How I learned to shut up and be a good little feminist

I went to the very swanky, very un-Kate Players Club this week. It’s some sort of old-timey New York actors' haunt and it’s all heavy 100-year-old doors and grand staircases and John Barrymore portraits. If I were writing an essay about it for freshman English comp I’d say the air was thick with decades of stories from men who knew the subtle nuances of fine storytelling. But it’s a blog, so there’s no need for me to say that.

Suffice to say, if they had served me oysters, I’d have sent them flying across the room Pretty Woman style.

The writer of the adaptation of Bridge to Terabithia (a book that I reacted to not unlike when I watched Atonement last month) was speaking about getting movies made. As a bonus, he brought along a funny five-minute short about three cavemen becoming enlightened and sensitive. (“Oog need send smoke signal to wife, let her know Oog be home late.” Because we all know cavemen could speak English, but verb conjugation slowed them down.)

That’s when things took a turn for the racist. You see, the three cavemen were all white, although two had medium brown hair and one had darker brown hair. One woman in the front row hopped up and started yelling at the director that he picked the whitest one to become enlightened.

Director: I don’t get it. They were all white

Mad woman in the front row: But the dark-haired one, he’s the last one to become sensitive. The whitest one was the first.

Director: That was John. He’s Irish, so yeah, he was pale.

MWITFR: But you see my point about the subtle racism.

Director: I’m sorry, but I really don’t. It was me, my brother and our friend and we’re all white.

MWITFR: I lived through the Civil Rights movement! There’s still racism everywhere we look!

The audience shifted nervously in our seats. Were we all so racist that we didn’t even see racism in front of us?

Moderator: I don’t think we’re going to settle this tonight.

Black actor taking the stage for the next bit: Ma’am, I don’t doubt you saw racism in the film, but that doesn’t mean it was racist.

MWITFR sits back down, until the play starts and it has the formerly-funny-now-racist-for-reasons-we’re-not-quite-clear-on bit about an old Chinese woman speaking Chinese and working at a dry cleaners. That’s when MWITFR stomped out.

There is racism everywhere, except possibly in a play about three white cavemen. I can only imagine what the teacher of the feminism class I accidentally took in college would've said about the gender stereotypes in the film.

Having been raised by a dad who made his motto the simple yet brilliant "Don't go looking for hurt" I tend to save my righteous indignation of things for when it's warranted.

But oh that semester I got an earful about how women are kept down by men (and I suppose The Man). The teacher would show us a clip from a news story about how science is discovering how male and female babies learn language differently based on what parts of their little brains light up. Then we’d spend the rest of the class telling each other what the reporter was really trying to say about how men learned better, were smarter, etc.

I failed the first two tests because I (like any good young aspiring journalist) would say things in my essay like, “Some people say… while others interpret the data as a sign of….” I finally learned to just parrot back exactly her line of thinking on the tests and my final grade was miraculously (and mathematically impossibly) raised to a B. The guy behind me, with nearly identical test grades, got a D.

Cause us women have to stick together, ya know?

This will all be included in my upcoming memoirs “How I learned to shut up and be a good little feminist.”