Media Room

Why I am a Feminist!

This former NFL player believes that sexism is the root cause of homophobia. Wade Davis is the executive Director of You Can Play (an organization that promotes equality in sports) and an ambassador for HeForShe.

Wade Davis came out as gay in 2012, several years after he retired from professional sports, in 2003.

Recently Davis touched on a topic that I have always been passionate about – the idea that sexism plays a role in the cultural and social perception of sexuality.

According to Davis, men do not hold each other accountable for their actions; we were conditioned to believe that there is a lesser gender class and as men, we were taught to believe that listening to women makes us inferior.

Like Davis, I strongly believe in gender equality; I strongly oppose to gender roles and stereotypes and I believe that once we begin to treat each other equally, regardless of gender, we will abandon the archaic ideology that gender and sexuality are binary and anything in between is a travesty.

We live in a very hyper-masculine society and the subject of gender and sexuality is often scorned; in some cases we either deny that there is a sexism issue or we condemn any anti-conservative/patriarchal view of the family.

Why am I a feminist?

For a start, I believe that we are all equal, there is no inferior or superior gender and we are therefore all entitled to social, political and economic equality.
In addition, I believe that gender-socialization is a code word for discrimination by gender and sexuality.

Once we begin to view each other differently, we create a divide and that ‘divide’ is used to subjugate certain groups of people that extensively ranks us by facets such as gender and sexuality.

Sexism is a menace to our humanity! Feminism is not about any one gender; and its not just about two genders, it is about all us being equals, wherever along the gender spectrum we belong.