Ya'll Be Feminists & Don't Even Know It

Leveling Up, Sprinkle Sprinkle, or my personal favorite, Fuck These Niggas: It's all feminism.

I am a baddie with an advanced degree in gender & sexuality studies. My bachelor’s and master’s reflect years of research, study, and analysis of gender identity and gendered representation in our society. I am extremely well-versed in feminism, and it is my feminism that will not allow me to date a broke man. So a video that links the rise of hypergamous content creators to feminism is clearly my bag. I loved Anna’s take because, like so many of our TikTok-era trends, the boosted interest in hypergamy is lacking context. Lots of women have strong opinions about the content created by people like Shera Seven, but noticeably fewer folks understand that feminism is at the center of it. I would even go so far as to say that there is a substantial number of Black women who are interested in themes of female empowerment of hypergamy—perhaps even Shera herself—but would vehemently reject any association with feminism. Let me be the first to tell you: If you’re a Black woman working against the expectation put upon you by men, you’re not beating the feminist allegations, babe. And you shouldn’t want to.

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“Feminist: A person who believes in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes.” Beyoncé including this snippet of Chimamanda’s TedX Talk in her 2013 self-titled album was a pivotal moment for feminism in popular culture. Kicking off just as social media platforms like Instagram gave celebrities more tools to brand themselves, Bey’s declaration ignited a trend of entertainment journalists asking entertainers if they, too, identified as feminists. Their responses would trigger headlines, think pieces, and tweets. (Fun fact: My ability to weave feminist themes into my pop culture coverage became so valuable post-Beyoncé that it helped launch my professional writing career.) Using the definition so neatly defined by Chimamanda, and echoed by Bey, women of the era had a new reason to label themselves as feminists, or not. With a little over a decade’s worth of hindsight, though, I fear that we may have lost the plot. While we were hyper-focused on the who, we lost sight of the what and the why.

The truest definition of a feminist is a person who supports or engages in feminism. Anybody can call themselves a feminist, but if their beliefs and actions don’t align with feminism, they aren’t. And anybody can deny being a feminist, but if it thinks like a duck and acts like a duck… You know the rest. So many people struggle with this delineation because the foundational definition of feminism has been intentionally muddied to keep those who need it most (i.e. Black women) disinterested in it. Hopefully, I can help clear it up.