Although I’m a bloke, I do consider myself to have a lot of sympathies to the idea of equity feminism. This is the idea that men and women are equally capable of driving trucks, being a doctor, doing babycare etc and should have the opportunities to do so. In other words men and women have the equal right to make choices about their lives and careers. I grew up seeing women run businesses, women teaching, women doing all manner of things, some of which were traditionally and stereotypically called ‘mens work’ and I see from my own life and experience that women are equal to men even though I acknowledge we are both different and complimentary to each other.
Having set out my stall about my belief in equity feminism I have to say that all too much modern ‘third wave’ feminism is the exact opposite of the equity feminism. It doesn’t seek to treat people of either gender as of equal social worth but treats people differently on the grounds of gender and promotes the false idea that women in the Western free world are the ongoing victims of ‘the patriarchy’. However, for all the rantings of third wave feminism by activists about ‘the patriarchy’ in the West, they are remarkably silent on cultures and ideologies, such as Islam for example, which are not just patriarchal, but are violently and oppressively so.
Because of the consistent appeasement of Islam and the blind spot that third wave feminists have towards Islam I feel nothing but disgust for modern feminism. Mainstream feminism, at least in the United Kingdom seems to have concerned itself with minor ‘first world’ problems and are taking no note or care whatsoever to the plight of women living, or rather existing, under Islamic subjugation.
This abandonment by mainstream feminists, of a vast number of women to the violent patriarchy of Islam, is one reason why I have very few modern feminist heroes or heroines. If I was to make a few exceptions to this lack of feminists to admire, then one of those exceptions would be the counter shariah campaigner Anne Marie Waters. Ms Waters is what I would call a ‘proper’ feminist. She doesn’t pussyfoot around issues of ‘cultural sensitivity’ she tells it like it is, especially were Islam is concerned. Ms Waters recognises that what threatens women’s futures is not relatively minor stuff, such as women not choosing to work in science, technology, engineering or manufacturing, but aggressive Shariah which seeks to treat women as inferior beings who should be coerced and controlled to accept men’s decisions and men’s wills.
Therefore in order to mark International Women’s Day I thought the best thing to use to highlight the day and illustrate the necessity of fighting back against violently misogynist ideologies such as Islam, is with a piece by Anne Marie Waters.
I chose to take an excerpt from this piece that was published on Ms Waters’ blog in July 2016 and is an appeal to European feminists to wake up and smell the stench of misogyny that accompanies Islam wherever it goes.
Ms Waters said
Dear feminist,
I write this as a last ditch attempt to reach you; to reach your common sense, and to reach any genuine concern at least some of you may have about the future of women’s rights in Europe. ‘Why only Europe?’ may well be your first question, and the answer is quite simply that we are threatened in a way we have not known in our lifetimes, and this threat is entirely preventable.
Great Britain is on the verge of electing its second female Prime Minister. This is an incredible achievement when one considers that it has not yet been a century since women won our right to vote. While this takes place, the Government of once-secular Turkey (a country that many European leaders seek to fast-track in to the EU) has legislated to allow “village heads” to conduct marriages. Metin Feyzioğlu[1], of the Turkish Bar Association, claimed that this represents “the first step in switching from secular to sharia law.” He adds “This regulation will remove women’s right to marry of their own free will”. Please absorb the seriousness of this; if a woman may not choose who, or whether, she marries, she is a slave. She is property. Her life is not her own and she will be traded as chattel, handed to men who will have complete dominion over her. A fate she cannot escape because she has no legal right to.
This reversal of the freedom of women in Turkey is happening for a distinct reason. Turkey is increasingly embracing Islam in its public life. It is not unique. Women have seen, and are seeing, themselves reduced to property in countries all over the world as Islam tightens its grip.
Do you think that the women of Iran or Afghanistan has always lived as they do today? They have not. Both countries have known secularism, and their women have known freedom, but as the tentacles of sharia disperse their poison, women in both countries suffer unimaginable cruelties – Islam justifies, sustains, and maintains these cruelties. That is a matter of fact.
Sexual harassment is rife across the Middle East and North Africa. In Egypt for example, 99% of women experience it. Over the last several decades, both through social change in attitude towards women and through legislation, the harassment of women for sex is deemed both unlawful and entirely unacceptable in Western countries. This enormous progress has not been mirrored elsewhere in the world. That too is a matter of fact.
Ms Waters later added:
The response of many feminists to what I have written above will be ‘misogyny exists everywhere, we oppose all misogyny’. Good. I entirely agree. But law are not the same everywhere, men’s attitudes to women are not the same everywhere, and the progress of women to independence and freedom has not been the same everywhere.
What you are doing by condemning all misogyny (as of course I do) is simply making a grand statement and leaving it there. Your statement will make no difference whatsoever to any woman suffering anywhere. Action needs to be taken. This is how you win. You pick battles and you fight them. Might I suggest that you see the battle you have against Islam-inspired misogyny, and take practical steps to oppose it?
The Suffragettes didn’t stand around making statements about how wonderful it would be if the world was perfectly just and free. They didn’t spend their time debating theories and congratulating themselves for tolerating the oppression of women in the name of their culture. They took action, they demanded, they starved themselves, they chained themselves to Parliament, some even committed suicide. They did so for a reason, to win the right to vote, not to condemn misogyny in general.
I am asking you to do the same. I am asking you to cease the cowardice of making a virtuous statement and then going about your lives, this achieves nothing. If we are to preserve the freedoms won for us by our mothers and grandmothers, we must demand that men who pose a threat to those freedoms are not permitted to move here en masse. It’s a real solution, not a grand statement. We must also demand an end to sharia law, which is facilitating the slavery of women right under our noses in the UK. We must demand prosecutions for forced marriage and jail-time for the obscenity of FGM. If this occurred, not only will it save countless individual girls, but if you’re a fan of grand statements, one could hardly be grander than that.
Its time to show some courage feminists, stand up to this. It won’t solve all the world’s problems, but the world’s problems are solved one at a time. To solve problems, you must fight, and to fight you must recognize who threatens you. Putting your head in the sand is not an option.
Read the rest of this excellent piece via the link below:
http://www.annemariewaters.org/an-open-letter-to-european-feminists/
If you like me are getting jaded and frustrated by the worthless and often evasive and relativistic statements by modern academic feminists then I would strongly advise you to read Ms Waters’ writings. It’s a refreshing counter to the ‘I see no Islamic misogyny’ guff put out by mainstream feminists. I read her work and watch her speeches and I truly believe that in her I see what a feminist should truly look like and sound like.
