Third Wave Manifesta from Manifesta

After reading Third Wave Manifesta from Manifesta, I was a little confused, so I decided to look up what the point of the actual book was. I found out that Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards wrote this book about a new kind of feminism. Basically, there were two different waves of feminism, and the third wave would consist of young women like myself who are trying to connect the old meaning of feminism and relate it to what they feel feminism is today. I then read the excerpt again, and it made much more since. Baumgardner and Richards, in Manifesta, composed this agenda for the Third Wave Manifesta. One point that really stood out to me was the 4th one, which talks about the double standard between women and men dealing with sex and sexual health. Being a part of various organizations and groups that deal with sexual, reproductive health in teens, I know that a lot of them feel that it is the girl's responsibility to protect herself, to take birth control if needed, and to make sure that she doesn't get pregnant. I think this is a common mindset in a lot of young people's minds simply because girls are the ones who can get pregnant, therefore it is solely up to them to make sure it does or doesn't happen.

This makes me think of a news segment that I saw not too long ago where they were talking about a birth control pill for men. The news station conducted a survey on whether or not men would be willing to take the pill, and majority of them said they would not. This surprised me and also made me wonder why, at a time where it was decided that childbearing could and should be controlled, the method was targeted towards women and not men. I mean is there some scientific reason why there was no equal form of birth control made for men at the same time birth control was made for women? I can go on and on about the different forms of oppression that women face, but then I think I would start to sound like the adults on Charlie Brown. I am at a point where everything I look at has some sort of oppressive element, whether it be towards women, Blacks, Latinos, bisexuals, or any other minority group, and truthfully I don't know what to do.