Courtesy of the Associated Press.

When I was 10-years-old, I didn‰’t think I was like “other girls‰Û. I liked sports and wrestling boys and I wore those cut-off pants, you know, those long pants with the zips at the knees that you could zip off into shorts? I hated makeup and dresses and gosh, why were girls so silly?

When I was 12-years-old, my middle school crush said that I was funny, but I wasn‰’t “hot‰” enough to date. He preferred girls with silky hair, low-cut shirts and high-pitched giggles. Instead of kicking him in the balls, I would glare at these girls and blame them for everything.

When I was 15-years-old, my classmates were going to high school parties but I stayed home because books were better and sloppy, drunk girls were so pathetic and God, when will girls learn to respect themselves?

If I could go back in time, I‰’d want to tell my younger self to shut up and stop acting like some rare specimen of womankind. Guess how many girls like sports and books and staying in? A shit ton. Just because I liked being one way, didn‰’t make me more superior than other girls. There was a lot of internalized misogyny that I had to cleanse from my mind and body.

So when I read about what Annie Lennox said about Beyonce being “feminist lite‰” and how “twerking is not feminism‰Û, it reminded me of how I used to think women should act.

Lennox‰’s problem with twerking is the sexualization of women‰’s body and I can see where she‰’s coming from. In the music industry, women‰’s bodies are highly exploited and packaged to sell, okay, valid. But the burden to change should not be on women to cover up and dance more “conservatively,” it should be on the music execs and audience members to stop demanding women‰’s bodies for their own profit and pleasure. Lennox should direct her derision on the male gaze rather than the women.

Instead of telling women to stop being sexual, she should tell men to stop viewing women as sexual objects.

And honestly, if you bust a load over a few pelvic thrusts that is clearly your problem and not anyone else‰’s.

The bottom line is that there is no one way on how to be a woman. All of our experiences are different but that doesn‰’t make one better than the other. We need to stop thinking that being one kind of woman is better than the other. Educated, uneducated, beautiful, ugly, dancing, sitting, housewife, academic ‰ÛÒ women don‰’t need to have a specific quality to have value.

Sorry Annie, but what‰’s not feminism in this case is policing what women do with their bodies instead of telling people to stop objectifying women.