Sometimes I’m just not in the mood

By Elyssa Goodman

You can dangle it in front of me all you want. You can prod and poke and instigate, but my reaction will simply be a half-hearted, “Eh.” Because sometimes I’m just not in the mood for feminism.

Don’t get me wrong—I am as much a warrior as the rest of us, doing my best to reduce stereotypes and promote equality to the nth degree, but sometimes I am interested in being a person first and a woman second.

I want to go into a restaurant, order food, eat it, pay, then leave.

I want to do gather up my clothes, put them in the wash, then put them in the dryer.

I want to go to a movie theatre, buy my ticket and some popcorn, sit down and watch the movie.

My gender doesn’t have to be a factor in any of those things. As far as I know, we look at a single man eating dinner by himself the same way we look at a single woman. Everybody has dirty clothes. Nobody wants to stand and see a movie for two hours.

When I am a person first, it’s like my gender doesn’t matter. Not everything—interests, activities, experiences—is or has to be male or female. Some things you can’t categorize. I like good food, good music, good movies. I don’t think that specifically links me to one gender or another. Those are things that people like.

Granted, some interests, activities, or experiences are directly related to gender, but not all of them are. For example, everyone—female, male, black, white, orange, purple, gay, straight, bi, transsexual, pansexual, asexual—has to do laundry. We wear our clothes, they get dirty, we have to clean them. Everyone has to eat—we go buy food, we cook it, we eat it. Everyone needs a place to sleep—we have beds, we lie down, we close our eyes.

Yes, there are feminist analyses of all these things. Who does the laundry? Who buys the food? Who cooks it? Who eats it? Who goes to sleep first? The answers to these questions are not always the same, nor are they what they used to be. A woman does not always cook or clean, a man is not always the breadwinner.

The feminism battle gets difficult to do all the time. It uses up a lot of negative energy that I could be using for positive things, like basking in sunshine or writing the world’s next great novel. For me, the ability to step beyond myself and see the world in neutrality is like a détente. I don’t have to fight with anyone to make me or think of me as equal because if I am just a person it means I already am. I like being a person first because it means that I am a blank canvas—I am just me, without predetermined characteristics being ascribed to me. I wonder if we all start to think of ourselves as just people, if we stop labelling and stereotyping ourselves, then maybe the labels and stereotypes will eventually disappear? La la la and world peace. It might be raging idealism, but at least it’s a start. For now, I am walking down the street not as a female or a male, but as a person who likes to walk down the street.

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