It's Sexist To Expect Feminists To Stand Up For Women In Muslim Countries
By Carly Morrison, Feminist Activist
The male-dominated media would have you believe that being a feminist means seeking equality for women everywhere, but the male-dominated media has no right to define for us what being a feminist means. It's sexist for anyone to tell us feminists that we're supposed to fight for the equality of women in the Muslim world. An outrage.
Feminism doesn't mean what you men say it means. It means what we women say it means. And if we decide it means ignoring the yawning inequality between men and women in Muslim countries, then that is what it means. You can't define for us what our movement wants.
Definitions themselves are a patriarchal institution, after all, and we will have no part of them. Etymology - et- him-ology - has been dominated by men forever. Linguistics - lingu-his-tics - has the same defect. Sorry, men, but this is not your rule book to interpret anymore. You are in no position to tell us we have to use words the way they have been used throughout their history. His-tory.
If we want, we can claim that laws mandating the hijab, niqab, and other coverings actually empower women, and none of you are allowed to say boo. You just want an excuse to rape them, probably. So your opinion counts for nothing. You simply do not understand that when a pre-teen Muslim woman in Gaza is given by her father in marriage to a much older man, that is an act of liberation, a way of asserting cultural independence from you white males and your assumptions about what is good for women. You sexist pigs.
No offense intended to pigs. At least to the sows.
So no more of your holier-than-thou, sanctimonious preaching that feminists should be fighting polygamy, female genital mutilation, or other phenomena rampant in the Islamic world. Maybe those women WANT to have sex be a painful experience. Maybe they WANT to risk infection and death from adhering to their tribal traditions. Maybe they WANT to vie for the attention and support of a husband with multiple other wives. Maybe they ENJOY when their husbands force them to have sex. Maybe they don't WANT to drive cars. Maybe they don't WANT to leave the house without a male escort. It would never occur to you to respect those wishes, of course, because you men always know what is best for women, and their desires can be safely ignored.
And you call yourselves liberal.