14 Going on Forever: My Feminist Awakening
TW: Mentions of suicide and mass shooting*
I would like to claim that I became a feminist when I first spilled my blood, my underwear stained in a vibrant red shade of young womanhood and social stigma, but my initiation into the feminist fold happened as a result of other people’s blood being spilled. In our country’s storied and tragic history with mass shootings, this particular shooting did not garner much media attention or discussion as many subsequent massacres have. This angers me. Everyone should still be talking about the 2014 Isla Vista Killings and its greater implications on our society because these murders were abhorrently rooted in deadly misogyny.
Just Jared Jr. Justin Bieber News. J-14. These were the websites that my fourteen-year-old self visited daily. This was a time before I realized the exigency of keeping up with politics, a time before I comprehended that the world was not as welcoming and forthcoming as I thought it was. Back then, my world was comprised of my family and myself, Justin Bieber, and teen magazine quizzes. That was all. Until one day, I stumbled upon a new website called “Gurl”, and I happened to click on an article about a recent school shooting: the Isla Vista Massacre. A white-hot rage flashed within me. It dawned on me that this twisted murderer killed these victims out of a dangerously inflated sense of male entitlement. He saw these murders as retribution for the love and sex denied to him by women and the women “stolen” from him by sexually active men. He killed because he felt that women owed him something. He killed because he saw women as conquerable possessions and nothing else.
It’s laughable how one seemingly unconnected event can elicit a flood of unwanted memories. Reading about the Isla Vista Massacre felt jarringly similar to an experience I had when I was just twelve-years-old.
I was twelve when it happened, attending my neighborhood church’s vacation bible school. I met a boy my age there. He wasn’t the most attractive kid, and I think he was aware of that “flaw,” especially when he would talk to girls, but he could make me laugh like no one else could. His childish antics were adorable and lighthearted. He seemed to be a really sweet kid. As the week progressed, we forged a friendship. One night, through Facebook Messenger, he asked me out, and I was shocked. I had inklings that he had a crush on me, but I didn’t realize that it was so developed that he wanted to date me. As any twelve-year-old person would do, I said no. But then he countered with, “I’m going to stab myself if you don’t date me.” At that point, I was scared. I thought he was being honest, so I told my mom. She directed me what to say to him, and eventually, the boy said he was just joking. That incident traumatized me, to say the least, but the saddest part about that encounter is at merely twelve-years-old, that boy had already internalized harmful social norms about self-worth and relationship dynamics. Whether he learned it directly or indirectly, that boy grasped that the threat of violence could be wielded to intimidate women. He also figured out that according to social standards, a women’s “No” carries no weight. Unfortunately, he is not the only boy raised in this masculine tradition.
I did not consciously become a feminist. My feminist conversion was not a big bang, but a small whimper. It wasn’t like the heavens parted and God’s Word was imbued upon me. My feminist metamorphosis happened when I thought to myself, “I wish women would be treated more like humans.”
