Activism Log Week 1

This week we began the preparation for Feminist Coming Out Day, mostly with advertising. NOW at UCF promotes the club and upcoming events every Wednesday outside of the Student Union. We’ve therefore been working on making and printing a functional flyer that will promote our event and inform UCF students. The flyer will begin to be passed out through the NOW at UCF table next week as well as by our group members to friends, classmates, bulletin boards etc. Next week we need to print more flyers, finalize the date (because there’s been talk about changing it) and help with the NOW at UCF table on Wednesday to keep promoting.

The activism we’ve done this week hasn’t been much other than getting the word out. But even that has been impactful to my life, just by seeing other people’s reaction to “feminists” being prominent on campus. It’s funny to see people’s face, even girls when you mention the event/movement. Some girls will even become annoyed at the idea of feminism, arguing that they “experience no inequality and everyone needs to stop hating on men.” We had an incident on Facebook where a girl kept commenting things like this to a wall post our group member, Nicole put up about Feminism. It was interesting to see how mixed up people are about feminism and how the negative stereotypes are still very prominent among college students. People saying things like this encourage me even more to be a part of Feminist Coming Out Day. Our goal is to reach as many people as we can to realize that feminist ideals are not as old school/radical/dramatic as people think. We need to be realistic here, just because you personally feel that you’ve never experienced inequality in your life, doesn’t mean that it’s not a real issue affecting our country/world.

Women are still dealing with domestic violence/abuse. Rapes haven’t seized, they still happen and can very well happen to any of us. Sex slave trades are still going on worldwide. Women are still not getting paid equal wages as men in the corporate world. Reproductive justice is still something that’s not available to everyone, the resources aren’t cutting it. Women’s rights and feminism is not about whining women trying to end men chauvinism, it’s about equality for everyone, and that’s what many people don’t understand. In a lot of ways I can’t blame the smiles and eye rolls people give us when we talk about feminism because I probably would have thought the same things before I took this class. It feels good to have this new perspective on women’s issues, hopefully we can widen other people’s points of views as well.