No, it was more I felt disenfranchised in myself. I never called myself a feminist because I used to live with active feminists who hated the appropriation of what they viewed as their liberation movement. Try as you might to be sympathetic, you're never going to fully understand all the subtleties and nuances of actually being a female and thus, you're not really going to be able to think and act the same way.
I've never really understood this hang-up and maybe you can explain it to me. Why does not fully understanding the "female experience" preclude you from identifying as a feminist? I feel like, yeah, obviously there are some fundamental biological differences and, stemming from that, certain societal expectations that each of us respond to, consciously or otherwise, depending on our gender. But I don't feel like there is some sort of immutable experience of gender. I don't feel like because I am a woman, I understand all women or that I can speak for all women as an authority on the experience of being a woman. I also feel, in a way, as if you are almost not giving yourself enough credit. You know that women, being primarily human, eat, sleep, and do any number of other human things. You also do a lot of those same things; you don't have to sympathize with an experience that you don't understand because a lot of that experience is bridgeable. And when those experiences aren't bridge-able (like you probably are never gonna grow a baby inside yourself or get followed home by a crazy-looking fellow), then yeah, of course, that is a good place to defer to someone who knows what's up.
Also, with respect to the risk of making feminism another male-dominated sphere -- maybe I'm too new to it, but I've honestly never met any loud-mouth-man-feminists. I have met precious few male feminists, and a few more thoughtful men who wouldn't think to use the label/don't label themselves as feminist for any number of (fairly problematic) reasons but who none-the-less appear to me to be thinking critically about women's issues. And they are, by and large, doing a lot more listening than talking (anecdotal generalization what what). I guess I am curious if when you say "male-dominated sphere" if you are talking about the risk of becoming male-dominated applying to academia in specific, or in a broader sense, culturally or something?
Shifting gears back to the original topic, I remember when I was young (Clara the Pre-Teen era or thereabouts) I went to this friend's birthday party that had boys at it, possibly the first boy-girl party I'd gone to since toddlerhood (that's probably a gross exaggeration, but anyways it was a very big deal to the birthday girl that boys were there and I did remember it feeling sort of new somehow), and anyways I was talking to this one boy about the White Stripes and he was like, "Man I love them, but that girl can't drum" followed by a general "Can girls play music?" soliloquy. And I remember I was like, "Heh, yeah" and sort of wracking my brain for some sort of counterexample and feeling suddenly woefully unlearned about what good drumming is or is not. I did not tell him that I thought he was wrong about his "girls playing music" ideas or that I didn't like the White Stripes or even that I played piano for several years and could probably out-music him and whatever lame guitar tabs he learned on the internet. Which is to say, the language of female inadequacy can make even bright, competent women shut up, and it's an important thing to keep in mind and consciously work against. So, there.
