By Amapola Solidarios
Everything today is an archetype. A trend, or a passing fad, if it’s lucky enough to capture more than five minutes of fame in the effervescent attention of the masses.
Carrying the certain suffix of -core or some other diminutive that minimizes the gravity held by tangible words that carry real-world weight, falling victim to social media simplification to garner traction by way of virtual validation.
This has happened to practically any form of social phenomena at this point with the prevalence of aestheticism and the general lack of sincerity people treat anything under the sun with.
Unfortunately, feminism did not elude this fate.
When discussing feminism, there’s no avoidance of the words girl power or divine feminine, catchphrases that succinctly summarize the movement into easy terminology that can be thrown around in the most innocuous of discussions and left at that. It helped, there’s no denying the impact and influence of packaging a heavy subject in such a roundabout way to evade the mores of social censorship.
But then again, too much of a good thing is bad.
This gave way to the simple adaptation of feminism into the concurrent lifestyle. No matter who you are, how and where you live, how young or old, how appealing or not, feminism can be shaped and molded to fit into the extant functioning under the system. There’s a quiet, ignored turning point that by doing so, the politics of feminism is slowly removed, a null, moot point where feminism is now safe and palatable.
With the constant utilization of empty words, the popular conception of feminism has turned from a genuine, sharp critique of the social conditions women are made to endure into an embracing of these said conditions, as perpetuated by the hegemony, as if it is an organicist concept that has been conquered–some sickening point of pride that women are supposed to be satiated with, an experience akin to winning a competition with no prize in store.
There’s a disingenuity to this approach, a lack of acknowledgement that these conditions are anthropogenic. Man-made (literally). These are experiences manufactured in order to disenfranchise the woman, to police them, to break them down and make them subservient and submit to the frightful desires of male primacy.
Feminism cannot co-exist with this lifestyle. Feminism cannot exist without the ruination of the protracted culture. To be a feminist, there should be questioning, challenging, and changing of our character, of our navigation of life, of the system in itself. There is no room for Hallmark-esque versions in feminism. There is no reason to surrender space and compromise when marginalized genders are debased and dehumanized as part of life, on a pedestrian and legal scale.
No, we shouldn’t “dumb things down” or wrap pretty, pink, coquette bows around ideologies to render them digestible, to make them sanitized enough for public consumption. Not when the social realities women and other marginalized genders face are tantamount to that of horror spectacles made to entertain the hegemony.
When discussing feminism, there should be a willful desire to wield it as a transformative power that allows women and marginalized genders to stand on the same footing as the rest. Resisting in feminism shouldn’t be directed towards the movement, towards the conscious realization of the brutality and violence of being disenfranchised, but rather, resisting against the very culture that permeates our society, down to the very minutiae interactions that build this up.
The heart of feminism is its cultural transformative ability. This is the girl power that it holds: a revolutionary possibility inherent and hopeful in its prowess.
