The Personal is Political

My Intro to Gender and Women’s Studies class began with a simple phrase: “The personal is political.”  The class—a typical mix of students from different colleges and different grades—discussed how our daily lives can reflect our political beliefs, from the clothes we wear to the shows we watch to the clubs we choose to participate in. Even if we weren’t doing so consciously, our choices definitely sent messages to the rest of society. It wasn’t the first time I’d discussed this, but after being away from my Scripps friends and the campus for over a year, I was happy to return to a space of more critical thought and discussion about our culture.

It turned out I spoke too soon. As the school year dragged on and I eased back into Scripps life, I realized something: Rarely do we Scripps students look at our lives with a critical eye outside of the classroom. If this does occur, it’s typically in private groups, among friends or SCORE CLORGs. Occasionally these discussions transcend our comfort zones—the “difficult dialogue” event about the problematic Browning dorm decorations was a great start, but an anomaly on this campus. We preach feminism and critical analysis in the classroom, but we don’t always apply it to real life.

Take a minute and count the number of pairs of TOMS shoes you saw this week at Scripps. It’s impossible, right? I wonder how many of the people wearing those shoes know that the founder of the company spoke at a 2011 Focus on the Family event, and later claimed he didn’t know that the organization was actively anti-gay. Even if we give him the benefit of the doubt in that situation, TOMS’ marketing promotes the “white savior” complex, and giving free shoes to the poor may negatively impact local shoe businesses and make the poor dependent on handouts instead of learning to help their community. Of course, these acts of charity are based in good intentions, and maybe the wearers of TOMS around Scripps have read these facts and decided that they still believe in supporting the company. My suspicion, however, is that they haven’t.

And then there’s the Twilight craze, which, as an incoming student, was the last thing I expected to encounter at Scripps. I’ve been a part of A-Team since my first year here, and every year we’ve held a Twilight-themed event the night before the latest movie comes out. As the current co-head, I brought up discontinuing the event, but we ultimately decided to go ahead with it. Why? Because it’s one of our best-attended events of the year. Some of those attendees may be “hate-watching” the series, as many people do, but I’ve talked with multiple Scripps students that genuinely enjoy it. From a feminist standpoint, there’s so much to dissect about this series—the abusive relationship, the fact that the main character and the promotions of the book portray this abuse as romantic, and her overwhelming desire to give up her human family, friends, and education for said abuser. Yet outside of my close friends, I’ve never heard Scripps students talk about these issues.

But nowhere has this glaring lack of critical thinking been more blatant than our campus’ universal celebration of Taylor Swift’s upcoming concert at Harvey Mudd. From SAS to overheard conversations at the dining table to the words of faculty, I’ve heard nothing but excitement—which is understandable, given that Mudd won the concert, and the tickets are free. But in the midst of all this, I’ve heard no one talking about the irony that a women’s college, a space for feminist thought and female empowerment to blossom, is celebrating a singer whose songs and videos recycle the virgin-whore dichotomy and whose public persona is infantilized beyond belief. She sends a message to young girls that boys are everything, and her insistence through her music and her image that she’s a “normal” girl is insulting, given that she fits every beauty standard our society perpetuates. Swift isn’t waging a war on women, but she’s definitely not a feminist icon, either.

I don’t bring these things up to mindlessly attack the Scripps community, or to police what women should like. It’s okay to enjoy something that’s problematic—if we rejected everything with even the slightest bit of racism or misogyny, we’d have nothing left. The trouble is that instead of having campus-wide conversations about problematic aspects of our culture and the media, we just mindlessly consume it. When I chose to come to a women’s college, I expected to enter a proactive, critical environment, and after three years, I’m disappointed. If we don’t apply the critical thinking we learn in Claremont classrooms to real life, we’re wasting it.

What I want is for Scripps students to realize that learning doesn’t end after the bell. I am proud of our campus’ progressive and vocal stances on LGBT and environmentalist issues, but I wish we were just as progressive about issues of race and womanhood. Just because we go to a women’s college doesn’t mean that we don’t need to talk about feminism. Being a smart consumer is about more than just saving money, and being a good citizen requires more than helping old women cross the street. The personal is political, and it is our responsibility as future leaders to have “difficult dialogues” about our society.