Prime
Debunking an increasingly detested outlook to feminism
Feminism has become a distortion of the true ideals upheld by our forefeminists. PHOTO/net
What you need to know:
At its core, is a privileged entitlement attitude? Contemporary feminists are seemingly driven by resentment for anything. They reduce every discourse to power games and they have no regard for competence or merit.
In the spirit of International Women’s Day and the women’s month of March, I would like to tread controversial waters by discrediting the new wave of feminism aided by social media and in particular Twitter.
This contemporary feminism has increasingly become unpopular among both women and men within the elite, middle class circles everywhere. All one need to do now is go to Twitter and look into any discourse (yes, effect intended as its barely actual discourse) tag along the topic and start commenting irrationally.
This topic has left a distaste for the subject by many, which I believe I should help break down, in order to understand the root of this and make this a call to action to all those that feel powerless against the situation.
A quick look at the history of the idea of feminism is a good place to start. Feminism in general is advocacy for women’s rights on grounds of equality of sexes. With this definition, you may wonder where the distaste I was talking about comes from.
Feminism has had four waves and we are currently in the fourth wave. The first wave saw women in the western world fight for basic control of their lives, with equal voting rights being at the centre of these struggles. The suffrage movement went on for 72 years, until women were given the right to vote in the 1920s.
The second wave happened in the 1960s and women at the time were demanding for anti-sex discrimination laws. The third wave was primarily concerned with women’s reproductive health rights, the gender pay-gap and sexual discrimination. This wave generally recorded less legal strides than the waves before.
We should note that Africa has had its own feminists in the strict sense of the word impacting real change such as Winnie Madikizela. The current wave started in 2012, with a new approach to attaining equality.
The new wave caters not just for women’s actual grievances but now also fights for all minority groups, racism, and classism and requires that everyone who calls themselves feminist, should align with all such struggles.
This wave is mostly led by celebrities and social media warriors and much less by genuine activists fighting for any legal changes to better women’s lives. This fourth wave of feminism is a distortion of the true ideals held by our forefeminists. It is at its very best a form of ideology and indoctrination with half-baked ideas and arguments and it is being fronted by passionate radicals.
These women have chosen to focus on equality of outcome rather than equality for opportunity, which is a grossly misleading metric. This wave streams from white middle class bourgeoisie sentiments that are parallel to the day to day realities of an ordinary woman.
Similarly, this has trickled down to the rest of the upper middle class world over including here in Uganda. At its core, is a privileged entitlement attitude? All the authentic feminist ideals of the 1960s feminism were left behind by these contemporary feminists. New feminists have been reduced to word-choppers and snide post-modernists who do not use the language of the people, the working class people.
They are simply careerist feminists stemming from Marxist western thought which perpetuates group identity over individuality. That your reality is dependent on the group you belong to, man or woman and are largely materialistic.
Whereas our foremothers were concerned with legal, political and professional change, these new age feminists are primarily concerned with social equality, an ambitious task to say the least. Their motivation seems to be a resentment for virtually anything and everything for them is reduced to power games. They have no regard for competence or merit. They know nothing of the basics of history, biology, economics, pyschology and sociology and so don’t believe in an objective world.
They are not independent thinkers and anybody that aligns with them is usually backing down and complying with their illusory ideals. They portray human history as nothing short of male oppression and female victimisation.
Women have had freedoms and power in their own realms in the past and the prior allegations are concoctions by them to solidify the victim position. New age feminists are ideologically possessed and this is how they camouflage in herd-like entities including their shared language with which they have used to move away from philosophical feminism to tribal feminism, where they shame non-believers into comformity or outside the club.
They have no consideration for multiple view points thus the ever growing disgust for their brand that has become the outlook of feminism today. They are made to believe society is up against them despite all the progress made in the past years in terms of more women graduates, reduced sexual violence and more women in work places. This cancer needs to be addressed.
Their obsession for careerism and denigrating the experience of motherhood should tell us about the tricksters they are. To all women out there, you are not victims.
Freedom comes with responsibility, where rights are not enough. I want to see is a feminist encouraging this and not misguided constant male bashing. It is time to stand up against these dogmatic, intolerant, mal-educated radical feminists of today. Enough of it.
