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It’s never my intention to criticize the thoughtful conclusions you’ve made about your life or the things that empower you. But the truth is that being a woman of color is political, and having dedicated many of my formative years to sharing the stories of women, I feel a responsibility to hold up the mirror that has been painfully pieced together over the last few decades.
I’m approachable enough to invite people’s curiosity about what I do for work, but the moment I mention that I work for a feminist media company, the reactions are polarizing.
It either elicits excited and agreeable attention from those who believe that we need feminism, or it instantly creates distance and exasperation from those who don’t believe in it, who tell me that it’s an act of hate against men, or that the women of this region do not require what feminism preaches to be freedom.
As a young adult, I wasn’t seeking feminist rhetoric or academia. My feminism was purely circumstantial with no structural foundation in the West. Before I was thrown into the world of women, my ideals were reserved for myself only, and being an immigrant child raised on survival by very young parents, I only knew that I needed a way out of the things that caged me. With divine intervention, I not only found independence, but I ran headfirst into an organization led by women, for women.
My journey over the past six years was guided and shaped by the women that I have met, spoken to, been led by, and told the stories of. My education and insight into what it means to have a world with equity for women was solely shaped by Asian, Arab, and Black women.
Being primarily surrounded by women of color, who have suffered beneath the systematic oppression and marginalization of colonial global powers, I learned to not only understand patriarchy but the larger systems at play that enforce and nurture it. I’m surrounded by women who are well-versed in the language and action of continuously working to overcome mountains of limitations.
They understand that intersectionality means that it’s us against war machines, climate change, colonialism, military-industrial complexes, and every other ‘ism’ you can think of.
The stories of these women carry multitudes. They tell me of the cages they broke out of, the lessons their mothers taught them, and their grief when faced with the cages of their own mothers.
Whether we like to acknowledge it or not, the women before us broke cultural and social barriers on every human level possible, which allows us to speak (not only when we’re being spoken to), fight, work, and most importantly be free without the permission of a man.
These women tell me the stories of their wildest dreams, which became their empowered realities, and the dreams they had to let go of because the world around them is still trying to catch up.
As I carry these stories within me, it becomes extremely difficult to keep my composure when women sit across from me and nonchalantly say “I don’t believe in feminism.”
I write this out of an added frustration from seeing a new wave of content created by women themselves, championing a narrative that claims that feminism has made life harder for women, and that we should all go back to needing the men in our lives. That we should all yearn for the “Soft Life” and that includes not knowing how to pay the bills or what your car insurance is, apparently? This can only be categorized under: brain rot from being chronically online.
This actually has nothing to do with the men in our lives, who we love and respect and do in fact appreciate in times of need, but is about the inability of society to understand the intricate framework that allows a woman to be more than just one thing.
How are we to practice the art of individuality and subjectivity if our perception is constantly manipulated by a system that replicates itself with each scroll on a phone screen? How will young women know that the whole and only point of this age-old debate is so that they can be whatever they choose to be?
The word Feminist comes to life if and only when you give it your own meaning. To me, its meaning lies in all of the sacrifices our women have made. Not just on a political stage recognized by the West, or by freeing the nipple, or screaming from the rooftops about men, but more significantly in the subtle and powerful ways of women in the Global South who have bent, twisted and broken all the rules to create their own realities.
These are the women who quietly make decisions within a household. The women who raised us to be loud on the inside, with the footsteps of a panther when maneuvering the outside. The women who rose in ranks and the women who touched the sun. The women who had dreams but raised kids, the women whose dreams were their kids. The women who didn’t want kids but had a career, and the women who did both anyway.
The deep secret, I’ve discovered, of intersectional feminism, is that it is a carefully threaded net that our matriarchs have weaved for us to fall back on. When a young woman tells me that they don’t “subscribe to feminism” it deftly unravels this net. Because how do you not see that most of us still fall through and down to the pit of lions? That our women’s limbs still poke through the holes?
Is it because of the individualistic culture that now permeates our everyday lives? That, if we’re free to make our own choices (we’re not, but that’s another conversation), we don’t care about the other millions who are still falling through the gaps?
Feminism has been weaponized and undermined by the same patriarchal structures we are fighting against. Tokenism is a plague that feeds us the illusion of women who conform to patriarchal norms and support superficial changes that don’t challenge any actual systematic issues. Our ideas and goals are portrayed in a radical light, seeking to delegitimize any sort of meaningful change.
While I have had the unique privilege to hear so many stories of women in such diverse categories, I am constantly seeking those I have not heard. I deeply grieve and acknowledge that my privilege only makes me privy to the stories of some. My language, my education, my skin, and my innocence do not take me far enough.
Maybe it’s not individualism, but the collective capitalist concepts we’ve come up with. The Girlboss, Girl Hood, the Girl’s Girls, the Girl Math, and the many other affirmative ideals of feminine identity and power. We now embody “Girl” and “Woman” in all these vast shapes and forms, so we must be empowered, surely?
Our friends and aunts are the CEOs of conglomerates. They built them from the ground up, and command an army of men with a wink. Surely, we don’t need feminism anymore?
The laws that demand equal pay for women in certain countries of the region surely must mean that our women are in equal playing fields. We wear what we want, marry who we want, and travel where we want, so who cares about those on the margins of society?
Women definitely still don’t die for what they wear? Women aren’t more vulnerable in times of war or conflict? Women and girls everywhere have access to education and reproductive healthcare? Why do we need more empowerment? What more are we fighting for?
It could also be that it’s kind of uncool in the eyes of many to be on board the feminist cause. It’s almost like a curse word in the ears of men and women we wish to impress. It shines a very specific light on you and your ideals, and there is fear in being associated with something so gender specific. Women used to be burned at the stake for witchcraft, but now they’re burned at the stake for wokeness.
It is an illness, this wokeness. We police language while the world burns; we condemn anything that the social climate deems worthy of condemning. We allow our wokeness and false narratives to keep fueling systemic patriarchy. We’re so busy fighting the wrong fight that our exhaustion takes us out of the revolution before it’s even begun.
To be fair, we’ve won in so many ways, and it makes sense why cognitively we no longer have space for the women who still can’t do any of these things, who are still held under the heel of the patriarchy and its laws, customs, and people.
To me, the inability to identify with feminism feels like an inherent faulty wire. It tells me that somewhere along your empowered journey, you were never at risk of falling into the lion’s den, never at risk of being eaten alive. Perhaps you teetered on the edge, or perhaps you fell in and clawed your way out. If you can do it, so can everyone else, right?
I am tired of feminism being weaponized against women, and I’m tired of us holding each other at gunpoint. I only ask that we question ourselves about whether the fight only begins and ends with us. Does our empathy only stretch as far as our own fingertips?
What I have seen and been taught by the women in my life is that the feminism of the region, the one that women of color subscribe to, is one of communal empathy. A net cannot be held taut if some members are faltering. And if the net is not held taut, the women who follow are simply more food for the lion’s den.