Andrea is a sophomore at Duke who will be working with the National Domestic Workers Alliance this summer.

Hey! Hello!

My name is Andrea Lin and I am a rising sophomore studying Biology and Music Performance, and as you can probably tell, my interests are all over the place. Born and raised in Arizona, I didn’t really understand why so many of the people around me didn’t consider themselves feminists. But, I didn’t want to be that one weird kid, so I never brought up feminism until I came to Duke where so many of my peers openly discussed racial, gender, religious, or political issues.

As I prepare for New York with the Moxie Project this summer, I look back on the mind-opening experiences of my freshman year and confront my old hesitations of openly admitting my support for feminism.

Aristotle once claimed that there is only one way to be “good,” but many ways to embody evil. Plot twist: I don’t agree with Aristotle. #sorrynotsorry

Despite movies depicting the flawless superhero and the corrupted super-villain, television shows about the mean girl and saintly underdog, tales marking the hellish monsters that plague our planet and worlds unknown, we know that “IRL” good versus evil is a cloud of “un”absolutes, no black and white line discerning the most good and most evil. I’m sure some of us would say: Murder itself is bad, but we consider the scenarios (self defense?) and even then, the greatest evils are even called into question—in which we can go into philosophical debate about sometime later.

It took me some self-contemplation to realize that even if we are different–just as I felt different calling myself a feminist amongst my peers–it doesn’t make us “bad people.” We often associate people who are different as people who are wrong, and by extension, people who are bad. Naturally I paired my anomalies with being “bad.” But now, my exposure to such open conversation, I consider my hesitation “bad.”

My mission this summer with the Moxie Project can be traced back to this internal conundrum: I’m not a bad person just because I am unaware. When I, along with so many, grow up in a culture that allows and encourages men to treat women the way they do, how are you supposed to know that it’s wrong? We trivialize so many of these actions that we don’t even recognize it as a problem.

I don’t want to become a cynical, man-hating, party-pooper feminist. The kind of extreme feminist that both certain women and men alike don’t want to be associated with. But I do want to become a feminist that is aware of the inequalities and equalities between the sexes. I want to become aware of the demand, the push of so many people fighting for their rights over the course of time…the uncomfortableness of reform, I want to understand.

I am afraid of this change that may come during my summer with National Domestic Workers Alliance and with the nine other Moxie girls–to admit that there’s so much that I don’t understand and to still want to be part of.

Bigger plot twist: I guess there is one thing that I can agree on with Aristotle: “The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.”