It's not them baby, it's us

I think quite a bit about feminism, I’m naturally opinionated and a woman so it’s seems logical that I would be a feminist, no? What the purpose or definition or aims of feminism might be is something more problematic. One of the blogs I read is the F-word, now principally I’m entirely amused by the title, but it also is a very useful aggregator. It was a post on this that got me thinking this time.

The gist of the article is that the identification of mental illness and the provision of mental health services is a feminist issue. i.e. women on the basis of their gender have it worse than men. OH FOR GOD’S SAKE. It is of course well known that there are excellent and freely available and approachable mental healthcare facilities for men, that’s why the male rate of suicide climbs year on year you see. The whole bloody package of mental healthcare facilities is crap, for everyone. It’s complicated and it’s expensive and mad people don’t vote. It’s this sort of rubbish that provides fodder for the attitudes that make the blog title funny.

Reading this has confirmed in my mind something that’s been lurking for a while, ladies, it’s not men that are the problem.

I’m not saying that professional or indeed personal prejudice has been completely eradicated, nor that there should be any laurel resting going on there, but I do believe that we have reached the stage where external obstacles are no longer the problem. Thin=Happy is a convenient example here, though only an example. Body image issues remain one of the most serious and ubiquitous women face today. Why do we continue to allow this ridiculous concern to blight our lives? Yes, we are and have been fed a constant diet of images of dangerously underweight role models and an ideal structure that absurdly, prioritises beauty and in particularly thinness. Surely, if women stood back for a moment and gave this a long hard look we would all realise the patent silliness of judging beauty, no mind success, with a scales.

But we are all big girls now, educated, intelligent and with a multitude of sources from which to take our ideas and ideals, yet in this arena Marie Claire continues to dominate. Have we not minds of our own, do we not possess eyes and an accompanying aesthetic sense, that as of yet, are not actually edited by Heat? The maintenance of this pathology is entirely our own choice and what’s worse is, given the accepted wisdom that this is the fault of our parents and our society, we perpetuate this torture and thus gift it to our daughters. This cycle has to be broken somewhere, it may as well be now.

Obviously feminism doesn’t start or stop with eating disorders, but it is a facet of what I see as a worrying tendency in modern feminism to cling to victimhood. It’s never easy and it’s not always fair, but I do not believe that oppression is not the issue anymore and the old polemic of the sixties has outlived its usefulness. There are different issues now and they require a different solution.