Who Is Myself A Feminist?

Throughout my life, I have experienced and seen my family affected by issues that revolve around feminism. I myself have learned from these experiences and now have a different view on women’s rights. I personally consider myself a feminist because I believe that women should have equal rights to men, and everyone should be held accountable for their actions. When I was younger I did not view women’s rights as something that was a priority, but a controversial topic. After going through a traumatic occurrence with an ex-boyfriend and seeing my sister mentally damaged through her own incident, I stand with many other women when I call myself a feminist. Growing up Southern Baptist was something that my parents instilled in my morals and values.

For three years I stayed in a relationship that was extremely toxic. Being constantly put down and told how I could not do any better started to transform my thoughts and made me actually believe what I was being told. Verbal abuse started to become normal for me and I accepted it. Over time, things began to progress until one day I was punched in the face by the person I thought loved me. We were in public and I immediately thought one of the bystanders would help me or at least chase after my attacker. No one said a word or flinched to try and help. My nose was broken in three places and I was required to have surgery the following day. After this event, I finally realized what I had accepted as a normal relationship. It took physical abuse to understand what I was going through and sadly, this is the case in many abusive relationships. Over time, more and more family and friends started to find out about this experience. My ex-boyfriend’s friends would talk to me about it and the first thing they would ask is, “What did you do for him to punch you?” This question still sticks out in my memory and I have trouble grasping how someone could ask the victim of abuse what he or she did to deserve it. I believe that media and society today has desensitized people to understanding the victim’s side. Their immediate thought is what was the cause instead of thinking that some people are just naturally evil and have bad intentions. That question really brought things to perspective for me and made me realize how people’s first instinct is to question what the woman did to deserve it in the first