Feminism Explained
Feminism isn’t really concerned with who does the dishes in a romantic partnership, or if a woman holds a door open for herself. In fact, feminism is concerned with more substantial pursuits than exaggerated domestic drama. Real feminism is too busy advocating for justice for women, to protect the basic human rights of women all over the world, like access to education, an end to child marriages and female genital mutilation. It is too busy advocating for more women to be present in spaces of leadership to be spewing angry tweets about who should or should not cook.
Alas, most of the conversation around the subject online is concerned with whose duty it is to do what chores.
Every time I come across misguided ‘feminist’ tweets, I feel an overwhelming sense of frustration, and I want to shout from the rooftop how wrong it is. For instance, I came across a tweet and a couple of responses to it that weakened me.
The tweet: “Feminism has never been about ‘equality’. Feminism is about Marxism, dehumanization, and supremacy.
Response 1: It is a bitterness campaign. It gets women to constantly make complaints about men, creating bitterness until men become resentful and refuse to protect women…
Response 2: Feminism is nothing but an endless stream of false stereotypes about men so that women have endless excuses for hating, hurting, and oppressing men.
Admittedly, I understand why those people would see feminism through those lenses. There have been self-titled feminist women who have bitterly opposed men. These women have spoken about a world without men as an ideal one. They have made a habit of victimizing women and villainizing men, never mind that women are sometimes in the wrong. They have masked their jealousy of other women’s beauty and modesty by calling it feminism (the most recent example being so-called feminists criticizing American model, Olivia Culpo for succumbing to patriarchy and wearing a conservative wedding dress. I wonder what a grown woman’s style has to do with patriarchy).
But we must not equate their bitterness and ill manners with feminism. This is because feminism is fundamentally about protecting women and giving them a voice to participate fully in society. Because of feminism, because a group of women decided to use their voices, Sierra Leone recently enacted legislation to ban and criminalize child marriage. To think that the country was first inhabited 2,000 years ago, gained its independence in 1961, and is only just enacting such legislation.
Could you imagine the sheer number of girls who had to watch their dreams of getting something as basic as an education die because they were forced to marry young? The number of girls who developed vaginal fistula (vagina tear) and spent the remainder of their lives living with the resulting shame. Think about how much worse it would’ve been for them in an Africa that is still falling behind on healthcare.
Although the women who contributed to the criminalization of child marriage in Sierra Leone might not identify as feminists, they upheld feminist ideals in their fight against child marriage. Feminists, like them, seek to empower women.
Feminism exists to inform a new and empowering way of raising girls, rather than raising them with shame. Feminism is out to stop sexual harassment and other forms of gender-based violence. It wants to protect women in the workplace from being discriminated against because of their gender — please read Bad Feminist, The Feminine Mystique, and We Should All Be Feminists for context.
Yet I must admit that feminism is flawed. Well-intentioned as it is, it has caused its own damage. Proposing a radical turn of female sexual liberation, it inadvertently contributed to men’s increasing sense of entitlement to sex with women, not to mention their increasing laziness and unwillingness to commit on the dating scene. Moreover, with different voices speaking for it, feminism has become confused, so that it is no longer clear what it is or isn’t.
Even so, feminism, at the heart of it, is about creating a world where women have the same social, economic, and political opportunities as men. It is not a battle to upstage or compete with men. It merely recognizes that society has largely been unfair to women and their potential, and it advocates for that unfairness to end.
My goal with this essay is to encourage you to challenge your misconceptions about feminism, to see its flaws but refrain from defining it through those flaws. Ultimately, I want you to educate yourself about feminism by reading key feminist texts, some of which I’ve already mentioned, not Twitter (X) or by watching 60-seconds emotionally charged videos on TikTok.
