For a very long time, I wasn’t able to tell whether I was proud or ashamed to be a girl. Self-teaching myself to code as early as 12 years old, I had a lot of ambition and a lot of personal pride. I remember myself strongly opposing, even getting angry at organizations like “Girls Who Code” because I felt like they were conveying message that “it’s not normal for a girl to code, so we have to make it a big deal to get girls into programming” and “Girl programmers aren’t good enough and lack merit on their own, so we have to push for diversity like, affirmative action of sort, and quota to present girls in tech”. In a way, I felt bad because I felt like my effort in self-teaching myself to code was trivialized, I felt like because I’m a girl, people are going to assume that I never had interests in computer in the first place without the help of those organizations. Even now, six years later, part of me still finds the idea a bit insulting, but my attitude toward it had changed a lot; If anything, I couldn’t careless if someone did think that I learned to code from those girl camps - after all, if you get the job done, you get the job done, no one cares about how you learn to do it. Maybe deep down I still feel the same, but I know one thing for certain - I’m no longer ashamed to be a girl.

I acknowledge that being a girl and feminist are two different things, however, in my case, feminism is usually the reason why I feel ashamed to be a girl. Being a teenager in the 2010s, when I submerge myself in feminism, the issues at hand were things like Gamergate, Anita Sarkeesian vs video games, Emma Sulkowski rape case, and Elliot Rodger. I have to admit, I wasn’t very impressed; I was angry, actually. I consider myself to be educated and open minded, so I always try to view things on both side and try to be as objective as possible whenever I dig into something. Needless to say, “feminism” failed me (I will explain the quotation later) in a sense that, whenever I read anything pro-feminist in these events, they tend to be really illogical and, for a lack of better word, simply bad at arguing. Take Emma Sulkowski for example, while no one except Sulkowski and the Nungesser (the accused) actually knew whether the rape happened or not, it is a fact that officials had investigated the case, and found Nungesser to be innocent. Sulkowski had also attempted to file a police complaint, and once again, the attorney did not press criminal charge, because there was simply lack of evidence for suspicion. Now let me repeat, whether the rape actually happen or not, only Sulkowski and Nungesser know, AND let me say that I understand that rape accusations are often really hard to prove, and there are definitely a lot more rapes that happen behind the scene and are under reported due to work schedule (did you know that you might not get paid if you take a day off work to go to court depending on where you work? This is especially true if you are in say, a minimum wage job). But if you had tried to do the case two times, both failed, wouldn’t it be a bad thing to continue calling the guy a rapist? If you are truly wronged, shouldn’t you be trying to find more evidence to back it up instead of continuing to mar your accused’s name without considering what it might do? Isn’t our justice system had always had been based on “innocent until proven guilty?” By accusing Nungesser of rape, Sulkowski indirectly ruined Nungesser’s life because now he became well known as a rapist, even when he was found innocent. Employers are more reluctant to hire him, he’s less likely to receive a job because of the bias against criminals (look at employment post correction for criminal). As a matter of fact, in April of 2015, Nungesser filed a charge against the school for allowing gender-based discrimination. While it didn’t bring a positive outcome for him, the zealot and the willingness to assume anyone is guilty in rape cases by feminist just really irks me.

Just like that, my teenager years had gone by and I constantly found that “feminism” was a source of stupidity and a justification to be angry at the world. I hated feminism, I hated feminists, and in a way, I sort of hated myself because I thought feminism was supposed to be a good thing and that these feminists mean no harm, that they have good intentions in mind. I came from California, which is a very liberal place, and as you can expect, there are a lot of feminists here. I had debated with a lot of people, and lost a lot of friends over the years. Despite having an outgoing personality, I became reclusive; I saw socializing as a lost cause. I had no interest in what people talk about (whether I talked about sci fi like star trek or really technical stuff) and according to what I heard from people, I had an “elitist” aura around me. The two side of me were still there, the arrogant and ambitious self-made programmer Jackie, that believed that she’s superior and smarter than everyone in almost anyway, and the quiet, shy, lonely, and attention needy girl that really wanted attention and to blend in. At one point I did try to change my views, tried to hangout with feminists, tried to educate myself on these issues, but all my effort usually just ended up with me sitting alone in a group of people all having conversations while I didn’t know what to say. I also joined a few online communities who shared the same views as me, however, I found most of them to be really conservative (to the point of ignorance and blind hatred toward feminism), and often time they had no reason to be angry other than they were suffering and believe that feminists want special treatment. I simply didn’t blend in. I wasn’t really a feminist, but at the same time, I wasn’t really an anti-social justice warrior either.

My life eventually changed when I met my current boyfriend Kevin. The first few conversations he said something that I kind of didn’t want in any of my boyfriend - he’s a feminist. To my demise, he also has a lot of friends in his circle that are also feminists. We used to argue a lot. I would bring up stuff like why it’s bad that women are encouraged to do tech. My point was that it’s insulting and that if women were truly interested in tech, they wouldn’t need anyone to tell them otherwise. Kevin, who happened to be a CS major who had been doing programming for over 10 years, told me something that I still remember even till this day, while I don’t remember the exact word, it was something like “Jackie, look back at history, for example, one of the first significant milestones for modern general purpose computer, the ENIAC, was ran and programmed with a team of over 80 women. In fact, if you look at tech history, a lot of pivotal moment in computer technology had involved women in some way or another, how about Grace Hopper (the woman who documented computer ‘bugs’ and main brain behind COBAL)? What happened over 60 years that caused women to lose interest in computer science?”. Kevin caught me off guard, he was right; What the heck happened? Early on women played a lot of significant roles in the development of technology, why did the percentage of women in tech drop so dramatically?

Kevin sparked an interest that I never knew I had. I started reading about women’s history. Boy, did you know that one of that one of the really popular video games back in the day, King’s Quest, was designed by Roberta Williams? One of my favorite childhood games, Empire Earth (yeah I play RTS :P ), was published by Sierra Entertainment, which was also co-owned by Roberta Williams as well. All of the sudden, my miniscule view of famous women wasn’t just Marie Curie anymore; I mean, prior to this, if you had asked me to list a list of famous and significant women, I could probably named only 4 or 5 - Marie Curie, Rosa Park, Helen Keller and Emily Dickinson. Quite honestly, while I know they were important in one way or another, they didn’t have any revelation to me as a girl who really loves computer science. For once, what I read about women’s history actually mattered, they actually spoke out to me, and in a way, I felt proud. Don’t get me wrong, I still have no clue why women’s interest in tech dropped, but being a woman started to matter to me. But seeing all of these women in tech sort of made me proud. It isn’t my achievement, but the fact that they are women just make me happy and take a bit of pride in myself - if they can do it, I can too.

Well, taking pride to be a woman is one thing, but being a feminist is another. Of course, at this point, I was still not coming to terms with being a feminist, I still think of them as idiots. Social media was still pissing me off, and social justice warriors were still making me mad, that is, until I decided to get rid of them. Awhile ago, I deactivated my facebook, which in my opinion, was probably the best move ever. With google plus being the only form of social media I use (har har, who use google+? ), my social life is pretty much cut, I talked to no one except my family and Kevin exclusively. However, being offline was actually a good thing. I sort of craved for interaction with people now that I don’t consume online interaction anymore. I got on my phone, texted an old friend of mine, Tori, and we arranged to meet up and hangout. When we met, things happened and we basically get into talk about feminism, which I basically express a lot of discontent with. To my surprise, despite claiming to be a feminist, she and I actually agreed on a lot of things: we both hated Lena Dunham, we both think while no one should be shamed for being fat,it should not be encouraged as a healthy lifestyle. Now there are some obvious disagreements, but for the most part, we got along really well. That night on the way home, I gave our conversation a lot of thought, Tori was a feminist, and it wasn’t like she’s a “Oh yeah, I’m a feminist”, she one of those “HELL YEAH I’M A FEMINIST AND I’M PROUD OF IT” type feminist; not just I didn’t dislike Tori, I was actually looking forward to hangout with her again. I contacted Kevin and talked about this, and he just told me the same thing he told me all along - vocal minority. What I really hated wasn’t the idea of gender equality (hell I’m a girl), what I truly hated was some minorities within feminism that spoke about absurd things, the ones that scam people for money and scream that everything is sexist. I don’t know if it’s because now that I got, the people I hangout with are more mature, but I often finding myself agreeing with a lot more “feminist” concepts. They tend to be more moderate than the ones I met online, and even some of them that I hated the stuff they post on facebook, are actually reasonable and more agreeable when I talk with them in person.

As time goes on, without seeing stupid things on Facebook, I guess I just stopped caring about the stupid things SOME feminists said. I said some because well, meeting people and getting to know what they really believe in proved to me that people aren’t as stupid as I tend to think they are (Yes I’m really arrogant sometime). Slowly, I kind of came to terms with feminism as a whole, and I guess I just started to see myself, in a way, as a first wave feminist. As I dig into women histories, I guess I just started to like feminism a lot; don’t get me wrong, there are even first wave feminists that I don’t agree with - Susan B Anthony for example. But as a whole, I admire the movement, I think it was noble in its cause, and the result had been very positive. Why has the word “feminism”, which was an honorable and idealistic word in the past became associated with stupidity and absurdity? After all, feminists, like Tori and Kevin, aren’t as bad as I thought they would be, I really enjoyed talking with them. There are still a lot of injustices for women both in first world countries and third world countries. Why should we see feminism as a bad thing?

In the grand scheme of things, feminism is just a label, I could had changed this blog title to why I am an egalitarian and it wouldn’t have mattered much. But for me, coming to terms with feminism has a significance in my life, because a large portion of my early years were defined by how I was ashamed of being a girl. Well, even now, I’m still skeptical about a lot of things feminism stand for, but for the most part, I have settled down and can say with pride that I am a feminist. I would still scream “NO” if anyone ask whether I’m a third wave feminist, but first wave? Count me in for sure. I might change my views in the future like I have recently changed regarding feminism, but in the meantime, I think I have made peace with myself in a way. After all, like Kevin and Tori, feminism and I both believe in helping women around the world treated equal to men. I’m willing to make a change, maybe not for the better of mankind, but for the better of myself.

I am a feminist.