good interview. I really don't consider myself a feminist, either. At least I did, but not anymore. Now I just call myself a secular humanist, since that label includes feminism, obviously.

When you take a label on yourself, you don't (necessarily) have a lot of control over it, how it gets perceived, et cetera. You take the label, you take the baggage. I can ask "What does it mean to say you're a feminist?" and get 16 different answers; if only 12 apply, should one self-identify? We can say that one should be able to define what that means for themselves, but the moment you say it to someone else, that's no longer true in practice; hence the 2 years my sister spent as a non-vegetarian/non-vegan who just didn't eat or use animal products.

In real life, I'm loath to accept almost every label. I'd freely cop to being pro-labour, I guess, but if Elizabeth, Beatrix, Albert, other Albert, Carl, Margrethe and all them wanted to form a union, the only thing I'd question was whether Liz gets 1 membership card or 16. ;)

In practice, it is different to condemn people for not standing up and receiving the backlash than to praise those who do; I can freely praise Rosa Parks, say, without condemning those who did go to the back of the bus, the same applies on a lesser scale.

When mainstream feminism stops marginalizing and making invisible just about anyone who isn't white, female, middle class, cis-gendered and able bodied, I might consider it. Till then I won't. Good god, even white men get more notice.

"It really pisses me off" ?? Good. Then fuck her, cos the above shit pisses me off too.

I don't find it that surprising. Try finding, for instance, a member of Congress who self-identifies as liberal. These terms are often so vague, and often carry such a boatload of different connotations, that I largely find them not particularly useful.

There's also the issue of "how much" of feminism one must believe in order to be a feminist.

Is there a feminist canon? Well, in an informal way of "this is what feminists usually believe." But no, not really. There's not really a list of X, Y, and Z that one must believe to be a feminist. So what if one believes only X and Y, and is unsure about Z? Or believes only X, and considers Y and Z to be not entirely true? What if they believe Z only in part?

It doesn't help that there are often feminist authors/teachers who say all feminists "must believe X!" or "cannot believe Y!"

My point is, the question "What makes someone a feminist?" is so vague as to be rather unhelpful. So hence the confusion over who is and isn't a feminist.

I know there will be many complicated reasons why various women will feel happy or unhappy with the label of feminist. However it is totally untrue that only white middle class women have been very actively involved in feminism. Many many working class women, WOC, and disabled women have been very active in feminist strugggles and campaigns. However these are the same women who the media ignore and get written out of our recorded history.

I think a lot of the debate about who should identify as feminist disregards the full range of reasons why someone might choose another label. The writer of the Damsel piece says women of her generation don't ID as feminist because "they think [feminism is] for old women and man haters, hairy broads and militants." Sure, there's that, and then there are people who choose to ID as womanist instead because they feel marginalized by mainstream feminism. Obviously, those are far from being the same line of reasoning.