"You can never have too much of a good thing." It's a saying that I'm sure we've all heard at some point in our lives. We may have even said it when referring to one thing or another, but I don't think we have ever really sat down to really think about it. It's certainly a point I've never agreed with. We can always have too much of something. And this applies to everything. We can have too much money. We can have too much cake during the holidays. We can have too much time on our hands-idle hands are the devil's playground, as my momma always told me. To expand it, we can be too much. We can be too nice. We can definitely be too mean. We can even be too committed a cause.
I know, you're thinking I'm crazy. How does that work? If you really care about something, you can't be TOO committed to it. I disagree. I believe that if you put too much into one cause you can change it into something it's not. And doing that gives people the wrong idea on what you're trying to do in the first place.
Take feminism for example. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not anti-feminist. Quite the opposite, actually. You see, my high school has a whole segment on feminism where you read things like The Doll House and The Yellow Wallpaper and discuss what it means and what feminism is and blah blah blah. It never really struck me, though, how much feminism has changed. It used to be about equality amongst men and women, which we still haven't completely gotten, but we're getting there.
My class recently held a discussion in which everyone identified a feminist as a girl (I know, stereotypes, right?) who doesn't shave her underarms and hates men. Why? That's not what it was about to begin with, why do people see it that way now? In the past 24 hours I read three recently posted articles, two of which attacked housewives as lacking ambition. Wait a minute, my mom's a housewife who taught me to cook and clean and she did a damn good job raising eight kids. And, someday, when I'm a lawyer and I have a family, my pot roast will make all others pale in comparison.
I guess I got a little sidetracked there, but what I am trying to say is that feminism is about more than just the stereotype of hating members of the opposite sex, chopping off all our hair, and refusing to shave. Feminism is about wanting to be seen as equal, because we are. We're all equal. All of us. Men AND women. But that doesn't mean I'm not going to wear my brand new shoes to get a mani-pedi. Because I will. It's just that, women and social media have redefined feminism and I say we take this movement back. Feminism equals equality. And that's all we really want.