Commit.

Hello world.  I’m thehouseofadoll, a senior marketing major writing for the blog this year.  I enjoy both piña coladas and getting caught in the rain. I’m not really into yoga, and I would definitely argue that I have at least half a brain.  So to make this introduction short and sweet, I’m basically Jimmy Buffets perfect woman. And he should have run away with me to the dunes of the cape instead of with his wife.

Now that that’s out of the bag, I’m not sure there’s really that much more you need to know about me.  I’ve never exactly identified myself as a feminist before, and especially going into the man’s world that is corporate America, I’m not sure it would be too smart to start waving that flag all around. However, there are still a lot of feminist issues that are near and dear to my heart; I guess I’ve just never really labeled them as ‘feminist’ before.

Throughout this semester, I plan to really explore just what exactly feminism is and how it relates to my life and the lives of so many others.  Let’s call it… a path to feminist self-discovery.  And at the start of this path, I thought, “Hey, a definition of feminism might be helpful along this journey – sort of like a road map”.  So to the great wizard of Google I went.

Just like everything else in this world, there are countless definitions of feminism and explanations of what it entails.  However, one description stood out and has resonated with me ever since.  They even typed it up all pretty like which made it even better. It reads: “Feminism is not simply a struggle to end male chauvinism or a movement to ensure that women have equal rights with men; It is a commitment to eradicating the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels – sex, race, class to name a few – and a commitment to reorganizing U.S. society so that the self-development of people can take precedence over imperialism, economic expansion, and material desires”.

Now, if you didn’t read that out load, scroll back up there and do so.  Take a moment to really let the entirety of the message sink in.

Perhaps feminism should be renamed.  Maybe it’s just the word “feminism” that turns people off so much – that made me feel like I would never want to advertise that I was a feminist in corporate America. Or even the rest of America for that matter.

Perhaps it’s that stigma that, “Identify yourself as a feminist today and many people will immediately assume you are man-hating, bra-burning, whiny liberal” (whoneedsfeminism.tumblr.com).

Or the majority of Urban Dictionary users that define feminism as women believing they are above men.

But what feminism really is, is a fight for equality. Plain and simple.

“A commitment to eradicating the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels”

Eradicating the ideology of domination. Equality.

It took one sentence for me to come to that realization and to shed all of the negative connotations that I might have previously associated with the word ‘feminism’.

One sentence.

Imagine how the world could change with a thousand sentences, a million sentences, a billion sentences.

Commit to feminism. Commit to equality.