Whenever I am asked if I am a feminist or what I think about feminism, for a couple of years now, even though the answer is yes, I struggle with feminism nowadays. From my point of view, because of the influence, impact, and power of social media,  feminism today is very eruptive but it is also quite void and lacks things that in the downs of the movement were there. Things such as theoric production, clear leaders and a common ground and goals. Today everything and everybody are feminists- liberals, radicals, intersectionals, and socialists, coexist which makes feminism a constant living contradiction with the presence of a huge word that is now empty of meaning. In a few words, as a white, middle-class, educated woman, I glorify feminism in the late nineteen-sixties and seventies over everything that came up later, and in doing so, Simone de Beauvoir cannot be left unmentioned. 

Simone de Beauvoir thought of herself as an intellectual and was one of the first women to be recognized bi-continentally as a feminist leader. What I admire the most of her is that what took her to the climax of her career was not explicit activism in the media world or the streets -at least in the beginnings or not only that- but her academic and intellectual work. As she mentioned in an interview on television from 1975, “The second sex” (1949) -her most famous book and the feminist bible of an era- was not written with the purpose of being a feminist book but a philosophy one, in her own words “it was mainly a theoretical work, much more than a militant work. But I am really glad it was taken up by activists afterwards” (de Beauvoir, 2021, min 7:40).

Often, people who chose to major in any kind of social studies are constantly questioned about what are we going to live from, or why are we spending our youth studying things that won't make us any richer, and if it's not profitable how is it not a waste of time. It's not a waste of time and energy because it fulfills my soul, in the same way it also helps others because we cannot fix what we cannot name nor identify. Social studies are something that hurts us in the same sense it awakens our passion and attracts us, and as I once heard at a Congress, producing theory is a way of making politics. 

Naïve or not, two of my strongest beliefs in life are that there are way too many people living in the world for us to waste our lives doing something we are average at mainly for something as superficial as money, and that in a world where the right wings keep gaining spaces and think of themselves as revolutionary, the left wings have a lot of work to do and things to rethik, yet I still think the world deserves the chance to become into a better, kinder, healthier and more inclusive world.  In doing so, I think I could lead, but not from a traditional position in politics (I don't want to be a governor nor a president, not even a senator), nor in the business world,  and even less as something in social media such as influencers or a youtuber. If the leadership has a direct impact, I want to lead in an environment where I can engage and build a rapport with the people I am leading, I want to have the chance to see them as more than numbers and graphics.  

As Simone de Beauvoir suggested in 1979 when for an interview Jardine asked her what did she hope towards her work in the future and her answer was “I think that The Second Sex will seem an old, dated book, after a while. But nonetheless ... a book which will have made its contribution. At least, I hope” (de Beauvoir & Jardine, 1979, pp. 236), our academic writing might be criticized in the future or replaced by something better, or even forgotten, but at the end of the day it would have made those who read it think about it. The ultimate goal of an intellectual leader, being a source of inspiration and thinking around those themes which concern us so badly to make us want to spend our lives challenging and teasing the limits of the barriers of the current knowledge.