When I first heard “We Should All Be Feminists” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, it was because Beyoncé samples Adichie’s speech. Though it was a small and heavily edited, it made me pressed “repeat” on my IPhone because her verse alone made me love the song. After the fifth or sixth time listening to the song, I had to google Adichie’s lyrics:
“We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, you can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise, you would threaten the man. Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Now marriage can be a source of
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She states, “gender is not an easy conversation to have for both men and women. To bring up gender is sometimes to encounter an almost immediate resistance.” She reminds the audience with an example about gender “If you are a man and you walk into a restaurant with a woman and the waiter greets only you, does it occur to you to ask the waiter, ‘Why haven’t you greeted her?’” This example made me realized that I “do not actively think about gender or notice gender, is part of the problem of gender.” So can I be truly feminist if I am problem that contributes the reason why feminism needs to exist? Adichie answers that question and the answer is “Yes”. Once more, Adichie’s definition for feminist is “a man or a woman who says, ‘Yes, there’s a problem with gender as it is today, and we must fix it, we must do better.’”; Therefore, Adichie says it best – “Culture does not make people. People make culture. So if it is in fact true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we must make it our culture.” Thus, I will challenge the status quo of gender by acknowledging that there is a problem. Hopefully, by acknowledging this idea will reduce the issue of gender targeting