TO FALTERING FEMINISTS

Dear Feminist,

There are days when speaking up and challenging pernicious narratives will confer on you some form of veneration. People will applaud you. You will feel like the messiah, the one who has been chosen to speak up for those who are either too timid to hold their own opinions, or simply lack the eloquence to share their thoughts convincingly. And boy, does this feel so good.

Here's the ugly part, though: these times never last. Brace up for the next phase; that phase in which you will begin to sound like a broken record. You will shout out in defence of your gender, but you will be knocked down by a wall of silence—the intimidating silence of your own members. 

You will question your sense of humour when everyone else laughs at jokes that disparage you and other members of your gender. You will tell yourself that you aren't any more special than the feminists who find these jokes hilarious. You will ask yourself who you think you are, to object to a joke that even your "senior feminists" find funny.

You will question your sanity when someone pays you a compliment but you swear you can perceive the condescension cleverly concealed in the adulation. 

You  can almost hear the crickets now. The whole world is at a standstill, waiting for you to be a grouch in your usual fashion; there's no inbetween for you. You will either prove your detractors right by rebuffing the denigrating compliment, or please them by "courteously" accepting the compliment (even though you, feeling like the most reprehensible saboteur a.k.a convenient feminist, will spend the next several hours appeasing your aggrieved feministic conscience).

Dear feminist,

The tag is not an attractive one. 

You are the butt of the vitriol of ignorant clowns; and when anti-feminist intellectuals need few minutes' break away from the mental burden of intellectualism and common sense, whenever they need to exhibit their compulsory 5-minute folly, you are the butt of their wisecracks.

These ones—with the fine grammar, glib speech, psychological depth—are the slickest gaslighters of all time. They are among your frenemies, your friends, and your idols. You can almost hear their exasperated sighs from behind their keypads. "It's not that deep," "maybe you should calm down with this gender equality thing." 

Then you begin to question yourself.

"I decried male condescension last week."

"I attacked female discrimination three days ago."

"I made a feministic post yesterday."

E don dey be like say na only me carry this thing for head like gala. Maybe I need to calm down.

Dear Feminist,

You need to speak up.

Get in their faces.

Annoy the hell out of them until they listen. 

You can only not do enough, you can never do too much.

And if you keep seeking validation as an encouragement to keep standing up for the right thing, know that you will shrivel into nothingness while chasing after it in this present society. 

You, one-man squad, are enough. 

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