The Psychopathy of Mainstream Feminism
Feminism in the twenty-first Century looks vastly different from its previous-century’s counterpart. And unlike first-wave feminism, the current generation does exceedingly more harm than good.
The 101st anniversary of women’s suffrage in the US has just passed, and it serves as a reminder of how far American women have come, and what the early feminist waves have accomplished for the nation. Until the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, women could still face legal discimination on the basis of pregnancy; meaning their employers could fire them for being pregnant, whether they had a physically taxing job or not. Women could also be barred from applying for a credit card or loan, until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act was signed into law in 1974. It wasn’t until the late twentieth century that women were considered equals to men, in the eyes of the law.
Now that we’re into two decades of the twenty-first century, where do we go from here?
I heard over and over again in my college days: “feminism means equality of the sexes.” Did we not have that legally, already? I was told (mind you, by “feminists” around my own age) that men had it better than women, and we needed to move on to levelling the cultural playing field. Men still had the upper hand in life: they could walk around at night alone without fear of getting sexually assaulted, they got paid more than their female counterparts for doing the same job, and they just got taken seriously. He could repeat a sentiment or idea made by his female coworker, and all the praise and acknowledgement would go to him. Us ladies had a long way to go still.
I learned very quickly that a lot of this didn’t check out. Statistics in the Netherlands around 2017 show that men are about one-and-a-half times as likely to experience violent crime than women, although women do encounter twice as many sexual assaults. Men certainly can’t just waltz around at night, alone, or in an area they don’t know, without a care in the world. In terms of being paid more than women, men generally embark on careers that could be riskier, more demanding, and therefore higher-paying than women’s careers (aircraft pilots and engineers make more than school teachers do, but it’s considered a very dangerous profession).
Additionally, men are generally more confident or forward when it comes to negotiating salaries. While a woman may think she needs to do x, y, z in order to earn it, and her managers or supervisors will just see that and give her a promotion or raise (which, don’t get me wrong they very well may) a man will be more likely to just ask for it, and get it by asking. If you never ask, the answer is always ‘no.’
Even as I learned about how their claims didn’t check out - or at least, they weren’t as simple as they made things out to be - I knew how women had it in other countries, and that there was a case to be made for feminism (as in advocacy for the women’s equality) in those places.
What women in the States complained (and continue to complain) about, pales in comparison with what women in other nations go through. When mainstream feminists of today call a “lack of representation”, the “male gaze” and “unrealistic beauty standards” oppressive, that is a smack in the face to women who are suffering all over the world, and especially in the Middle East.
What It’s Like Outside America
A family friend in Mexico was denied work because she was declared “too old” for a secretary job at thirty-five years old, and they said even if she was younger, she had to forget about her family as the job required her to be available at any and all hours of the day and weekends - all at her male boss’s request.
The violence women face in Latin American countries is something that’s relatively normalized.
Oxfam, a confederation of charitable organizations founded in Oxford, reported in July of 2018 that domestic violence is so normalized within Latin American and Caribbean nations that “86 percent of young women and men in the region would not interfere if a male friend hit their female partner.” With the rise of feminism in the United States, it’s generally a very negative thing to abuse your wife. In fact, we call it abuse, not just “how things are.” Children from a young age are taught in schools that this is abuse, and not something that constitutes a healthy relationship.
Oxfam also reported:
“Although 84 percent of young women and men believe that violence against women is a product of inequalities, they believe that solving the problem is not up to them. Two-thirds (67 percent) believe that the state should be responsible for reducing the consequences of male violence.”
A quote from Edmund Burke comes to mind here, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men should do nothing.” With the mentality reported here, we shouldn’t expect domestic violence against women to end anytime soon.
When violence against women in the home is normalized, it’s certainly no surprise to see it as a regular occurrence outside the home. Speaking anecdotally, it’s not unusual for families in Latin American countries to send their women and girls accompanied by a male family member when they go out. Meanwhile in many (if not most) states in the US, it’d be strange if you had to wait on a dad, brother, or husband to go run errands with you.
Women in many Latin American countries still aren’t seen as equal to men in the eyes of the culture - whether that be through antiquated traditions and views on women and their roles in society. While in the states women can be doctors, professors, mechanics, engineers, or homemakers, the role of women in many places in Latin America is seen still as more limited than that. Even so, there are women who are not even seen as equals to men under the law, and they are arguably seen as sub-human.
The Living Nightmare For Afghan Women
According to Sky News reporter Alix Culbertson, when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001,
“[W]omen were effectively put under house arrest as they were not allowed to work or have an education. Women and girls from the age of eight had to wear a burka and had to be chaperoned by a male relative to be out on a street, and even to visit the doctor.
High-heeled shoes were not allowed in case it excited a man and no stranger was allowed to hear a woman's voice so they could not speak loudly in public. Homes with windows on the ground and first floor had to be painted over and women were forbidden to go on their balconies so they could not be seen from the street.”
Even displaying images of women in shops or print media was banned. While the Taliban says that women will be able to live as they did before the recent takeover (but be forced to wear a hijab “for their safety”), pictures of women on walls are already being whitewashed (literally covered in white paint) in Kabul.
During these five years, the Taliban implemented Sharia Law - which is made up of Muhammad’s words, actions, and the text in the Quran. The law itself reportedly cannot be altered, but an individual (or group) can interpret that with some flexibility. When interpreted to the letter, this can be deadly to women, as it was during this period of time.
One Afghan woman who goes by one name, Khatera, was shot eight times and had her eyes gouged after her father tipped off Taliban militants (allegedly, as they deny involvement) that she got her dream job as a policewoman. Her only crime was achieving her childhood dream of working outside the home and becoming a police officer. She had only been able to live this dream for three months before she was violently attacked by a group that was tipped off by her own father.
Khatera, who was in Delhi at the time of her interview, said to India’s News18, “In the eyes of Taliban, women are not living, breathing human beings, but merely some meat and flesh to be battered … “I was lucky that I survived [the attack]. One has to live in Afghanistan under the Taliban to even imagine what hell has befallen on the women, children and minorities there.”
Khatera continued,
“The Taliban don’t allow women to visit male doctors, and at the same time, don’t let women study and work. So, then what is left for a woman? Left to die? Even if you think we are just reproductive machines, there is no common sense but pure hate. How does a woman deliver her child according to the dictum of these men with guns without medical care? It’s tough for the world to imagine what we built in the past 20 years. We built dreams. Now they are gone. It’s all over for us. Women who work with the government or police were being hunted and threatened even before the Taliban had taken over the country. Now, the concern has gone beyond letting women work. At this point, I am scared if they would leave these women alive. They don’t just kill women. They make animals feed on their bodies. They are a blot on Islam. Our women and the youth had come a long way in these 20 years to reach somewhere; to find a stable livelihood, to get proper education. Women were filling up universities. It was a beautiful sight to see girls going to schools. All went down the drain in just a week. I even heard from my relatives that families have begun burning the educational certificates of girls to protect them from the Taliban.”
Something Worse Than Silence
If the mainstream western feminists don’t even acknowledge what women face in their immediately neighboring countries, or at least do nothing about it except make cute Instagram posts about it, they advocate even less for women in the Middle East, especially those who are, and have been, suffering under Taliban rule.
Except, seeing the current trend, they don’t just stay silent, they prop up their own vanity, their own complaints and superficial suffering, and their made-up problems. One week female influencers and celebrities will say something to the tune of “if you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention” and the next they will post their skincare routine, a photoset of some fun or interesting event they went to, until the next catastrophe that the mainstream news cycle pops up, or the next superficial offense committed against women.
Things like the ‘male gaze’, lack of representation in some triple-A video game or the lack of gay women in the endless series of Marvel movies, are more often talked about than the suffering women in neighboring countries and just across the ocean face.
Understandably, not every woman can do something about it, but at the very least they could stop saying that women are hurt because of airbrushing and filtered images (and implying that this is some form of oppression), when the words oppression and hurt are used to describe situations wherein school-age girls get their fingers cut off for wearing nail polish.
Where Does The Feminist Psychopathy End?
At best, we could say that the latest wave of online feminism begins and ends in the west, creating a bubble where not being taken seriously at work or being ‘body shamed’ as a celebrity are legitimate sufferings women go through. The latest wave has even moved on from taking sexual assault among women seriously, since they don’t speak out when female prison inmates are raped by transgender inmates, coerced into denying that the rape took place the attack took place and then punished for filing “false complaints.”
At this point, this brave new modern wave focuses on a very particular set of women - those that aim for careers over everything else, who enjoy the company of themselves over many (much less a loving partner or children) who hold no regard for anyone’s opinion but their own (unless they are bigger-bodied), and who seemingly lean towards a particular affiliation.
The Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund was launched in 2018 (during the #MeToo movement), and aimed to help people (particularly women) feel “safe and respected at work”. Their goal was to create “A world where women have an equal shot at success and security. A world where no one lives in fear of sexual harassment or assault.”
Roberta Kaplan, co-founder of the Time’s Up legal defense fund, recently resigned from Time’s Up on account of helping former governor of New York Andrew Cuomo (who has been found to have sexually harassed multiple women). Kaplan served as an attorney to Melissa DeRosa, the governor’s top aide; DeRosa reportedly drafted an op-ed which aimed to impugn Lindsay Boylan, one of Cuomo’s accusers, and Kaplan allegedly said the draft was fine. This then went back to Cuomo - an op-ed draft written to discredit an alleged sexual harassment victim was given the green light by a co-founder of Time’s Up.
You would think members of an organization dedicated to championing women who’ve faced sexual harassment in the workplace, especially someone in position of power, wouldn’t happily sign off on a hit piece targeting an acuser. We need only look at the drama with Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh to know that if political affiliations were reversed, it’d be an entirely different story. To those who may think, “it’s not one-to-one!” we can see the difference between two US President’s accusals of sexual assault.
Tara Reade’s allegations of sexual assault from Joe Biden were all but dismissed, and several news outlets don’t shy away from discrediting her, (the linked report says, “Her account has changed over time”) which isn’t entirely bad. We need clarity and honesty when it comes to accusations such as these. Meanwhile, Donald Trump has had a myriad of accusations of sexual assault against him, and you’d never hear the end of it on social media or the news. Vox.com frames the accusations a little differently, with Trump they’re talking about this well into the fourth year of his term, and calling attention to it (“attention has faded” can be read as “don’t forget this!”) and with Biden this is regarded as something meant to cause controversy. Between these two articles, there’s a different sense of gravity.
American philosopher Eric Hoffer once said, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” With the visible lack of empathy and self-centeredness that seems to revolve around the current feminist movement, it begs the question, how long has this been a racket? At what point do we turn it around and use it to truly uplift those women that have seemingly been forgotten?
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