How Eating Eggs Made Me A Feminist

One nondescript Tuesday, I decided to be a tourist in my own city of Los Angeles by dining at a popular downtown eatery by the name of Eggslut. As I ate the most expensive eggs I had ever eaten in my life, and I don’t mean caviar but more along the lines of the sunny side up variety, I realized that what I was truly paying for was an intellectual awakening in the world of feminism that no other meal has ever afforded me.

Eggslut is this gas station of a restaurant nestled in Grand Central Market that challenged my idea of what it is to be a modern feminist. I like to call it a gas station, because in many ways it’s fueled my desire to reevaluate how easily we pump terms without knowing how far they can go to hurt others. Eating at a stop and go place such as this reminded me of the power of words and how we as a society have superimposed aggressive meanings to them in our selective if not limited lexicons, charging them in a negative way and stripping them of their potential to be powerful in a positive way.

Before I get too ahead of myself, let me just say this isn’t a food review and I am by no means trying to impose my opinions on this local eatery and pass my own off as theirs. Nor am I some expert in feminism with a hidden political agenda. I am, however, a woman who has shrugged countless of times upon hearing tyrannical rants being labeled as feminism by the media. What I am trying to say is that the word feminism itself has too often been misused and looked upon with certain distaste.

Media often dictates what feminism is by telling us what it isn’t through the persecution of certain realities like painting pornography as the objectification of women and the lack of equality women have in the workforce as more of a percentage than an injustice. Means to inspire often become means that offend as their words form predetermined ideas in our head of what is to be a feminist that often make it more difficult to support one let alone be one.

In light of the HeForShe movement, I suppose it’s irrational for me to say that having breakfast made me more of a feminist than those who have “converted” out of their undying love for Emma Watson. While I am not completely against the campaign, I am also neither an advocate for its platform. I do, however, have a great deal of respect for Miss Watson as a voice in the world of feminism, not because of her position, but because it was she who taught us all that words are magic and can be powerful when spoken as spells. After all “it’s Leviosa, not Leviosar.”

When you use words aggressively or speak them with a negative connotation attached with your intonation, you strip them of power in the way we’ve claimed the workforce and society has done to women for years. We’ve all said the wrong things and have had it blow up in our faces, so why not try saying the right things and see where that gets us?

Miss Watson’s portrayal of Hermione Granger showed us that being a feminist isn’t limited to being a woman, but about being smart and knowing which side to stand for, something both genders are capable of. And when I say side, I don’t mean women against men or vice versa but rather our opinions of right and wrong.

We are allowing our education to shape our preconceived notions when really we should change our ideas on how we utilize our knowledge by allowing it to reinforce our own observations of the world around us.

Three people walk into an art gallery and choose to stand in front of the same painting. The art critic says something about the use of color, whereas the art historian says something about the symbolism behind each stroke. As for the third person – they say something so intrinsically and absolutely profound that it catches the attention of the other two. However their opinion of their fellow art lover drastically changes once they find out he or she is not a ticket holder, but rather the custodian. While this is no joke, it might as well be an offensive one society constantly likes to tell.

Why have we allowed our background and gender define the shape of our ideas? Why do we inherently assume a janitor is incapable of being educated and knowledgeable about art, or a woman’s knowledge of economics is limited to the receipt of her designer handbag, or that being a feminist means being an unshaven homosexual?

I have always regarded myself as somewhat of a feminist, because by the world’s logic if you’re not a feminist you’re a misogynist. Why is it that those are our only two options? In the twenty minutes it took me to eat my breakfast at Eggslut I realized that, just like the menu, I did have more than two options. I only saw two of them, because I wasn’t looking at the menu of feminism the way I should have been, which is as a choice of entrees not limited to bestselling daily specials.

The often forgotten pillar of feminism is humanism and the fundamental idea that we each are entitled to deciding what is right and what is wrong - and there is no wrong way to be feminist unless, of course, you’re a misogynist.

Feminism cannot be conveyed by individual parts that form the whole, but through the new collective meanings we choose to give them with each singular intonation used to express the overall thought.

Which is why my epiphany of what is to be a feminist, the one I had while eating eggs, began with the single word that has long been used to condemn, depreciate, and shame women – “slut.” “Slut,” a word used for women, in reference to women, and by women for too long.

Maybe that’s just how we Los Angelenos do it - we claim eggs are sluts the way New Yorkers claim to have the best pizza in a never-ending game of word association we like to call opinions. At the heart of it that’s all feminism really is – a series of opinions. The good, the bad, and the ugly – you decide, but be a judge of it as much as you are a voice.

There is boldness in not just calling an eatery “Eggslut,” but also in confronting how we can make a basic diet staple, like the egg, into a gourmet dining experience. They have liberated the egg from the confines of its category as a breakfast food and challenged the more orthodox means of how we cook and plate the simple egg, which brings me back to feminism. Much in the way that this humble protein is elevated to the level of the truly gourmand, the key to being a feminist is as easy as elevating the way we use our words and phrase our thoughts without being offensive even when we don’t mean to be. As simple as it is to proudly declare oneself an Eggslut, shouldn’t it be just as simple to proudly declare oneself a feminist?

As for the name, it is only natural for it to be met with mixed opinions and I know many feminists are going to jump on this one. After all women are known anatomically for their... well, eggs, of course! So the obvious assumption is that it is anti-feminist to eat at Eggslut, because it is tethering women to the term “slut.” On the contrary what we’re seeing is a public statement that words are not innately derogatory and that vulgarity is the freedom of designation. It is we who make words filthy by assigning definitive and singular meanings to them, much in the way society assigns gender roles.

In the case of Eggslut, we see a positive connotation as we are confronted by the juxtaposition of a food that is the epitome of ‘clean’ living and the basis of all life with a word we associate to be dirty.
So what is a slut? Despite dictionary standards, a “slut” can no longer be limited to a promiscuous woman or man. A “Slut” is “a coddled egg on top of a smooth potato purée, poached in a glass jar and served with toasty crostini” (directly taken from eggslut.com).

On an aesthetic level, the use of a jar may appear to come off as a marketing ploy to all those who instagram breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but when you think about it, the concept isn’t remotely outlandish. We are witness to a concept that reflects the style of much of the architecture in Los Angeles, which is “form follows function.” Which brings me to my next point, why can’t the form of our opinions take shape from the function of them. I challenge you to channel the idea of art for art’s sake by paving the way of feminist for feminism’s sake.

While the eggs come in jars, the water comes in cartons, which evokes a sense of nostalgia. There was something about sipping water out of a milk carton that made me feel like a kid again and that’s when it hit me that the real concept of the experience is elementary eating and thinking – going back to the ABCs and 123s. It's going back to learning how to use our words. It’s going back to a time when we were all figuring things out for the first time and deciding where we stood in the spectrum of conscious decisions and being unafraid of having an opinion because we didn’t “know better.”

I believe wholeheartedly that we should approach the subject feminism and gender equality in a way that is similar to Egglslut’s business model – by taking a stand in the marketplace with a sign that reads “open.”

Clean living is not an option but a choice one has to be willing to make, much like feminism. Since we’ve developed a love affair with the term organic, why not make feminism organic and define it to be a simple idea that branches out into different leaves of thought rather than a tangled bunch of complex spun off ideas that run straight down into the roots poisoning the foundation?

So how do we make a change without signing a petition? By starting with ourselves and knowing that our words matter as much as our names and that both are long-term commitments. By accepting that the action of a signature cannot compensate the actions provoked by our words. By simply talking, thinking, and then talking some more and being aware of our word choices and the power we wield with our diction. By listening more to what is said and placing less importance on who has said them. By not jumping to conclusions, but also not immediately jumping on the bandwagon. By not asking ourselves what have we done or what has made us responsible, but by asking ourselves what we can do and how by doing so that makes us responsible.

By cutting a hearty concept and often indigestible idea like feminism into a smaller meal we are reminded that feminism starts by word of mouth – it starts with our mouth, not just with the words we allow to come out of it but also the ideas we choose to swallow.

What did my breakfast really teach me? It taught me that we should regard every word as a living being that can create and destroy in equal measure. Like every form of life all ideas begin as eggs, which when hatched are dependent on us to be nurtured and raised with good intentions. As a result it is not a he or a she, but a we who determines the shape of society. So know that feminism is merely a perception formed by the whites of our eyes and the yolks of our words, and that social structures only exist because of the foundations we choose to lay.