{"id":4,"date":"2009-02-23T17:16:45","date_gmt":"2009-02-23T22:16:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/arielservadio.com\/blog\/?p=4"},"modified":"2009-12-13T23:00:33","modified_gmt":"2009-12-14T04:00:33","slug":"when-i-became-a-feminist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arielservadio.com\/blog\/2009\/02\/when-i-became-a-feminist\/","title":{"rendered":"When I Became a Feminist"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Recently at a job interview, I was asked how someone my age got into feminism. This wasn’t a weird question, based on the writing samples included in my portfolio that I brought to the interview, but still, I hesitated in answering.<\/p>\n

There are plenty of non-personal answers to that question, one being, “Why wouldn’t someone my age be a feminist?”. Another, “Why wouldn’t any woman or smart man be ‘into feminism’?”<\/p>\n

But the reason I hesitated is because I had to think about it. After pondering for a moment, I replied with a rambling answer about how my developing interest in women’s and sexual health issues naturally lead to an interest in feminism, concluding with a personal experience regarding my mother that I needn’t be coy about as it’s been published<\/a> both in print and online for over a year now, but for discretion’s sake, I will.<\/p>\n

I think this went over pretty well – it felt like a comfortable and accepted response to a rather unorthodox question for a job interview.<\/p>\n

But, after the interview, I realized I was lying.<\/p>\n

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It wasn’t my fault, I just hadn’t thought about it for a long time. Because I guess I’ve been “into feminism” for a lot longer than I’ve ever thought about. Of course, my dad had worked to ingrain it in me from birth<\/a>, but even that wasn’t really it.<\/p>\n

It was Gwen Stefani.<\/p>\n

Or, as I more fondly like to think of her (and the three other members of the band that made her famous), it was No Doubt.<\/p>\n

I heard “Just A Girl” when I was in the third grade. Even though I probably wasn’t sure what the lyrics meant, and I most likely didn’t feel I could relate to them, I knew they carried a deeper meaning.<\/p>\n

I knew that when Gwen screamed at a concert, “Fuck you, I’m a girl!” during the performance of the song, she wasn’t just looking for an excuse to swear. She was making a statement.<\/p>\n

And that statement filtered through to my little third-grade brain and has been with me ever since. I can still feel it every time I hear the song, and hear the frustration in her voice, the mocking tone, the anger, the sarcasm.<\/p>\n

And guess who ‘got me into’ No Doubt? My dad.<\/p>\n

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Additional Note: I started this blog late in the summer of 2008, after Thomas Beattie gave birth to his first child. I continued to labor over a long post about my frustration with people’s disgust over a transgendered man with female reproductive organs choosing to have a child. I didn’t post it because I was never finished with it, every time I opened it up I had something else to add. Then, Thomas got pregnant again<\/a>. I’m not sure if that post will be published before or after baby number two arrives, but I’m working on it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recently at a job interview, I was asked how someone my age got into feminism. This wasn’t a weird question, based on the writing samples included in my portfolio that I brought to the interview, but still, I hesitated in answering. There are plenty of non-personal answers to that question, one being, “Why wouldn’t someone … Continue reading “When I Became a Feminist”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-feminism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arielservadio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arielservadio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arielservadio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arielservadio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arielservadio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/arielservadio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17,"href":"https:\/\/arielservadio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4\/revisions\/17"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arielservadio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arielservadio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arielservadio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}