Having short hair didn’t make me anything but a kid who didn’t feel like waking up early to straighten it.

When I chopped it all off two years ago, all I thought about was how much sleep I’d be saving and how much 20-fewer minutes in the shower every morning would save on our water bill. When I came to school, I got, more or less jokingly, called super fun names. And so I need feminism.

It’s not a rule book. There are a few basic principles, but one feminist doesn’t speak for everyone. If you disagree with a feminist on something, don’t discount the entire movement. We don’t all always agree and that’s good. That’s part of figuring it all out.

Feminism, as Emily Shire of the Daily Beast put it, at its most core level, is about equality between the sexes – not advancing one over the other.
It’s a process that aims to get people to understand all people are created equal and deserve like rights; that oppression exists because of the way men and women are socialized; that women have the same mental capacity as their male counterparts and should be given the same chances in political, economic and social spheres as men have; that gender roles are a burden and hurt all sexes

Women should have the right to choose and not have their lives chosen for them because of their sex.

Is that all not logical?

It doesn’t stop at suffrage. Women have the right to vote, yeah, but there are dozens of double standards that exist now, from wage disparity to treatment in assault cases to treatment in everyday life.

I was one of two girls in my PE class one year and needed feminism because the guys in my gym class called each other ‘girls’ and ‘ladies’ when they’d miss a shot or get knocked down, because doing something “like a girl” is an insult.

Although women’s rights are significantly closer to men’s than ever and that’s fantastic, people don’t understand that feminism is not only about advancing women’s rights.

It’s a lot more than that.

Take the portrayal of women in media right now. There is so little representation.

This is not to say that women haven’t made gains in the past few years in the industry – while only 36 percent of movies last year passed the Bechdel test (measurement of how substantial female roles are by asking if a film features two or more women characters who speak to one another about something other than a man), this year may prove better, with films like Divergent, Veronica Mars and Maleficent being critical successes and many more films like them coming out.

But even with these gains, women in media are being trivialized, most recently by nude photo scandals. Actresses like Jennifer Lawrence had photos spilled last week. Reactions to this were mixed, with most calling the actresses promiscuous and guilty, even though the photos were spread without their consent

We live in a society that participates in the unwilling sexualization of its women. Where’s the logic in that?