Requirements

Being a woman comes with a certain amount of "requirements" in a way. You're required to spend a lot of time making sure your make-up is perfect for every occasion, you're required to wear nice dresses and heels for every occasion to make sure you look good to everybody there, but probably most importantly, you're required to be a feminist and make sure the rest of the world is too.

Well, I guess I screwed all of those, and probably a lot more, up.

I don't wear make-up let alone spend hours making sure it's perfect for every occasion. I wore it once in middle school because I was going to a dance and my mom thought it would be the perfect idea to take me to the mall and have it done. It's easy to say that I hated every second of it. Having to eat pizza with a fork and knife so I don't mess up my lipstick, not being able to rub my eyes when I got tired. It was awful.

That dance was also the last time I wore a dress. It wasn't a nice one by any means, and I definitely didn't wear heels with it, but technically it was a dress. I hated it more than the make-up. The feeling of vulnerability was insane, and I could not figure out how people liked wearing them so much. I even had to have something around my shoulders because the short straps made me nervous. After that night, it was suits and only suits for formal occasions.

Last, but certainly not least, is the one fact that I try to hide from most people. I never hid the fact that I was gay for an instant, but this fact, I've hidden from almost everybody. I'm not a feminist (*insert dramatic gasps and chanting here*). I used to be one, though.

My old roommates were hardcore feminists, like the ones you would see in the cringe compilations on YouTube with posters, chanting in the streets. In a way, I guess they got me into it through a type of indoctrination almost. Convincing me through all of the good things that it was and showing nothing that it couldn't be. I went along with it, didn't ask questions, hoped for the best, and always got McDonald's after marches.

After I moved on and went to a bigger college with much more variety of thoughts and ideologies available, I started to question it all. I started looking more into what it was and what it actually meant. I fact checked everything they said and all of the things that had convinced me to stay with it. Once I looked in, I started to back farther and farther out.

Yes, I believe in equality of the sexes and all of that stuff that they say feminism is. But that's the exact reason I left the ideology and adopted others that suited my thoughts better. Having one that preaches equality but ignores the disparities of men and only tries to make the world better for women is not one that I want to be part of. One should practice what they preach, and the feminist movement has become one that is far from that.

Being a woman that speaks up and says that men don't have everything perfect in this world is usually seen as taboo for many people. Speaking about it in a classroom brings nothing but denial and weird looks from classmates. Sometimes things have to be said, though.

Women have requirements in life. Looking pretty, acting like they want equality, everything to be the same whether they want to admit it or not. It's easy to forget that sometimes it's completely possible for there to be people that aren't the same, but that doesn't mean they're against everything.