The fuss about feminism

“We do not stop talking about gender equality until gender inequality ceases to be an issue.”

Feminism is not a bunch of crazy women who believe that women are better than men as many conceive but that women deserve same opportunities as their male counterparts.

Feminists do not believe they are victims. In order to be a feminist you only need to be on board with one significant idea: all humans, male and female, should have equal political, economic and social rights.

It is a great relieve that many are now beginning to understand the true definition of feminism and openly identifying with it; but, however, there is still always a negative stigma attached to it. Part of this problem is the way our media sensationalises things, trying to pass the most radical and extreme versions as the standard which in this case, depicts a feminist as a man-hater who hates lip-stick, crinkles her nose at mothers who are complete housewives and unapologetically supports abortions on demand.

It is this false assumption that causes anti-feminism campaigns such as “women against feminism” which consist of people posting statements on social platforms such as: “I don’t need feminism because I have equal rights, I don’t need feminism because I don’t choose to ignore the fact that men have issues too, I don’t need feminism because in the long run men will still run the world”. This piece brings forth an obvious problem; how misguided many are about what feminism is all about.

Feminism is not a dirty word. As earlier stated it is not a bunch of crazy or deranged group of people who think women should take the world and be lords and masters over everyone else or making an unrealistic move to eliminate men in order to have a feminist world.

Being a feminist has nothing to do with that. It has nothing to do with how you look, what you wear, who you date. Being a feminist does not mean you think women deserve special rights; it means you know we deserve the equal right.

The primary purpose of feminism is to empower women. Feminism, however, is not aiming to make women butchers of men or stronger in that way, but stronger in a positive way.

They already know they are strong; they just want the society to see that too. Empowering women does not mean belittling or punishing men.

Men, of course, suffer from gender role assumptions that place expectations upon them to live and act in a certain way. Feminism believes each person should be viewed based on their individual strengths and capacities, not on gender. It believes that everyone should be treated equally not because of gender but in spite of it.

There are people who believe that feminism is a thing of the past since many a writer like Virginia Woolf, Alice Walker, Mariama Ba, Nawal El Sadaawi have voiced out the unfair and brutal treatments of women in the society through their books, so we do not need it anymore. The patriarchal system no longer exists.

After all, we can vote and hold positions of high authority but these revolutions are not taking place completely. In all demographics, female vote more than men not because they are not interested in voting but because they are always in the position to vote for ‘men’ who over the years have not failed in their corruptive and weak leadership-mostly-as seen in a country like Nigeria.

Women still hold less than 20 per cent of seats in Congress; even though they make half of the population. There is a need for women to rise from point zero to point ‘equal’.

Most women today now feel like they now have equal opportunities as men. Thanks to past feminist movements who set the ball in motion for awareness on the inequality bedevilling the world. But we still need feminism until every other woman in the world feels this way as well.

We still need feminism because when women get married it is still assumed they automatically subsumed into the beliefs and aspirations of their husbands; we still need feminism because we teach women how to prevent rape, instead of teaching people to not view women as objects since women are told that walking alone at night makes them “an easy prey”.

We still need feminism because female genital mutilation (FGM), a barbaric act, still takes and is still practised in more than 29 countries; more than 120 countries do not have laws against marital rape and still allow child brides-some as young as 6 years old.

We still need feminism because domestic violence is still made legalised in some countries like Ivory Coast, Haiti, Congo, Burkina Faso, Egypt et cetera.

Men beat their wives at will with the law as their backup and expect them to yield to their whims and forever remain submissive. We still need feminism because infanticides, the act of killing children within a year of birth, can be attributed to millions of fewer females than males in the Middle Eastern countries.

We need feminism because people are still blindly agreeing that women do not need to be paid for the same work as men that women will do just fine with the disparities in their income in comparison with men. Why do we still need feminism? “…because you are still asking me that same question”.

AFOLASADE OLA writes from University of Ibadan