Not a post about feminism.

I’m reading How to be a woman, it’s rather annoying me (I’m also blogging from a phone that won’t allow me to put in full stops please imagine them in appropriate places)

Gave up on that.

No full stops? Gah. This is working much better. Where was I? Feminism. Yes.

(On Caitlin Moran, I really want to like her. She was home educated. She really has carved out a niche for herself, and I respect that. No silver spoon, no old boys network, no trust fund. But I just don’t identify with the experiences she had as a young woman, and what’s probably worse, I don’t find it funny. Shoot me now. I guess I just have no sense of humour. Sorry.)

I don’t want to be a strident feminist. I don’t want to work out which rude word I’m going to reclaim to describe which bit of my anatomy. I’m quite happy with the vaguely medical terms, they work for me. And I don’t want to get on a chair and shout.

I do want things to be more fair and equal. But only because that, to me, is the obvious way to go about things. There are certain activities men are better at than women. Such as weeing standing up. Can’t actually, off the top of my head think of anything else that women can’t do, while women are much much better at giving birth and feeding babies.

So, when it comes to doing just about anything, what I want is the person best at doing that thing. And I don’t care if they are female, male, have swapped between the two, white, black, young, old, fat, thin or any other dichotomy you care to come up with.

So I’d really like it if we could just make the world be like that please.

Any ideas how we go about it? I don’t think the way we’re trying to do it now is working.

The recent debate/disagreement/kerfuffle over the term intersectional is a case in point. I think what it means is some people have more than one thing against them. So if you’re white and female, you have it worse than a white male, but better than a woman of colour (is that the right phrase to use? I don’t want to offend anyone). Which is all well and good, and absolutely true but what I would say is, you don’t know. You don’t know what my life is like, what my history is like, what experiences I’ve had just by looking at my outside. And I don’t know you. I’m prepared to not make assumptions about you, will you do the same for me?

And I’ll do my best to make whatever changes I can to even out the world and I’ll hope everyone else does the same. I hope that makes some sort of sense. It’s late, it’s been a long day, I’m kind of tired.

I’m done now.