The Subjection of the Feminists
Western feminism faces a difficult tension between universal women’s rights and cultural sensitivity. In some cases, concerns about Islamophobia have made criticism of patriarchal practices more difficult. This can leave Muslim women’s experiences of coercion, inequality, or restricted autonomy overlooked. The result may be a double standard in how women’s rights are defended across different cultures. The broader question is whether feminism can uphold equality while remaining consistent in its principles. At its core is the challenge of placing women’s freedom and autonomy above cultural or ideological boundaries.
The subjection of feminism:
Perhaps the most tragic and consequential failure of Y2KMind happened with feminists in Women’s Studies. Feminism, above all other fruits of civil society, depends on the willingness of the stronger to give up the privileges of superior physical power. Feminism arose, therefore, because some (primarily white and Jewish) men were willing to respond fairly to their moral claims.
Nor was this an easy matter. Men’s limbic captivity to honor, not only in the eyes of their women, but of their male (warrior) peers, makes seeming effeminate an extremely painful experience for males, and, in some cases, can lead to murderous rampages. The urge to use force in order to reassert honor never goes away, and resurges in times of crisis and attendant onēidophobia.
In this sense, Western feminism has relied on a powerful, enduring commitment of mature men (‘I know, not mature enough’), willing to accept public criticism, some of it quite harsh, without striking back. On the contrary, at least some of these men try to listen and respond. This seems to have elicited from some feminists in the late twentieth century very aggressive behavior, not hesitating to express rage at an intimidated Western “patriarchy.”
In other places and societies, however, more volatile men, driven by jealousy, envy, and libido dominandi, exploit their physical power to subject [NSH1] [RL2] women; and both law and mores approve. The twin phenomena of “crimes of passion” (killing an unfaithful wife) and shame murders (killing a daughter who shames the family) attest to the deadly power of male honor to claim the lives of problematic women. The kinds of complaints raised by #MeToo in the West, however bad by our standards, pale before the threat that such societies present to every female born in them.
In the twenty-first century, no culture, and within that culture, no religious movement, has been more zealously misogynist and oppressive of women than supremacist Islam. And yet, for reasons both puzzling and troubling, the feminist movement, and particularly its academic manifestation, Women and Gender Studies, so fierce at home, have shown profound respect and loud support for these patriarchs who embodied everything they hated about (Western) men. Indeed, it appears that Western women writing about Arab and Muslim women, systematically subordinated their concerns to the red-green alliance in which the West, where women are most free, embodies evil, and anyone “resisting” that evil, is on the good side. This tendency already appeared in the 1980s in UN conferences, but it became a key dimension of Y2KMind.
Beginning in the 1980s/1400s, for example, the more radical circles of Islam sought to impose at least the hijab, if not the burka or nikab on Muslim women, a public marker of supremacist dominion over Muslims, especially in the West. Once having taken over in Iran, Caliphator mullahs required the hijab; the Taliban (1996-2001) would throw acid in the face of women who did not wear the most extreme version, the niqab. Since 9-11 throughout the Ummah, including Israel and the West, there has been “a huge increase in the number of women, particularly among young women, who started wearing the hijab.”
When Western feminists are told by Muslim women who newly adopt wearing the hijab that it is an act of individuation and principle, they feel compelled to admire their courage. If one interprets the male gaze at a bikinied body as a form of visual rape, the burka becomes a form of resistance. Obviously it would be tasteless, even hostile, to ask if this newly assumed practice expressed postmodern liberation, or fealty to ancient religious practices, or submission to the demands of recent Caliphators, including Bin Laden.
How many “zones urbaines sensibles” became the unmentionable no-go-zones because the Muslim women in them had to wear hijabs in order to protect themselves, and infidel women without veils, now rape bait―“uncovered, easy meat”―got out? And given that being raped in many Muslim-majority cultures (but not only!) is a cause for shame-murder (talk about blaming the victim), women surrounded by aggressive, patriarchal, triumphalist Muslims are strongly advised to wear the hijab at the very least. Oikophobic feminists, instead, assure us that most wear hijabs by choice, not from a fear that not wearing it dishonors the woman and leaves her open to justified male violence like rape. And privileged Muslim women are only too happy to use their own self-loathing to dismiss their concerns for Muslim women as a form of white saviorism. Given the strong link between enforcing hijab compliance and jihad, should not feminists get a bit more concerned about the finer details here?
Faced with the remorseless insistence of immigrant communities to enforce their violent patriarchal rules on their women, Westerners crumbled, victims of their fears of being called racists, of opposing a “multiculturalism” to which their immigrant communities had no commitment. Describing the shame-murder of one of the girls in her charge as a social worker, Unni Wikan writes:
“Culture” is the coinage used to express and claim minority rights, and it is backed by hard sanctions. Physical force, or the threat of such, may not be necessary to compel compliance. A little word, just six letters long, does the job just as effectively: “Racist!” nor need the word be spoken. It hangs like a specter in the air, palpable if invisible, and frightens people into accepting acts that they deeply deplore. . . . “Racist” has become a “deadly word.” It pierces the heart of the well-meaning Scandinavian, whose cherished identity is world champion of all that is kind and good. . . . But there is a high price to be paid by such high morality, and it is paid neither by those who pride themselves on supreme tolerance toward immigrants, professed as “respect for the culture,” nor by those who cry “racist” to claim or enforce such respect. [The price] is Aisha [dead at 14] and others like her.
Hard to find a better description of moral narcissism: looking good trumps actual negative effects on victims one supposedly protects.
The Feminist/Women’s Studies adoption of this inversion shows up sharply in an incident at Brandeis, in the spring of 2014. The school announced that Ayaan Hirsi Ali would get an honorary degree that year. Rapidly professors in various theoretically sophisticated disciplines, with Women’s Studies in the fore, objected vehemently to this honor being awarded an “Islamophobe.” So, a woman who had endured clitoridectomy, escaped a forced marriage by fleeing to the West, become a successful politician very critical of Islam’s treatment of women, who had been threatened and pursued by patriarchal Islamists all over the world including the US, somehow became an “Islamophobe” for saying things about Islam that any Jew and Christian can say about their own and each other’s religions.
In other words, she was everything that liberals imagined, when they spoke of moderate, peaceful Muslims who enrich the societies in which they dwell. Therefore, she had to go. As Andrew Anthony put it dryly: “she is loathed not just by Islamic fundamentalists but by many western liberals, who find her rejection of Islam almost as objectionable as her embrace of western liberalism.” Says the oikophobe: I wouldn’t want a friend who wanted to join my club. And so, Ayaan Hirsi Ali became the victim of an academic honor-killing.
This affair around Ayaan Hirsi Ali illustrates everything wrong about 21st century feminism, in which feminists submitted to the supremacist Muslims who hate her, both in Europe and the United States; won the plaudits of the demopathic institutions that enforce that supremacism, and betrayed both their own feminist values and the Muslim women who suffer at the hands of the very supremacists to whom they submit. It seems like a classic example of the authoritarian personality: submissive to those stronger (Muslim supremacist misogynists), aggressive to those weaker (Western men who acceed to their demands and get excoriated for not being sufficiently submissive to the most radical demands). It suggests that behind the loathing they have for their own culture, lies a much deeper (and more richly deserved) loathing for their own cowardice.
Sources: https://rlandes.substack.com/, https://theaugeanstables.com/