Today's Feminism: Real Or Pseudo?- #VocalWednesday
Updated: Jul 29, 2020
|By- Khushi Sitapara|
“Feminism is the radical notion that women are people”
-Marie Shear, 1986
Feminism. Do you actually know what it means? The word? Is it a word even? Or a term? Or maybe an ideology? In this age of #MeToo you should know its meaning but sadly a lot of people don't or they believe in the wrong meaning. I'm gonna say this for once and for all (You could have easily searched about this on Google but I'm still telling you, the emotional labour women do tsk tsk). Feminism is an ideology that believes and desires for equal rights and responsibilities for everyone IRRESPECTIVE of their gender, damn right it includes Transgender folks. For those who say rather proudly," I'm not a feminist I just Believe in equality" you might as well say," I’m not a water drinker please bring me some H2O." Yep, that's how dumb you sound. Ah, I can just hear the next argument "But then why do you call it Feminism, call it gender equality. If you really believed in equality you'd call it Equality not feminism." Here's the thing sweetie, you can’t be mad at feminism being called feminism, when the entire human existence is called mankind. Now that we’ve established what feminism is, it is important to know that people’s ideas of feminism around the world are varied. That even women and feminists have slightly different ideas of feminism and what works for them. Which is understandable up to a certain extent due to the different backgrounds they come from, the level of oppression they face. All women are oppressed, some more than others but all are. This where the types of feminism come into play.
Here are the types of Feminism to make you understand it better:
1. Liberal Feminism – Just as the name suggests this feminism is liberal, vague, general... Some have also gone as far as to call it shallow. Liberal feminists are those with the signs in women’s marches like “no means no”,” my body, my choice”, “the length of my skirt doesn’t determine my character”. It is mostly related with white feminism or white women’s feminism. It is like candy floss, light hearted and sometimes like the inside of a pink bubble. It talks about body positivity and choices. How women can choose whether to shave or not to shave, choose to wear whatever they want to and so on, it is fine. Being a lib fem is like being in the budding stage of feminism. You’re just figuring out what it is and listening about things like “girl power” and “my body my choice” makes you feel powerful and all is well and good until you get on the wrong side of it. Lib fems support sex work, not the workers. According to them sex work is empowering to some women. But no woman enters prostitution willingly unless it’s her last resort. And if sex work is just work like any other profession why is it that the most inexperienced (children and virgins) make the most money?
2. Radical Feminism – Radical literally means “getting to the root”. Where liberal feminism fails, radical feminism succeeds. Radical feminism realizes and voices its opinion that the root cause of all these problems is male supremacy. It recognizes society as a fundamental patriarchy where men oppress and dominate women. Rad fem doesn’t fool around, it is like that lesbian aunt of yours who had a punk phase and calls you out on your bullshit. It promotes the need for sisterhood, safe spaces for women and women only spaces. It believes in need for matriarchy. It focuses on much deeper and darker issues than lib fem does. Along with prostitution, radical feminism also opposes buying and selling sex, degrading sexual acts, kinks (bdsm, ddlg lifestyle etc) and judging women for having boundaries. Radical feminism targets toxic male psychology as the source of women’s oppression. What’s important to note here is that radical feminism opposes patriarchy, not men. When you compare radical feminism (or any feminism for that matter) to man hating (or calling feminists man haters) you’re saying that patriarchy and men are inseparable which is not true. Although, Robin Morgan has defended “man hating” as the right of the oppressed class to hate the class that is oppressing them. This applies equally to racism, ableism and ageism also.
3. Intersectional Feminism – Like previously mentioned feminism can be different for different women coming from different backgrounds. It can mean achieving different things. For a white working class woman it can be getting a promotion against her male counterpart, for a black woman it can be just being able to land the same job, for a brown middle class woman it can be the freedom to work after marriage or even marry to whoever she likes or whenever she likes, for a 15 year old Pakistani girl who works as a maid it can be getting access to education, so she can have the option to work and earn in her life. Intersectional feminism takes special care of factors such as race and class. It specifically includes women of colour and women coming from weaker economic conditions. Because lets be real if white women have it bad women of colour have it way worse. But intersectional feminism does not end here. It includes a lot of other variables along with race and colour it is also about culture, ethnicity, education, language, age, sexuality and others. Intersectional feminism is pretty important in this era where libfems and radfems are working hard to gain equal rights as compared to men they sometimes forget that, we as women are not equal among ourselves. Let’s talk about wage gap for instance, for every dollar a white man makes, Caucasian women make 77 cents, black women make 64 cents and Hispanic women make only 54 cents. Intersectional feminism works hard to bring all women on the same pedestal so that we can stand together and fight our battle.
There are other types to feminism too such as Marxist and socialist feminism, cultural feminism and eco feminism. But these three are the types which are the most needed in today’s time. If feminism was music and its types were music genres, libfem would be pop music, radfem would be punk rock or soft rock and intersectional would be country music. We all have our favourites, and if you have multiple personalities like me you have a lot of favourites, but you need to put all these together to make a good playlist!
(Have to listen to Old town road ASAP, be right back!)
Toodles!
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