ften when I’m being interviewed about my career and music, I’m asked whether I am a feminist. What the interviewer means depends on who’s doing the asking and what their take on the feminist movement is. Sometimes it’s rhetorical. Other times, a thinly veiled indictment. My answer is always yes. I have never been apologetic about this, but rather deeply passionate. It is an honor to be considered a feminist.
The concept of feminism to me is a mandatory link in a chain toward wholeness, cohesion, maturation and functionality—certainly the feminist movement is one of the most powerful means to this greater end. I do believe, however, that the definition of feminism needs some refocusing, redefining and updating for this modern time, and for this new generation, and that the movement deserves a reorienting, intentionality and re-envisioning for what is possible and how to get there. We need a revolution to the feminist revolution. And it needs to be brought to the fore of our awareness in order to heal what ails our times on this planet.
Here’s why: So much of the movement has been about (often willfully, and for good reason) forcing justice upon a patriarchal system that too often reduces the feminine to maintain the reign of the disempowered masculine. The patriarchy has always seemed an ignorant and emotionally immature purgatory at best, and, at worst, a liminal despair-filled holding pattern carefully held together by resistance, hate, hostility and separatism—the cost of which is felt across every area of life, in women and men alike.