The war against #WomenAgainstFeminism rages on, and as expected, the notion of privilege is used in what will be yet another failed attempt to guilt self-owning people into compliance.
IWantedWings, a feminist WordPress blog, recently responded to #WomenAgainstFeminism by rattling off a laundry list of female victims outside of Western civilization. The author (whom I will also address as IWantedWings, or simply IWW) makes a mistake right off the bat by assuming that only Western women would be against feminism.
By doing this, she casts herself as an altruistic soul and casts non-feminist women as privilege-blind bigots. Black-and-white morality aside, IWW makes many unwritten assumptions she never substantiates, as expected from feminist pundits.
IWW uses several hypothetical examples of female victimization based on true events, such as the case of a 25-year-old Pakistani woman forcefully separated from her fiancé by a controlling, abusive father. It is easy to accept the existence of a similar situation, but we can see the conversation being framed where victimization is female and perpetration is male. After painting on only half of the canvas, IWW suggests that feminists are the only moral crusaders holding back the morbid state of affairs she carefully framed while blocking the view of the blank half of the canvas.
Feminists, both female and male – have been locked up, beaten, tortured, and even killed, in the pursuit of equality. They did this with pen and ink and print; they did this with their voices; they did this with their bodies; they did this with art and music; they did in courts of law and halls and houses of government that they fought be to allowed into.
IWW shows blatant ignorance of feminist-perpetrated violence and abuse in Argentina, Canada, the violence perpetrated by women on women in the Congo, Valerie Solanas, and the dogmatic censorship proposed by the EU, WAM!, and other organizations professing to be for equality.
They did this so that women would no longer been seen as property, livestock, breeding machines, sex objects, punching bags, or infantile morons.
The only people who see women that way are fictitious misogynist caricatures, dogmatic adherents to scripture, or, ironically, feminists.
Feminism needs to generate fear and vulnerability to make the gullible suggestible. The scary part is that IWW does not realize she is doing this; she genuinely believes she is helping women with feminism much like a fundamentalist missionary believes she is helping “savages” overseas with scripture.
They did this so that women like me – a white Western woman – could attend school and university; to learn to read, write, and think critically; to gain a degree; to get a job and be paid an equal salary to a man in the same position; and to sit here with my own computer and type all of this.
If I was a combat veteran, I would have stopped reading here.
IWW made no explicit mention of soldiers, but she pretends that feminists are interchangeable with soldiers. IWW is suggesting that feminist sacrifice is comparable to the sacrifice of (drafted) men and voluntarily enlisted women. Apparently only feminist sacrifice gives you prosperity, corrects corruption, and makes you literate.
IWW even bastardizes JFK’s “Ask not what your country can do for you …” quote for one final tug on gynocentric heartstrings:
The fact is, like it or not, you still live a world where gender matters. Where gender controls not just the entire course of your life – but the lives of women all over the world. Every second, a child will be born female in a country where she will persecuted for this random biological occurrence for the rest of her life. So before you hold up your anti-Feminist placard proudly and smile at your own sense of empowerment, think not what Feminism can do for you, but what it can do for that one girl. She needs someone to stand up for her. That someone could be you.
IWW’s pushing aside of veterans for the sake of her faux-sensitivity is not even justified by her loaded questions, such as “Why is there still a pay gap (in the UK specifically) of 15% for women doing the same jobs and working the same hours as men?” or “Even in our liberal, Western world, why do women still only fill 24% of senior management jobs?” All of IWW’s suggestions dance around the same tired notion of a male conspiracy against females.
But IWW is forgetting one very important thing. #WomenAgainstFeminism is not falling for it. It’s not that non-feminist women are blinded by privilege as IWW insinuates, it’s that they understand feminism is packed full of emotionally manipulative bullshitters.
If you feel that you have so far lived your life unaffected by even the mildest form of sexism – anything from feeling uncomfortable when a man catcalls you in the street, to feeling scared walking home alone at night in a secluded area – and are treated with love and respect by every man in your life, then to you I say: I’m glad for you. If you don’t think you need feminism, then that is a victory for the movement. You have fulfilled all those dreams that every suffragette being force-fed in prison and every ‘witch’ burnt at the stake dreamed you would one day.
If I was a woman, this paragraph would enrage me to tears. IWW is giving feminism credit for what I am, as if I owe feminism my life and my identity. I would be plagued with questions, like “Why do you need to own me? Why won’t you respect me as a non-feminist human being who cares about others in a different way? Why can’t you leave me alone?”
Feminism can’t take credit for free women if it tells women what to think.
We are dealing with a poisonous dogma that wants control. The antidote has always been to renounce the faith and consult yourself on how to live life. Hell, don’t even listen to me if you don’t want to, but I would suggest from experience that everyone run as far away from feminism as he or she possibly can.
Feminism needs women to survive, and is flailing to keep control of #WomenAgainstFeminism. In their desperation, feminists have poked their own brand full of holes, revealing the shit-stained core of the movement.
And we human rights activists are laughing in relief.
We will be free soon.
