Faulty Feminism

Feminism too can be racist, casteist and other ists

I. Pop psych and feminism

Maybe we can start with the ‘feminist’ fanaticism around women CEOs. This has been talked about before, how pop psych celebrates women CEOs as the ultimate personifications of all feminist goals. To become a CEO is after all the aspiration of half of the world’s population.

Except that it isn’t. The CEO role isn’t what most women aspire for, not even a little bit, not even at all. Women aspire to be all kinds of people - employed, promoted, mothers, divorced, loved, retired, rich, married and sure sometimes also CEOs.  Yet somehow the female CEO narrative has captivated our ideas of what good and strong feminism should look like.

Another example is the ‘feminist’ glorification of working mothers and the parallel derision of homemakers. There is so much respect given to mothers who balance work with motherhood and so much scorn given to mothers who don’t work because just carrying, birthing and raising another human is not achievement enough in 2023. 

There are plenty of other such examples - the hype around women in STEM, criticism towards women who shave, shock at women who are sexually conservative, irritation at women who go by the ‘wife’ title.

II. Why pop psych’s feminism is problematic

Because it is not representative of what most women want. We take the top 1% of women located on the highest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, brand their personal wishes as feminist dreams and project them onto the world. And then we get upset at all the other women who don’t subscribe to those ideas. The 99% soon find themselves speaking the feminist language of the top 1% without really understanding what’s going on.  

Take the example of the Maternity Amendment Bill that was passed in 2017 in India that extended paid maternity leave from 12 to 26 weeks for women in formal sectors. The passing of the bill was announced as a gift to the women of India. Go feminism. While we all toasted to this new ‘feminist’ win of our country, few thought about how the bill literally excludes 99% of women in India.

Women today are fighting for issues that are close to neither their hearts nor their homes. Many women strongly desire to get married but are afraid to talk about it for fear of being branded as regressive. Many women are embarrassed to say that they are homemakers for fear of being labelled incapable. Many women wear “modern” clothes that they don’t enjoy wearing because how else will they signal their emancipation?  Many women date liberally (even if they don’t want to) for fear of appearing conservative. Many women publicly endorse singledom while secretly feeling lonely in an effort to live up to feminist ideals. Basically, a lot of us women subscribe to an idea of feminism that does not necessarily speak to us but one that we are too scared to challenge for upsetting the ‘feminists’. It’s almost as if the popular notions of feminism today are created by the rich women, for the rich women but forced to be of all the women. 

This is problematic for very obvious reasons. Feminism is supposed to help women come forward, not make them retreat in fear. When the Suffragettes decided to abandon their kitchens for the roads of Britain, it was not because they all hated cooking, it was because the fight for political participation was critical for women to win. Women needed to have the option to vote, contest and rule if they wanted to.

When sexual liberation arrived in the 60s, it was not that all American women detested monogamy or the institution of marriage. It was a fight to expand our liberation beyond our intellect. Our bodies needed to be free too. Women needed to have the option to have as many sexual partners and as much sex as they wanted. 

Feminism in my view has always been about about increasing the options available to women because as a gender, we started off with few. There are many reasons for this including biological ones e.g. before contraception, we had no way out of those 9 months of pregnancy or motherhood in general. As technology advanced and men got busy with war, we for the first time could (or had to) think beyond our kitchen and children. And my, did we discover a whole new range of our innate capabilities! We could work, we could earn, we could perform, we could lead, we could invent and we could do all of those things at the same time. 

These achievements notwithstanding, there is a lot more work that we need to do towards securing our place in this world. But today, feminism has become less about what kind of power we should strive to wield, and more about what we should wear and who we should cancel. Our feminism has become a shiny political toy, a reductionist checklist of a bunch of inconsistent dos and don'ts. 

III. An Unpopular Indicator of Feminism

Are you, as a woman, able to do what you want to do?

The answer to this question is a bigger indicator of how successful feminism is than the total number of women CEOs in the world.

Some women want to work through and after their pregnancy, are they able to do that? Or is their desire to work being held back by their partner or in-laws? Some women want to stop working and focus solely on raising their children, are they able to do that? Or does their financial precarity prevent them from exercising this option? Some women value their sexual freedom immensely, are they able to enjoy it to the fullest? Or are expectations around monogamy holding them back? Some women like how their breasts look with a bra, are they able to wear a bra without inviting judgement from free-the-body activists? Other women find bras constraining, are they able to free themselves from boob jail? Some women wish to get married and raise a family, are they able to express these wishes? Other women are looking for a way out of their unhappy marriage, do they have a way out?

The more yes-es we attain to our wants, the further we are getting with our feminist agenda. The more we try to pigeonhole what a woman’s feminism should look like, the more we distress the Suffragettes in their graves.

‘Progressive’ women often accuse other women of behaving in ways that indicate internalised patriarchy but rarely do these very women look inwards and assess how elite their own feminist ideals are. More often than not, our new and improved ‘progressive’ behaviours are manifestations of old anxieties e.g. Will he think of me as too traditional if I refuse sex on the first date? Will he think of me as boring if I tell him how much I hate sports?

IV. Final Words

Our anger at men hijacking our rightful share in the world is wholly warranted. Us women must get paid the same wages for the same work. We must be able to wear what we like. We must be able to date one person or multiple people. The work we do at our homes must not only be acknowledged but also distributed across members. 

But what we forget in this process is that the must-s need not always translate to want-s for all women. If a woman wants to cook her partner a meal, that does not necessarily mean that she has internalised patriarchy or is pulling the rest of her gender down with her (though in some cases, it very well could be that too). 

We often hyper focus on what men steal from us while underestimating what other women steal from us. Feminism like many other social issues lies at the intersection of many areas and this includes a woman’s socioeconomic location. We talk about how the white, rich man has colonised not just our world but also our minds. But what about the white, rich woman and how she has managed to colonise the minds of lesser privileged women? 

Today a minority of women tell the majority of women out there what their rights should be while paying 0 attention to if the rights they force on their fellow sisters will actually help them advance in life. A female domestic worker I knew cared more about her daughter getting married to a half decent man who is not an abusive alcoholic than she cared about sending her to college. It’s easy for an outsider to say that she is ruining her daughter’s life but if they know anything about how terrible the quality of public school education is in India, they may realise why this mother thinks that it is wiser to find her daughter a good husband than fail at trying to get her into a good college. This is not saying that this mother is right but to say that we might be wrong is assuming that she’s foolish or not a feminist ally.

In the end, if we really think long and hard about it, our feminism is so much more than the black-and-white ideas of gender equality that we perpetuate and it is certainly more than just becoming a CEO because there may be many ways to be a woman, but there is no one way to be one.