment is one of the favourite weapons of machismo.
But to read so many people claiming that “Evidently there were no women up to the task” in 2020 is still a blow to the heart.
But, if it is already too radical to explain that women are discriminated against on the basis of their gender and not on the basis of their skills, then what can feminism be about?
I think stopping asking the question of how one can tiptoe around activism can be a first step.
Stop seeking approval for battles, because the reality is that as long as you want to fight patriarchy by sticking to its rules, everything will remain as it is.
To beg for space and remain composed with our hand up waiting for them to stop ignoring us has never served any purpose, except to create a few laws on the emotional wave of some big media case.
But this does not change anything in substance.
And if the goal is to design a fairer society, without privileges and social stigmas, then being moderate is not only useless, it is even harmful.
Notes and Sources:
Chiara Bocci
Project Manager
