The Imperfect Feminist
My friend Casey said to me recently:
For me I just accept that there is no such thing as the perfect feminist.
It made me realize that I had been considering feminism a binary term: you are, or you aren’t. This, in hindsight, is stupid.
Maybe you consider yourself a programmer, or an artist, or a chef. When did you become that? For me, I became a programmer when I switched from being a designer to using Rails full time. But so what? Does that mean I’m done? Absolutely not. I’m still learning how to be a better programmer all the time.
This is now how I feel about being a feminist. I’m a feminist, but that doesn’t mean I’m “done”, or that I won’t make mistakes again, or that I have nothing left to learn.
It doesn’t matter if someone calls themselves a feminist or not. What matters is that they are willing to learn, listen, and get better.