Why is someone apparently so educated as yourself a feminist?

adesperadoundertheeaves-deactiv asked:

why is someone apparently so educateed as yourself, a feminist

It is precisely because of my education that I’m an advocate for feminism. My education has helped me to think abstractly, to get outside of my parochial perspective and see the vast complexity of our world, to recognize the insidious yet highly influential roles played by history, language, media, politics, and institutions. It is because I’m privileged enough to be educated that I’m able to understand that culture operates outside of individual choice; that society can be racist and sexist and perpetuate oppression without a single individual consciously choosing to be intolerant or hateful. My education has also helped me become scientifically literate, to interpret studies and statistics, to evaluate evidence, to question the status quo, to question my intuitions, to question my presumptions, to question my worldview. All of these things combined have played a role in my feminism. All of these things combined have helped me understand that women have been and continue to be the disproportionate victims of oppression and marginalization. This isn’t to deny that men also suffer from current power structures and cultural institutions; we most certainly do. But feminism aims to remedy that as well. To me, rejecting feminism in favor of ‘egalitarianism’ or some other such label is to deny the history of specifically feminine oppression and, therefore, add weight to an already-overwhelming cultural inertia. This flies in the face of the very core of my education.

I wasn’t always a feminist. I wasn’t born a feminist, I wasn’t raised a feminist. Quite the opposite. It was through my education that I became a feminist. I became a feminist because I became educated.