Making Fun Of White Women Is Not A Feminist Issue, So Stop Making It Out To Be

This post was taken directly from Chelsea Fagan’s Blog, unedited.

Okay, now it’s time for a rant because I’ve been off Tumblr for a while and haven’t really been keeping up with what’s going on these days. Excuse the language/anger, but this shit really boils my blood.

So I’ve noticed several posts come across my dash about how we need to stop “white girl shaming” and making fun of white women because they like things like Starbucks, pumpkins, and Pinterest. People are presenting it as though it’s a proxy for misogynists to make fun of all women and yet do it in an “acceptable way,” and acting as though it’s a really harmful thing to be doing to young white women on this website and we should all feel bad about it.

Now, I joke a lot about my white girl interests. Gawker even used me as their reference — twice — when talking about Pumpkin Spice Lattes. I will jokingly talk about how I am embracing or rejecting this “identity” and how I am proud in my white girldom. Now, these are jokes, because this whole fucking idea is a joke, and there is no actual cultural anything behind any of these bullshit Tumblr posts or articles. People are making a joke of the PSLs and the Pinterest because you know what the alternative stereotypes are for women who are not white? That they are welfare mothers, that they are illegal immigrants, that they are inherently sexual, and that they are undesirable parts of society. NO WHITE WOMAN HAS EVER LOST A JOB OVER LIKING FUCKING STARBUCKS. These “stereotype” posts are making fun of the fact that WE DO NOT HAVE ANY ACTUAL DAMAGING STEREOTYPE FOR BEING THE WHITE VERSION OF A WOMAN.

In fact, we are granted a lot of fucking privileges for being white women — arguably, we even hold them where a white MAN would not. We get to walk out of a store scott-free with shit we didn’t even realize that we stole because people code us as innocent, righteous, and incapable of malice. We get let off more easily for crimes, we get to be presumed honest, we are the image of womanhood that society is trained to PROTECT and ELEVATE.

I have gotten in so much shit with the bullshit fucking feminists on this website for referring to white women as the housecats of society, but that’s exactly what we are. So much of our oppression stems from condescension, infantilization, and overprotection. Now, is this ideal? No, it sucks. But would it be traded for all of the other horrible stereotypes that non-white women have to deal with? Absofuckinglutely.

And when I would talk about the bullshit gender studies textbooks that cherrypick statistics that mostly affect non-white and poor women and use them as an ideological sledgehammer to paint ALL WOMEN as universal victims and ALL MEN as universal perpetrators, people would come running to my inbox about how I was trying to smear or deny the feminist movement. I’m sorry, I would rather smear and deny the feminist movement all day if the alternative was having my head so far up my own ass that I believed a middle-class white female college student was IN ANY WAY worse off or more oppressed than a lower-class black guy. Hell, even a middle-class black guy. Hell, fucking FOREST WHITAKER can’t even go shopping without getting accused of stealing and he’s a fucking millionaire Oscar winner.

And the truth is that people wouldn’t even go so hard making fun of white women’s interests on this site if we weren’t SO FUCKING PRESSED to be the center of all fucking discussions about oppression at all fucking times, and pretended as though any of our statistics or rhetoric could be applied exclusively on a gendered line. Like get over yourselves, women can absolutely oppress men depending on who and where they are in society. You want to act like white women didn’t INTENTIONALLY use false rape claims against black men in America SINCE THE DAWN OF THIS COUNTRY??? Really???

Not everything is a fucking feminist issue, and if someone wants to make fun of Becky for liking pumpkin candles, have a fucking field day. Because it doesn’t affect any of us in the least, and it has no actual bearing on the world in any way whatsoever. But if we stop turning everything into a fucking oppression contest, then we might have to take responsibility for some of our own failures instead of blaming a society that is largely built to protect and bolster us, amirite? Like that chick who couldn’t get into Texas State or whatever and wanted to act like it was Al Sharpton’s fault even though she had grades that WEREN’T FUCKING GOOD ENOUGH TO GET IN THE SCHOOL.

I know that some of the feminists on this website have build their whole identity/self-worth/value around being The Biggest Victim, but get a fucking grip and recognize how good we have it in this world. Sometimes you are going to be slighted because you are a woman, but it will never be because you are a WHITE woman, and we just have to accept the fact that this is a slice of the Blame It On The Man Pie we do not get to take. UGH. Thought Catalog Logo Mark

image – mseckington

Chelsea Fagan founded the blog The Financial Diet. She is on Twitter.

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