Anti-Feminist Fairy

I have always considered myself somewhat anti-feminist. Not in the sense of being a misogynist - it would be difficult, if not bizarre to hate one's own gender - but in the sense that I am a believer of absolute equality between the sexes. Feminism, to me, represented the oppression of men, rather than the advocating of equality. I could appreciate and thank how many years ago the Sufferagettes fought for women's rights where there were none, but current feminist issues I have completely misunderstood as taking a step too far to unbalance the gender scale at men's expense.

I am of a complacent generation where women's rights are a given - and taken for granted. I'm not at a stage within my career where I am experiencing differing pay scales between myself and any male colleague due to gender issues - difference in salary is based on my age and therefore relative experience. I've had my eyes completely closed to the possibility that there's more to feminism than social equality, salaries and voting rights, until today when the Guardian forcefully peeled my eyelids open and encouraged me to stop sitting on the gender fence.

Kira Cochrane's article, Now the Backlash, points out how women's bodies are considered public property - to be scrutinised and picked apart within the media. If you've read my post The Great British Body, June 2008, then you'll be aware that this hits a sore spot for me. It is the growing media obsession with bodies that has left me lacking in self confidence of late. And as Kira aptly recognises, women are derided for being too thin, too fat, having cellulite, spots, veins... "what is implicit but unsaid is that there is no objective standard of beauty, no level of perfection that a woman could reach at which her body would be perceived as acceptable and in control."

Women have lost something which I feel to be far more important that the matter of a few grand between male and female colleague's salaries. We've lost ownership of our own skin, lost strength of self and gained an inferiority complex within our own sex. Male chauvinists are no longer the enemy - other women are. When values have become so materialistic, women of my generation are somewhat weaker than before. We're (myself included to an extent) fighting to be the skinniest, well-toned, golden skinned, silken haired, and if we're not then we're left feeling inferior.

With women in the limelight being criticised more than ever, and a lack of female unity as the criticism stems from within our own sex (it's not men who sit around in the Heat offices, circling cellulite patches on celebrities), I can only wonder if we've taken step back to times when women were expected to be little more than eye candy and spend their days concerning themselves with how to best look attractive to men.

I could go on to deeper feminist matters about the sex industry, abortion, working motherhood and rape convictions, but it's all too depressing...