The F word: how feminism saved my life | Marisa McGrath | TEDxOhioStateUniversity

The F word, some people love it
and they use it all the time.
Other people hate it
and they refrain from using it at any cost.
In either case, guys,
we know it's just tacky to use the F word in front of your mom.
The F word, we all know it, f, f, feminism, feminism.
Growing up, I always identified as a feminist.
I heard the word for the first time in grade school
and granted my understanding was incredibly limited.
But I knew that it involved Susan B. Anthony
and it involved men and women being entitled to the same social, economic, and political rights.
And what's wrong with that?
What's controversial about that?
So I was on board.

I don't think that there are a lot of grade schoolers who are declaring themselves feminists. So this identify went largely unchallenged for the majority of my childhood. And then I came to Ohio State and I heard the word "feminazi" for the first time and I heard about feminists being crazy brow burners and I thought, "Oh my gosh, is feminism the new F word? Will boys not like me if I'm a feminist?"

I started to freak out. I was having an identity crisis. But I knew I would find some solitude in my women's gender and sexuality studies class, only I hated that class. I hated every second of it. Because I thought that I was going into a class that would talk about equality, but my professor challenged me to look at more and see how we are not one identity, but standing at the intersection of many identities, including race and ability and religion and gender and class and many others. Intersectional feminism is what she called it.

Between intersectional feminism and peer pressure, I was so overwhelmed that I rejected the term entirely. I decided, "No, I'm not going to be a feminist. Instead, I'm a humanist." While I don't have a problem with the word humanist, it fails to address gender as an underlying problem that at the very least means that women are paid less than men for most jobs on average, and at the most means that being born female is a deadly condition.

It's important to acknowledge that I was able to stay blind to most of oppressive things because I live in a privileged bubble. And within this privilege as a white, middle class woman attending an institution of higher learning, I didn't have to look at many problems in the world. But the thing about gender violence, and more specifically sexual violence, is that it knows no intersection, pops every bubble.

And at the end of my freshman year of college, I was sexually assaulted. I can't describe to you how quickly I wanted to dive into numbness, get away from the incalculable shame that weighted on my entire being. I wonder if people could smell on my skin that I was now damaged goods and I tried to twist this story into some toxic narrative where it was my fault. I told myself, "Attempted rape isn't sexual assault." And one night became too much to bear. I decided to ignore my experience, thinking that it would erase it entirely, when in fact the opposite happened. It metastasized. It metastasized into an eating disorder and severe depression and suicidal thoughts, all attempts to destroy the site of the damage, the scene of the crime, my body. Moreover, I made myself so busy. I never had to look my trauma in the face.

I make no excuses or apologies for surviving in the only way I knew how, but I did lash out at everyone I loved and cared about that year, and for that I'm sorry. My sophomore year of college was frenzied chaos, and by the end of it, I was looking for something to hold onto. So naturally, I went to Pinterest. But instead of looking at how to style my hair or how to sculpt my bod for spring break, I decided to look for inspirational quotes, and what I found was Bell Hooks and Audrey Lorde and Tina Fey and Gloria Steinem. And from these words that I could take shelter in, I made entire Pinterest boards, and from those boards, I read books by incredible feminists. And all of a sudden, I began to feel the mending of a disjointed self of someone I thought was broken, but was actually just bruised from trauma. These books echoed that it wasn't my fault. And after I began to feel so good, I had a crazy realization, I'm a feminist! Had I been this way all along? Oh my gosh, guys.

So I e-mailed my professor from my first women's studies class and said, "I'm a feminist. How do I get more involved in this?" She helped me out of women's studies major and from there I began to dissect my trauma even more, understanding that for as agonizing as it has been for me, my trauma is indicative of a pandemic of a rape culture we live in that says, "My dress is a yes and that any man who pays attention to me is entitled to my body."

Once I started excavating my experiences, I started looking at other intersections and seeing how they're all valid and how we are all tied together, that in fact, feminism is for everybody. I became so passionate about feminism that I applied for this talk, frankly never thinking that I would get accepted. And when I met the other speakers here today and I realized they were bringing their whole selves to this stage, I realized it would be a disservice to me not to do the same and a dishonor to my experience not to speak out.

This was difficult because I had only told three people up until this point and I wondered how I am going to summon the courage to tell my mother that I was sexually assaulted? How am I going to navigate through people saying, "Attempted rate isn't sexual assault"? Or worse yet, "You were asking for it." And when I started to doubt myself, started to feel myself sink, I went back to those Pinterest boards and I thought about my two little sisters. And that if they weathered the trauma that I have weathered, if I stood in the shoes I am standing in, I would want them to know that they don't owe anyone their story. That although it is indicative of a pandemic, it doesn't make it public property. But at the same time, they shouldn't be caged into silence by shame. There is nothing shameful about survival. There is nothing shameful about being a feminist.

The purpose of my talk today is not to recruit you all to be feminists, but just simply disabuse us of this notion that feminism is the new F word, that it is bad and wrong. Because feminism is for everybody, and at most, has the capacity to change the world, and at the very least, feminism, the F word, it saved my life. Thank you.