We should all be feminists

a quick new idea daily from the world's greatest tedx talks I'm your host atosa Leone and this is tedx shorts starting at an early age girls are taught direct and indirect rules on how their behavior will affect boys from limitations on assertiveness to acceptance of domestic responsibilities but these rules don't just affect women they affect everyone chimamanda and gozi adichie wants to imagine a world where Generations no longer feel the restrictions assigned to their gender chimamanda is a novelist and recipient of a MacArthur genius Grant who challenges everyone especially men to imagine and build this

world with her so I would like to start by telling you about one of my greatest friends a coma lived on my street and looked after me like a big brother if I liked a boy I would ask the column as a premium okoma was the person I could argue with laugh with and truly talk to he was also the first person to call me a feminist I was about 14 we were in his house arguing both of us bristling with half-baked Knowledge from books that we had read I don't remember what this particular argument

was about but I remember that as I argued and argued Oklahoma looked at me and said you know you're a feminist it was not a compliment I could tell from his tone the same tone that you would use to say something like you're a supporter of terrorism I did not know exactly what this word feminist meant and I did not want a Coloma to know that I did not know so I brushed it aside and I continued to argue and the first thing I plan to do when I got home was to look up the

word feminist in the dictionary now fast forward to some years later I wrote a novel about a man who among other things beats his wife and whose story doesn't end very well while I was promoting the novel in Nigeria a journalist a nice well-meaning man told me he wanted to advise me he told me that people were saying that my novel was feminist and his advice to me and he was shaking his head sadly as he spoke was that I should never call myself a feminist because feminists are women who are unhappy because they cannot

find husbands so I decided to call myself a happy feminist then an academic Nigerian woman told me that feminism was not our culture but feminism was an African and that I was calling myself a feminist because I had been corrupted by Western books which amused me because a lot of my early reading was decidedly unfeminist I think I must have read every single Milson Boone romance published before I was 16. anyway since feminism was unafrican I decided I would Now call myself a happy African feminist at some point I was a happy African feminist who

does not hate men and who likes lip gloss and who wears high heels for herself but not for men of course a lot of this was tongue-in-cheek but that what feminist is so heavy with baggage negative baggage he hates men you hate bras you hate African culture that sort of thing gender as it functions today is a grieving Justice we should all be angry anger has a long history of bringing about positive change but in addition to being angry I'm also hopeful I would like today to ask that we begin to dream about and plan

for a different world a fairer world a world of happier men and happier women who are truer to themselves and this is how to start we must raise our daughters differently we must also raise our sons differently we do a great disservice to boys and how we raise them we stifle the humanity of boys we Define masculinity in a very narrow way masculinity becomes this hard small cage and we put boys inside the cage we teach boys to be afraid of fear we teach boys to be afraid of weakness of vulnerability we teach them to

mask their true self what if both boys and girls were raised not to link masculinity with money what if the attitude was not the boy has to pee but rather Whoever has more should pay now of course because of the historical Advantage it is mostly men who will have more today but if we start raising children differently then in 50 years in a hundred years boys will no longer have the pressure of having to prove this masculinity but by far the worst thing we do to males by making them feel that they have to be

hard is that we leave them with very fragile egos and then we do a much greater disservice to girls because we raise them to cater to the fragile egos of men we teach girls to shrink themselves to make themselves smaller we say to girls you can have ambition but not too much you should aim to be successful but not too successful otherwise you will threaten the man because I am female I'm expected to Aspire to marriage I'm expected to make My Life Choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important a marriage can

be a good thing it can be a source of joy and love and mutual support but why do we teach girls to Aspire to marriage and we don't teach boys the same a woman at a certain age who is unmarried our society teaches her to see it as a deep personal failure and a man at a certain age who's unmarried we just think he hasn't come around to making his pick we teach females that in relationships compromise is what women do we raise girls to see each other's competitors not for jobs of accomplishments which I

think can be a good thing but for the attention of men we teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are we praise girls for virginity but we don't raise boys for virginity and it's always made me wonder how exactly this is supposed to work out because we teach girls shame close your legs cover yourself we make them feel as good by being born female they're already guilty of something and so girls grew up to be women who cannot see they have desire they grow up to be women who silence

themselves they grow up to be women who cannot say what they truly think and they grow up and this is the worst thing we did to girls they grow up to be women who have turned pretense into an art form the problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are now imagine how much happier we would be how much Freer to be our true individual selves if we didn't have the weight of gender expectations what if in raising children we focus on ability instead of gender what if

in raising children we focus on interest instead of gender some of the men here might be thinking okay all of this is interesting but I don't think like that and that is part of the problem that many men do not actively think about gender or notice gender it's part of the problem of gender because gender can be it can be very uncomfortable conversation to have the very easy ways to close it to close the conversation so some people will bring up evolutionary biology and apes but the point is we're not Apes Apes also live on

trees and have earthworms for breakfast and we don't some people will say well poor men also have a hard time and this is true but that is not what this is but this is not what this conversation is about gender and class are different forms of Oppression some people will say that a woman being subordinate to a man is our culture but culture is constantly changing what is the point of culture I mean there's the decorative the dancing the but also culture really is about preservation and continuity of a people so if it is in

fact true that the full Humanity of women is not our culture then we must make it our culture I think I think very often of my dear friend okolo mama he will always be remembered by those of us who loved him and he was right that day many years ago when he called me a feminist I am a feminist and when I looked up the word in the dictionary that day this is what it said feminist a person who believes in the social political and economic equality of the sexes my great-grandmother from the stories I've

heard was a feminist she ran away from the house of the man she did not want to marry and ended up marrying the man of her choice she refused she protested she spoke up whenever she felt she was being deprived of access of land that sort of thing my great-grandmother did not know that word feminist but it doesn't mean that she wasn't one more of us should reclaim that word [Music] the tedx talk you just listened to was recorded at a tedx event in London England all tedx events are independently organized by volunteers who believe

in Ted's mission of ideas worth spreading special thanks to the organizing team at tedx Houston visit ted.com tedx shorts to listen to the full talk and learn more about tedx shorts I'm a toaster Leone thanks for listening and see you tomorrow