Pedestal Elitists: Hey, Women Against Feminism, Your Privilege Is Showing
I’m happy that the gender equality movement in rich countries has now reached a level that girls can publicly break with the women whose activism laid the groundwork for their own opportunities. But I confess that their contention that gendered violence and vulnerability are relics of a forgotten past strikes me as revealing a certain tunnel vision of privilege, a distinct lack of a sense of global citizenship and sisterhood.
I live in a country—just three hours away from the U.S. by plane—where women suffer the highest rate of acid attacks in the Western hemisphere, where the recent response of a prominent restauranteur to the rape of a woman on his premises was to blame the incident on the girl’s mini-skirt. Having lived here for two years, I can count on one hand the number of Colombian women I’ve met here who openly espouse feminism. Thus there would seem to be little correlation between how likely women are to call themselves feminists and how much they actually need the movement.
So my response to the girls in rich countries who earnestly believe, like French supermodel/ex-first lady Carla Bruni, that their generation “doesn’t need feminism” is simply: How very wonderful for you.
But the world is much smaller than it was during the Second Wave, and our interconnectedness intensifies our responsibilities to each other. Billions of our global sisters are still confined into social, legal, and economic structures that keep them dependent upon and vulnerable to men. This makes it a very bad idea indeed to openly call themselves feminists, given the very real risk of the label antagonizing those on whom their well-being and financial security depends.
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