If You Want to Be Serious About the New Feminism...

We’ve all seen the social media memes about women raising each other up rather than putting each other down. This morning at the gym while watching The Today Show a very famous woman was being interviewed whose initials are J.L.;) .  Apparently she is producing and judging a new Dance show. As the closed captions streamed by I read “busiest woman in television” and later “when she’s not making the rest of us look bad…”  (the two female interviewers were laughing) What?! Is this now how a major network morning program passive-aggressively puts down a successful woman?

Ladies if you’re going to post the memes, then you need to talk the talk also. I don’t follow celebrities but do know that J.L. is very successful. So why are these women implying that her success would “make them look bad.” Perhaps it’s supposed to be a joke, but in these days when people are going through sensitivity training for numerous issues, shouldn’t we be a little more careful in how we “raise up...don't tear down” other women?

I recently personally experienced how saying something incredibly innocuous online quickly turned into an assault on my good name. In my case I agreed with a Facebook Group poster that the addition of a chain budget store was a disappointing approval made by our shoreline town which is mostly quaint shops with a large summer tourist influx. Suddenly I was a “rich” person who didn’t want to allow poor people a place to shop.  The post was eventually removed because one of the budget store lovers (perhaps a champion for the poor) let loose some choice words for anyone who opposed the store.  After that Saturday morning laugh, I knew it was time for a break from the internet. 

Another incident in distant internet history was of a woman posing in a bathing suit with her family of young boys. The youngest was an 8 month old infant. I found her line “What’s your excuse?” a reminder not to let the excuse of young children keep me from taking care of my health. Apparently this picture was “mean” according to the trolls because it made other woman feel bad that they couldn’t lose the baby weight that quickly. People are different. As someone whose body never looked like this woman’s, before or after pregnancy (or even at 20 years old, haha) I was flabbergasted that my sisterhood of women would be so judgmental. 

So let J.L. be happy in her success!  Let thin momma have a fun photo session with her kids!  And for the love of gosh-darn, let me express an opinion without assuming anything beyond the actual words I typed.

And for the record, I would rather promote that we ALL build each other up rather than tearing each other down. Men and women work together in American Society of 2017.

Another Note: I've never liked labels of any type and am even hesitant to use the term "feminism" since it connotes such a wide variety of characteristics to different people.  So I'm using this definition, and no other!

New feminism is a philosophy which emphasizes a belief in an integral complementarity of men and women, rather than the superiority of men over women or women over men