I am a feminist.

This doesn’t mean I hate men (after all, I am one, and if high school taught me anything, I can’t hate myself and live). This doesn’t mean I think women should be in charge (although they are less likely to kill rashly and insanely). This means I believe women should have rights equal to the rights of men.

This is a great time to be a feminist. Look around you. Women are three times more likely to be in and finish college these days. Kent State isn’t the only campus with a ratio of three women to every man.

In 10 to 20 years, when the old male guard reaches retirement, women are going to take over the business world. When this shift occurs, women will have no glass ceiling and will make equal wages. Two centuries is not too bad to turn over three millennia of oppression. The feminist movement will go down in history as the most successful non-violent revolution of our times.

It can’t even be killed by the

Matriarchists.

Feminism is about equality and nothing more. Feminism promotes men and women living harmoniously together for the betterment of humanity. Feminism will win because feminists do.

Matriarchists talk.

Feminists are out getting degrees and assuming positions in the work force, while Matriarchists are still attending workshops and hosting be-ins and plotting the demise of men. Feminists don’t hate men; they hate the accepted norms of our society toward women.

Feminism isn’t a battle between men and women. Feminism is a movement, and as with any movement, the militant right wing of Feminism will only bring set-back and disappointment.

If you, as a woman or a man, want equality, work toward it. I was talking about this with my fiancee, Jamie, and she said, “Women have control of the colleges right now. As soon as they graduate and take over businesses, there won’t be a debate. It can only be a few more years before feminist goals are achieved and possibly even surpassed.”

And I think she’s right. She’s one of the greatest feminists I know. Not because she’s attended more protests then others, not because she successfully uses sex against men as they have her, but simply because she is striving to achieve a better life for herself by working hard and applying herself to her studies. She is a model feminist, and she isn’t worried about the debate.

Jamie had a group of close friends who became Matriarchists. They attacked her belief in love as merely “serial monogamy.” They said the only way for them to be strong women was to use men for sex like men used them. They attempted to get Jamie to leave the man she was seeing so she could “have sex with random men.”

She responded, “I’m going to leave a man I care about, a man who cares about me, for a sexually transmitted disease? I’m going to give up happiness for emptiness? Why would I do that?”

Why would anyone do that?

I’ll admit, my opinion may be a bit skewed because I was that man. I asked Jamie to marry me shortly after that occasion. She’s an incredible woman who knows the difference between life and absurdity, and I’m lucky to know her.

Feminists need to not rain on their own parade.

Jonathan D. Septer is a senior English major and columnist for the Daily Kent Stater. Contact him at [email protected].