Feminism as an academic discourse has long been the preserve of women, and of mostly those women who have had the opportunity and privilege to fight against a patriarchal society. The movement has had extraordinary impact upon women’s liberation along with gay rights movement and of course civil rights movement. In fact feminism ideally is the thought in which anything that is biased against minorities or interests of the minorities in society is condemned and rejected.
The main culprit against minorities has been a patriarchal pattern of thinking. Patriarchy has been the driving force behind the so-called pillars of society: religion, socialism, and to some extent even capitalism. Thus, anything that fights against a patriarchal society has been viewed with suspicion and with hatred, as it involves the unknown and as it involves the upsetting of an accepted and well appreciated system.
The system in fact has been notoriously the reason behind discrimination against all kinds of minorities in every society. Unfortunately, the majority may not realize that by encouraging what is known, understood and accepted as correct, they just might be the victims too alongside being perpetrators. While feminists have contributed quite a lot to the gay rights movement, some are strangely distant with regard to men’s issues, though these issues are results of the same patriarchal notions that the feminists fight against.
In fact, feminism is not about hating men or juxtaposing men with women, instead it is all about human beings fighting against any kind of inequalities whether they are caused by patriarchy or matriarchy. Men on the other hand have viewed feminism with distrust instead of acknowledging that a patriarchal society is detrimental to them as well, though it may appear otherwise.
Only when there is a vociferous movement against all kinds of gender based inequalities can the society remain healthy, and that requires the participation of all gender and sexual groups, all majorities and the minorities and also a desire to accept the “other” as one’s own, and to understand that the “other” doesn’t exist.
However, the most important task of the society is to understand that feminism is not about hating men, but about crushing the pillars of patriarchy, which has been the scourge against LGBT communities, racial and ethnic minorities, economically backward classes, and surprisingly against the patriarchal perpetrators themselves. Simultaneously, it is also crucial to acknowledge the importance of learning from feminist discourse. After all, feminism is humanism.
Posted on November 7th, 2009 at 9:24 pm by Jaiyant Cavale
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