A wave of blind partisanship is dividing global feminism. The caucus of causes are in a huddle, having lost the plot. Since 2016, Iranian women’s rights activist Narges Mohammadi has been in and out of prison, because the Ayatollahs hate her hair. Last week, it was left to her two twins Ali and Kiana, to receive the Nobel peace prize on her behalf; Ali quoted his mother, while speaking to reporters in Stockholm, “Victory is not easy, but it is certain.” Mohammadi is a driving force behind the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement, which calls for the right of Iranian women to discard the hated headscarf.
Why are there no ‘Free Narges!’ mass processions blocking the Brooklyn Bridge? Hundreds of women and girls have been tortured, raped and murdered by the Islamic Republic’s Morality Police; in police vans, cop stations and jails, for not wearing the hijab. Why is it so unpalatable for woke activists in the West to equate the sadism endured by these women with Hamas’s rape and mutilation of Jewish women and girls? Many of them were gangraped until they couldn’t walk, and then shot by the monsters. Their pelvises and legs broke while being ravaged.
Is the sorority of pain compromised? Why are no burqa-clad protestors rocking the Arab street against the mass rapes and detention of their Uighur sisters in China; or of Baloch women kidnapped, violated and murdered by Pakistani soldiers and cops? There is no Brinda Karat to lament the defilement of Ukrainian women. No strident words from Michelle Obama against the October 7 Hamas atrocities, though she condemned Boko Haram’s kidnapping of Nigerian schoolgirls. No women in keffiyeh marching in London against sexual violence in Haiti. And no follow-up of the Hathras rape by the NCW and Indian feminists. A crisis of contradiction has risen between the liberating ideals of women power and support for violent Islamist nationalism, which has selectively paralysed the soapbox liberals on the Palestine cause celebre. It is time to redefine feminism to save its true purpose: recognising equality of female trauma.
The great feminist icon Simone de Beauvoir’s book, The Second Sex, espouses the concept that woman has been held in a relationship of age-old oppression to man through marginalisation, as his ‘Other’. Now the Other has been co-opted by Hamas rapists to make the ‘River to the Sea’ their cause celebre. Irony of ironies, it’s women who are tearing down posters of Jewish hostages and babies. It is women who are kicking and punching Jewish women. It is women leaders of elite universities who are ‘contextualising’ terrorist rape. The ideological de-hyphenation of feminism and parti pris politics is over; the current gender trope being Woman vs Woman for crimes committed by men against women. Book II of The Second Sex illustrates Beauvoir’s seminal belief, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” The prevalent sectarian ethos of race politics sees the Left liberal feminist ‘becoming’ a woman only in warped circumstances.
Modern feminism stands at the crossroads of conscience. Violent men have weaponised misogyny to enslave the psychology of feminism. Sorry, Ali, victory for the world’s wronged women; abused, violated, tortured, ostracised and discriminated against looks uncertain, since their champions are synthetic sopranos of the odious opera of gender hypocrisy. Beauvoir commented that if a free woman doesn’t actively try to help women who are not free, she is implicated in their oppression. Who will tell the raucous spitballs of ‘Free Palestine’ that?
Ravi Shankar
ravi@newindianexpress.com