Feminism.

It’s bananas, B-A-N-A-N-A-S.

You would think that attending a school with only females present would result in receiving a thorough foundation of feminist history, theory, and practices. I’d say the exact opposite ended up being true for me. We learned about early humans. Ancient sub-Saharan Africa and Mesopotamia. Native Americans. The Roman Empire. Various Chinese dynasties. The ancient Islamic world and Egypt. If I had to write an essay about the Silk Road right now from memory, I could. Our teachers loved the Silk Road. Honorable mention to the Renaissance and the Triangle Trade too.

But then we skipped ahead to the Revolutionary War. We lingered a bit on the Puritans, a bit longer on the Industrial Revolution, touched briefly on the Civil War, and circled back just to make sure everyone could identify all fifty states on a map. We never talked about US Presidents or politics but because we did have a unit on the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, the term “Hooverville” floats around in my memory. There were electives available after that. I took a pair of classes called The History of Violence and The History of Non-Violence which covered various revolutions, religions, and social movements… again, there was no mention of any suffragettes or the ERA. Even barring that, by every measure I can think of, we learned the sanitized history of men… abridged and spotty as it may have been. 

I say spotty because we didn’t touch on most of modernity. And I say sanitized because we never talked much about men hacking each other to death. I’m pretty sure World War I was mentioned at some point from a technological perspective only. World War II? Not so much. Vietnam and Korea? Never. Iraq and Afghanistan? That wasn’t history yet. But in hindsight, I do wonder if the lack of focus on war was intentional. We learned a lot about the values and beliefs of various peoples of various times and places, but never quite got to what happened when they disagreed with what someone else was doing. For example, we talked about the history of Christianity and the points at which the church began splitting into opposting factions but we never spoke of the Crusades or the Spanish Inquisition. Meanwhile, we spoke about the Black Death for at least a month. 

This was balanced out a little bit by our English classes though. Even in our lower school library, the books displayed prominently all centered around female protagonists or had female authors. Assigned readings, aside from Shakespeare, also followed this pattern up until co-ed English electives senior year of high school where I was mercilessly subjected to both The Great Gatsby and The Catcher in the Rye… two books which were such a large departure from what we normally read that it was blatant enough to offend the taste of both me and my female classmates. Anyway, our normal books placed women in the many world settings we’d learned about in our history classes. A fair amount of books were largely about women and girls trying to avoid being married off so I figured that’s what women spent most of their time doing before rights were somehow won and now we have this great school. Lucky us!

But as I’ve said many times before, men were largely out of sight and out of mind while growing up. Feminism isn’t something I ever really thought about because there were few boys around to give me a taste of what feminism existed in response to until very late in my schooling. As such, it’s not until college that I ever thought about what feminism actually meant. It’s the first time I asked myself after a lifetime of all girls all the time if I was a feminist.

New York City in the late summer of 2012 was shaking off the last frail remnants of Occupy Wall Street. “Gangnam Style” was the biggest viral hit of all time. Hipsters and metrosexuals were hatching, demanding avocado toast and highly individualized cups of coffee in the niche cafes they would inhabit. According to a quick Google search, Tinder had just hit the scene which now makes me think my college campus was targeted to generate early users because I swear by the end of my freshman year everyone in every lecture hall spent half of class swiping away. 

Sex positivity was the name of the game. A few women on my lacrosse team had legitimate “sugar daddies.” Many more women I ran into talked about or had already participated in “camgirl” activities. The underlying joke was that it was all to pay for tuition. For most of them, it had everything to do with aesthetics, feeling edgy and desired, and being their full sexually liberated selves. In high school, a running joke to take the edge off college admission woes was that if all else failed we could all become strippers. And here I was at a top university where a decent chunk of women were lining up for a chance to show their stuff.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if Anna secretly ran some type of sex dungeon,” one of my lacrosse teammates said to the table at one of the many parties we’d have over those four years. Everyone else gathered around agreed. “It’s because you’re just so… straight-laced… calm… put together… all the time. All the hallmarks of a freak. It’s the people you least expect!”

“You like anime so I’m betting you’re into hentai and like… octopus porn,” another chimed in. I was stunned. 

“Porn is for men,” I said slowly and clearly like I was teaching a child the alphabet. “That’s why it’s so obscene.” Everyone looked confused. 

“No need to be shy about it. You like… have like… dom energy. And everyone watches porn.” 

“That’s news to me,” I said truthfully. When it became apparent that I wasn’t joking, some women started to look uncomfortable. The focus of the conversation was switched to someone else. 

I soon learned that outside of murder, criticizing any “sex act between consenting adults” was impolite and would get me likened to unhinged evangelical conservatives out in the countryside. Sexual expression is a form of confidence, not an age old cry for love, attention, or acceptance. That was the feminist view. So as a college student, I just figured I wasn’t a feminist. Sure I believed in equal rights for women, but not all this new stuff. I simply was a sensible young lady. 

In the face of relentless sex positivity and hookup culture, I kept in the same rhythm as I had in childhood. I formed and nurtured friendships, was engaged in my studies, pursued my career goals, and generally had a good time. Everyone around me had few good things to say about their high school experiences, tales of not fitting in or feeling trapped. When I told stories from the school I grew up in, people had a tendency to be shocked by my positive account and were always disgusted by the idea of few boys being around to interact with at any given second of any given day. I quietly thought they are probably just insecure. 

Despite a few notable childhood conflicts with boys, I came to college having very few expectations about men. In my mind, the boys that had been in my periphery growing up were an unusual breed compared to the rest of the world’s boys. Their behavior was offensive and juvenile compared to what I’d encounter in college or the workplace where we could use our respective strengths to work together to complete the task at hand. But I quickly learned that the boys from my neighborhood were no different from the men I’d encounter later beginning with a first lesson learned at the very start of my college days. And even now, so many years later, I find new ways in which the men around me succeed in lowering my already six feet under bar even further. 

But the important takeaway here is that it didn’t start that way. All of my opinions now are the direct result of, after eighteen years, experiencing full blast all quite suddenly the reality of the way men treated me as a direct contrast to the primarily female environment I came from. And what felt like a volcanic eruption of dehumanization to me registered to my female college peers, at worst, as a candle with an unpleasant aroma that you can get used to if a man gives you enough attention. They didn’t understand why I found men as offputting as I did. However, even in college I never came across terms like “girlboss” or “not like other girls” (Truthfully even now these terms and the vitriol around them confuse me). Furthermore, it never occurred to me to dice up the world into “feminine” and “masculine” categories, a preoccupation I noticed others having that made them easy pickings for the popularization of the gender spirit stuff later on.

If you asked me what the core focus of feminism at the time was, I would’ve said it was on seeking empowerment from verbally consenting to sexual activities. “Consent is sexy” and “No is a complete sentence” are catchphrases that come to mind. The whole #MeToo thing was the culmination of all that, I think. Because if you have a bunch of women come together to talk about consent, it won’t take long before they realize that most of them have one very notable brand of experience in common. 

If you asked me at the time what I was about if not “popular feminism,” it would’ve been ensuring the ability to follow ambitions, engage in interests, seek mastery, emphasize the importance of meaningful bonds between women independent of men, and generally advocating for one’s dignity and self-respect which - in my view - was incompatible with being involved with men in the way sex positivity championed. Even befriending a man seems inconceivable. No, just a professional or practical rapport maintaining a thin veneer of civility because, to me, males obviously did not see women as human so it didn’t make sense to seek out sexual exploits with them or rely on this brand new and never before thought of (Tone Note: Sarcasm) consent language that would prevent you from being raped while on your liberating joyride. The whole thing looked like a clown trying to disguise itself as an intellectual. 

“Can I ask you something?” my friend and roommate asked me shortly after our time as college students ended and in the lead up to Hillary Clinton being thwarted on the country’s biggest political stage. “I go to these clubs and I hook up with these guys but it leaves me kind of feeling… not that great afterwards.” 

“So don’t hook up with guys at clubs,” I say, more focused on the work I was doing on my computer.

“I mean, I like sex. I’ve consented to all of it,” she hurries to explain herself. “I know I’m hot. I know I’m good at it. Maybe I’m just monogamous.” That’s the first time I heard of monogamy referred to like it was its own sexual orientation. She admits she confided in me about her conundrum because I’m asexual and won’t judge her for not loving all this steamy, consensual, liberated sex she was having. After all, a condition of her living with me was that no males were to enter our apartment. But of course any criticism I had to offer about the deification of sexual intercourse could simultaneously be easily brushed aside because I’m asexual so I just don’t understand. But also, according to her, asexuality is a spectrum and I’m just the super special type of asexual who isn’t interested in sex at all, not even the feminist porn she was excited to announce she was now consuming. Very much unlike her sex positive, asexual, meth-dependent, amateur pornstar friend. 

Even at this point with no formal education on feminism, I was convinced that the popular definition of feminism was irreversably compromised. Navigating a male-dominated industry as I was, my dissatisfaction with common, sex-obsessed discourse was rapidly building. Where, I wondered, were people talking about real issues? Seemingly unrelated, same sex marriage was legalized nationwide. Then came the Trans Inquisition at a time when I was just starting to seek out people online to discuss all of my previously unspoken thoughts what I now knew was called women’s liberation. How? A questionably accurate but nonetheless informative for the almost entirely uninformed miniseries I checked out on Hulu: Mrs. America. 

The series put me on the path of discovering some of the women who came before me. Now armed with new language and a basic understanding of how we got here, I still find that defining feminism is as hotly debated as it ever was to the extent that many choose to avoid the term altogether at a time when even this shell of feminism… and video games… are getting blamed for the apparent downfall of male society. And while I’ve never been the type to go out on the streets with “feminism” branded on my chest, my words and actions have me being designated as a radical one from men and women alike who seem caught off guard by an apparent anger beneath my straight-laced, calm, and put together all the time, sensible young lady exterior. 

Indeed, it can be the people you least expect.