reading through unpublished drafts from my angry antifeminist youth and felt like publishing this one
I think my first exposure to feminism came in middle school. I was a math team kid, and one of the things that quickly becomes self-evident when you’re a math team kid is that girls just aren’t as good at math as boys.
I mean, maybe they are on average. But I was spending my time around the upper tail of the distribution, and there just weren’t as many girls. I never saw any sexism, any girls being discouraged. There weren’t girls in my school or in the schools we competed against who would have been great if they had just joined but they were too busy painting their nails instead. The missing girls just weren’t there.
This never confused me, there wasn’t any mystery about it. Girls were different from boys in lots of ways, why shouldn’t this be one of them? Different chromosomes, different hormones … the idea that this sort of difference might arise due to biology was totally unremarkable.
But if I ever mentioned this self-evident fact, I got one of two responses. One from adults, who tended to look sort of uncomfortable and change the subject quickly. And one from my (non-math-team-kid) peers, who would look shocked. “I can’t believe you would say something like that! That’s so sexist! It’s the current year!”
(No one ever argued with me, or tried to explain gender socialization, or pointed me to studies that would show that I was mistaken. It was always one of those two.)
It was then that I got the idea that there were true things that, if you talked about them, made you a bad person. It was terrifying.
Now of course, it’s ten years later and that knowledge is second nature. I’m better acquainted with the nuances of social justice shibboleths than most actual feminists I know. I’m used enough to tiptoeing around friends and acquaintances and people I meet at parties that I don’t have to think about it. But I still breathe a sigh of relief whenever I’m in a group of people and someone makes an offhandedly sexist remark. This, I think, this is somewhere I can be safe.