Fun & Famous

THE BOOK THAT CHANGED MY LIFE

For years, I associated feminism with prickly women in overalls who have a fondness for the color purple. Yes, the shortsighted cliché of man-hating feminists, I readily admit it. That image of feminists comes from my youth, when my mother had friends like that. Friends with henna curls and clogs with whom she sometimes spent hours discussing men, their behavior, and the suffering they caused.

As a child, I only half-listened to their discussions, and in retrospect, I think that the feminist militancy of the figures from my youth wasn't as intense as I thought. Complaining about men seems to be timeless – and so does whining about men, by the way – and now when I look back at the Jan, Jans and the Children-comics by Jan Kruis from that time, I see that henna curls, overalls, and clogs were just very trendy back then, just like the desire to move to a little farm in Drenthe.

“It's really not complicated, feminism is just about equal rights”

By the way, when I was fourteen and went on a girls' weekend, there was just as much casual chatter about men, your own sexuality, and self-determination. Engagement was cool back then. And okay, I was born in a city, but I grew up in a village, so I hadn't really experienced much about self-determination. The girls there had, especially those from Amsterdam. They dressed in full-blown punk or very much ‘their own’ – while I was kind of half new wave, as best as I could manage with a few second-hand black clothes and hand-me-downs from my mother from the sixties – and had changed their names to Babs, Pjotr, and Händel because the names they were given at birth didn't fit who they were. Their ambitions were high, they did what they wanted, and they didn't dance to the tune of boys – nor to that of their parents, for that matter. Extremely interesting, and how I wished I could be like that, but if I had to change my name back then, I would probably have been called Remi, so far removed did I feel from that tough, unattainable ideal of womanhood they radiated – and thus so alone. I wasn't a very good feminist back then, I think.

The feminist penny dropped for me ridiculously late, in 2012 to be precise. I read the book How to Be a Woman by British Caitlin Moran, a particularly funny collection of reflections on everyday women's issues, peppered with personal experiences. Moran made feminism clear as a lump, based on everyday matters like hiring help for household chores, being overweight, love, motherhood, and Brazilian waxes. I found it so enlightening: it's really not complicated, feminism is just about equal rights. It's nothing conceptual, it has nothing to do with man-hating, and it's nothing to be ashamed of – as is sometimes thought. And even though I already knew that things are sometimes grossly unfair and that double standards exist, I never dared to call myself a feminist, afraid I wouldn't know well enough what it entailed and being mistaken for a man-hater. Well, I'm free from that now. But what this book has mainly given me is a damn handy core question that I can ask myself in all those everyday decisions where I risk getting bogged down in emotional arguments or socially desirable behavior. And that question is: what would a man do? It makes my life a lot easier.

Written by Kalinka Hählen