Are you an activist?

 

Activist ('aek.ti.vist) n: advocating or engaged in activism; someone who takes part in activities that are intended to achieve political or social change

I was at The Other Club—the club "for women who do," in central London—with my colleague Serena last night, enjoying a dinner of duck egg risotto ball. We'd just had a Q&A session with Inna Shevchenko, a lead activist in the Ukrainian feminist group Femen—known, of course, for their topless protests—and a talk from the editors of a new book, "Let's Start a Pussy Riot." We were a having a little post-talk discussion.

"Who in this room," asked Joy Lo Dico, co-founder of The Other Club, "would call themselves an activist?" It was only once my hand was stuck confidently in the air that I realised nobody else had raised theirs. I tried to backtrack, running my hand through my hair as if that's what I'd been doing all along. But it was no use; my hand had been raised too high, too self-assuredly. "And what do you do, Jessica?" asked Joy, all eyes on me. I thought of Femen, allegedly assaulted by the KGB as a result of their protests, and the members of Pussy Riot still in prison. I swallowed a mouthful of buttered spinach. "Oh, well, you know, I sort of talk about it... well, I write and... you know, try to kick up a bit of a fuss..." There was silence in the room. I lowered my hand, turning back to my crispy risotto ball, suitably embarrassed.

So that's the last time I try calling myself an activist for a while. But in the cold light of day, I'm still surprised that I was the only person to raise my hand. Everybody in that room cared enough about the cause to haul themselves off the sofa on a cold Wednesday night and come to a discussion on feminism; some had come from outside London, and I imagine that many, like me, are regular attendees at similar discussions or even protests like Reclaim The Night and SlutWalk. At least two people there last night—Joy, and co-founder Katie Glass—had set up a feminist club; one had edited a book about Russian feminist punk group Pussy Riot; another had founded a feminist arts collective called Storm In A Teacup and was involved with the Feminist Times; myself and Serena both write about feminism. How was I the only person in that room who thought of myself as an activist?

As I discovered, it must partly be to do with a fear that you don't "do enough" to be an activist; that your feminist credentials won't match up to other people's, or that you don't do everything you "should" do as a feminist. If that is what's holding us back—and I speak as someone who has publicly embarrassed herself over this—I suggest we all stop worrying so much. I suspect that this is what was troubling David Cameron when—during an attempt to attract the "women's vote" that ended, yet again, in PR failure—he hesitated over calling himself a feminist; he probably thought it would amount to calling himself a women's rights activist, and he'd be pretty hard pressed to justify that.

But is it more than that? A few months' ago, I heard Caitlin Moran speaking at the Stoke Newington Literary Festival. Somewhere along the way, she said, it became uncool to demand a revolution; having that revolutionary spirit that was so alive during the 60s and 70s was no longer seen as a good thing. "How did they sell us that one?" she called out in disbelief. (Russell Brand, as everyone is aware, has recently taken up this cause in the pages of the New Statesman).

It's widely thought that part of the reason that feminism—at least the word, if not the concept—lost its popularity is because it became associated with a stereotyped idea of the feminist as aggressive and militant. Young girls no longer wanted to call themselves feminists and be associated with these qualities. Central to the recent revival of feminism has been the idea of "reclaiming" the word; detaching it from those associations and stripping it back to the basic idea that men and women are equal. Under this reclaimed definition, far from being embarrassed to call yourself a feminist, you should be ashamed not to (David Cameron, take note).

But does that mean that, as feminists, we're now scared to identify ourselves as activists? Worried about once again sullying the word—newly cleaned up and sparkling after its reclamation—do many of today's feminists want to insist that we're not activists, we're just people who believe that men and women are equal; nothing scary about that and you, sir, should be a feminist too.

Whatever the reason, in a roomful of members of a feminist club last night, I was the only person happy to call myself an activist, and perhaps it's time to reclaim that word, too. We need activists to change things, and if even we're not willing to call ourselves that—the ones who are attending talks and events, discussing these issues with people we meet, writing about them and running clubs—then who on earth will?