7 Ideas I got From Growing up in a Radical Feminism Culture

–1–

That PMS is normal

 All my life I have thought that PMS is normal. Not just a little moody PMS, but killer cramps and having the sound of my husband’s voice make me want to pull my hair out and rip his toenails off, PMS. All of the jokes about women and their cycles made me think that it was my right to be a terror for 10 days of the month and that the people around me just have to deal with it.  I’m now using NFP and getting help with my hormone imbalance so that my family doesn’t have to live in terror when I wake up and announce that I hate everything. My weight gain, hair loss, PMS, swelling of my feet, and horrible cramps were all things that other doctors could not figure out the cause of. One month with a NFP OBGYN and he found out that I have low Progesterone. My husband may do cartwheels if it helps my PMS.

–2–

That I Don’t Need a Man

Yes I do. I need a man that loves me in order to make my life awesome. And that is okay. Men are not the enemy.  The idea that I didn’t need a man led me to be angry at all men and use them for my own needs, which made me a miserable human being. When I lived my life that way I would lay in bed at night, either with someone or alone, and I felt so lonely that I would silently cry myself to sleep. Now that I have a husband who loves me like himself, I have peace. He’s not my boss and I’m not his. We are a team that works together. No wonder I was so tired when I was trying to do it all on my own!!

–3–

That working is more important than my children’s first steps

Along the same idea that I don’t need a man is the fact that I was working when all of my kids took their first steps. (And many other milestones.) If you can’t allow a man to serve you or your family because “I can do it by myself,” then you get to work while your kids are at daycare and walking for the first time.

–4–

That to be somebody I had to change who I am

This is a personal one, but I’m not as rough as I make myself sound. I got this way because I had the idea that a sweet, nice girl would never make it in this world. For the most part this idea was right, but it shouldn’t be. I started fighting and being a tough guy to get along in this world, and now I have to work hard to go back to being kind.

–5–

That men and women are the same

No, we aren’t  We are different. How we talk, walk, love, laugh, think, and countless other things are all different. We are equal in our dignity as human beings, but we are not the same. I can’t do some things that men can do, and that is okay. Men can’t have babies. And that is just fine with most men I know. Women shouldn’t have to kill spiders and snakes. Seriously, if that makes me an oppressed housewife, then so be it. I don’t want that job.

–6–

That with birth control I was in control of my body

This one is super crazy. Radical Feminism teaches that freedom means we women need to pump ourselves full of chemicals, essentially making us infertile. Only then can we truly be like men, who can’t get pregnant and thus are thought to have more freedom than women. By forcing infertility on ourselves, Radical Feminism says, women can have sex without consequences, in other words, sex with men who don’t want anything from you except sex. The truth is that I can control myself, my body, and who gets to touch it and if a man doesn’t want to love me for life then he shouldn’t get that privilege. Luckily, my husband has vowed to love me for life and we have a very good marriage. Women are capable of having kids and careers. We shouldn’t have to be men in order to contribute to this world.

–7–

That I’m strong enough to control my body but not know what is going on with it

Women are strong, smart and capable of handling their own choices, UNLESS it means knowing how their body works or what’s going on inside of it. Ex 1 : A woman is fully capable of making the choice to abort her child, BUT that same woman is not strong enough to see the sonogram of her fetus, because that would be too hard. And she is too weak to do hard things. Ex 2: A woman is smart enough to plan her family with the Pill, but is too dumb to understand how her cycle works.

And those are a few of my ideas that growing up in a culture saturated by Radical Feminism gave me.  Please feel free to add yours.

Check out Conversion Diary by Jen Fulwiler for more Quick Takes posts.