There should be the understanding that women don’t need to be nice, kind, decent, smart, strong, angelic, have each other’s back even, before we deserve equality.
Women don’t have to love one another before we deserve equality, the fact that we are people is enough justification. We don’t have to prove anything.
AT ALL.
“Women are the problems of women” that the society mindlessly regurgitate does NOT mean we do not deserve access to resources as much as men.
As long as you can’t make this kind of argument for men, then it is pure sexism to decide since we’re not “nice enough”, we deserve to be oppressed just by the reason of our gender identity.
Feminists especially need to understand THIS and incorporate it into their agitation for a more equal world.
Look, women don’t even need to like being friends with one another. The individual survival instinct for a feminist world trumps the need to desperately ask women to like being friends with other women; emphasize on that and women will instinctively come together.
There are a lot of women who don’t like me, and there are those I don’t like, but we bind together on feminist ideologies because of course, our interests align on that. Is it even possible to automatically like someone just because they share the same kind of bodies with you?
Identity politics especially in feminism needs to be exposed. We need to understand, confront and accept that women are not necessarily nice people and we don’t have to be, that’s a patriarchal trope; a trope that says women’s strength lies in their emotional vulnerability, in their nurturing “maternal” instincts, that women are sugar and spice and everything nice.
We’re in a society that’s not inherently nice but instead so twisted, sick and disgusting, why then should it be a prerequisite for women to be nice before we have equality? Why is such huge moral burden being placed on women alone?
It doesn’t make sense.
I’m writing this preamble because I’ve read the beginning of this book and while I haven’t finished it (I’m not even close), I think the parts I’ve read emphasizes the need for us to recognize women as just humans too and not angels and perhaps the book will do this later but I feel the need to point out that women absolutely do NOT need to be perfect or angelic or kind or love other women before we have equality.
By the reason of just existing, we deserve as much rights as every other human, as every other living thing.
Men have not been perfect examples of being sugar and spice. If anything, they have been natural assholes with the few ones who are humane and decent people being stigmatized and called “simps” but nobody has ever used that to say “Yep, they deserve to be repressed.”
On that note, I present WOMAN’S INHUMANITY TO WOMAN by Phyllis Chesler. It is not expectedly a popular book, but it is definitely the truth and reality we need to confront in the feminist movement.
The idea that women don’t necessarily like other women should be acknowledged because that idea solidly exists. Not acknowledging it doesn’t make it disappear, and it has done more harm than good.
Acknowledging it makes us ask why and how patriarchy and every other oppressive hierarchical structure has made it happen and then we can think of solutions.
Not doing anything about it and then making women loving one another or just being good people a prerequisite for deserving equality, for deserving to be treated like people, is pure undiluted crap.
Written by Sisí Afrika.
