Star-Bright

It pushes such toxic messages sometimes. You get married to one person? You’re gonna have to stick with them forever and ever, and if you try leaving he’s right to hurt you. He had 12 girlfriends during his college years but he’s mad at you for pointing that out when you just had one admirer that you didn’t even have a relationship with? You’re just gonna have to deal with it. He’s allowed to have multiple wives at a time? He goes sleep with women he’s not married to and blames you for not “satisfying” him? I guess that’s sad for you, “but you chose him”.

The fact that society discourages women from making decisions for themselves when it doesn’t suit the men around them - and furthermore, is so intent on making women live through hell for simple mistakes while denying them the chance to rectify that and live better lives is just...

We keep seeing the dramas and books where men and boys are bullies, players and overall immoral beings but guilt-trip the girls or women bothered by them into having sympathy for them, coercing them to give these particular men and boys unnecessary second chances. We see them in real life too. But where are the second chances for women? When are women allowed to make those mistakes? And if they’re not, then is it not reasonable to deny men that redemption too? To deny men those double standards and exceptions that only suit them?

There are plenty of women who “forgave” men for sleeping with other women. But there are plenty more men who wrongfully accuse women they’re supposed to respect - out of spite, jealousy, childishness or just vengeance - and hurt them, sometimes even kill them for it. There have been men who killed women for the slightest “suspicion” that they were cheating on them. There have been men who went on to make their wives’/partner’s lives miserable just for not being the person they wanted them to be.

Wtf? You’d discount a woman or girl’s story about abuse because you feel her suffering in a way that doesn’t support your personal/political views must mean she’s the worst? That she’s wrong and you’re right to treat her so inhumanely, to deny her a listening ear or the slightest comfort, to give her so much scorn and hatred instead?

Because I would like, for once, for there to be a challenge where women and girls get to come out about abuse and people fucking empathize or say something that isn’t a constant “but my religion isn’t really like that, I had good parents” or “not all men” or “you’re just making people from our culture look bad” or “she’s probably making it up”. The “treat women and girls like human beings” challenge. The “don’t vilify abuse victims” challenge. The “don’t make this about yourself and show a sliver of kindness” challenge.

Women and girls (or really, any abuse victims) shouldn’t have to be silenced about their bad experiences in the fear of being a bad “symbol”. No one is meant to fucking represent any community or religion, so why the sudden anger if a woman comes out about trauma? Why constantly torment these abuse victims further with accusations and bullying and straw-man arguments?

It was never about recognizing that misogyny came from “every man”, just about “any man.” The fact that it can come in various forms and ways from any man is enough. For it to be concerning, it doesn’t have to be “every man”, the fact that it can be “any man” is concerning enough.

It’s weird to me that there was so much emphasis on father-daughter relationships in media and real life to the point that so many mothers and mother-daughter relationships were erased or left out. It somehow doesn’t matter to people that the mother did 9 months of labor making and delivering a child in agony, some becoming permanently disabled in the process, took care of and nursed and raised the child with her blood and sweat in real life. All it took was the child being female for everyone to try to push down the mother and pretend like the father was the maker, which was not only insulting but just...hm

I’m also making clear that I’m not trying to say something like “all mothers good, all dads bad”, no. I recognize that in many cases, there are good fathers. My issue is that the line for being a “good father” is relatively low compared to the line for being a “good mother”, and a father doing a normal thing (like paying attention to his kids in the slightest) is often treated with greater approval and exaggerated “status-giving” than if a mother does much more hard work.

Nothing wrong with being close to your father but. It used to depress me, seeing all this media and societal pandering that “fathers are the biggest supporters in a girl’s life” or “dads are their daughters’ best friends” because I wasn’t close to my dad and I was heavily attached to my mom, and I wish my mother had that recognition - for being my supporter, my best friend. And it mostly stemmed from the fact that I knew that in reality, no girl I knew in my community actually had a good relationship with their dad, or at least, not one that superseded the slightly better relationships they had with their mothers (even if those weren’t too good on their own for some people either). Even the “best father-daughter” relationships was a basis of pure transaction, not unconditional love. It’s always not the horrific physically abusive relationship either, thank goodness. It’s just. dehumanizing in other ways.

There’s a difference between “one or two women have good father-daughter relationships” and “all women must be close to their fathers because women have to be some man’s property, even if it’s not sexually related” and it’s disgusting because you find this in both the East and West. The idealization of fathers and the dehumanization of mothers. The same girls who idealize their fathers at their expense of their mothers for no other reason than the public perception that it’s “better” end up being wives to men like their fathers and then realizing how it was like to be treated as a mother, a woman.

Even when you’re not married, you’re not actually allowed to be anything to your dad other than a very specific kind of woman, nor does your dad actually, truly defend you if you “go astray”. I still remember the time a security guard looked at my 13-year old sister (who was fully-covered in pants and a long-sleeved shirt) exactly once, and my dad noticed. He could have glared at the security guard. He could have told him not to look at her. He could have just moved the car or stayed quiet. He could have asked my sister how she felt. But instead, he hissed to my sister that if she wasn’t wearing a headscarf and abaya the next time we go out, he’d break her legs.

He calls my mother an idiot routinely, even though he is the reason she left her career and studies - to take care of us because he sure as hell couldn’t. He spends all day on his political talkshows as she is forced to cook, clean, take care of the kids, and then he makes fun of her for not knowing much. For destroying her life.

He screams at the top of his lungs if my sisters and I so much as disagree with him over simple things.

He constantly denies anything we accuse of his family, even when our cousins and uncles were abusive to us.

My mother tells us we’re lucky to have him because at least he provides for us. At least he didn’t get married to someone else. 

My mother idealizes her own father over her mother, but never mentions how her father got her married to this abusive man, and how her older sister was married as a child and nearly died in childbirth, and my “precious” maternal grandfather didn’t do jackshit to help her. My mother realizes that she’s become the woman she looked down on, and now there’s no other way to reconcile with this horrific fact other than continue to idealize and apologize for men. Excuse my dad, excuse her dad, excuse everyone else’s men.

One of my friends’ father constantly yells at their wife for giving him 4 daughters and threatens to marry another, while another already had a secret second wife in another country. All the women in my community were once qualified doctors, engineers, lawyers and accountants, now forced to sit or slave away at homes and develop depression, diabetes, fibroids, even cancer because of difficult births, bad conditions, drug abuse from their husbands. Their families don’t support them to go work or study, and the place we lived forbade women of specific backgrounds and races to work anyways. 

Some girls in my age group didn’t even get to go abroad to study in university (as the country we lived in didn’t allow to study in local universities). Their families took them back to Pakistan to get married, and they’d get some admission at a small university there while their husbands and brothers got to go abroad, travel, and later on drag their wives with them as little house slaves. I consider myself extremely blessed that my parents let me study in the West. I consider myself extremely blessed that I don’t have brothers or a husband.

If that’s not bad enough, other women are brainwashed into supporting misogyny and abuse against girls. They hold their little religious circles or tea parties bashing so-and-so’s daughter for getting divorced and not even mentioning that the husband was abusive. The man or boy is never at fault. Such women - gossiping about and looking down at other women- disgust me too. 

Every conversation about a woman or girls somehow ends up making her seem like a failure or a villain. Every conversation about a man or boy has to end up praising him in some way or overlooking his flaws.

It’s one of the reasons why I distrust men and boys in general. Why I don’t forgive easily. Why I don’t partake in so much woman-bashing even if the woman has made a mistake. In my experience, there is nothing more unforgivable than the horrible things men enforce and perpetuate in society. The way they make everything revolve around entirely them. The way they have for centuries.

I’m not talking about your “cute, progressive” dad with sandals and “you can wear anything you like, dear!” exception. I’m talking about the majority of men and boys that I have seen in my life. Fuck them. Fuck the ones who are strangers and fuck the ones in my family, equally. I’m done believing that I can pick out specific men and boys who are good and bad, that whatever the males in my family are is probably better than “those unnamed men outside”. Nearly none of them can be defended. 

I wasn’t surprised that when I came to live in the West again and made new friends, they had similar stories, despite how differently I had imagined things.

One of my friends, atheist, was abused by her grandfather and her father knew but said nothing. Another one of my friends, Mormon Christian, talked about modesty standards and how her father had once physically beat her so badly it left scars. And yet another one of my friends, who comes from an atheist African family, was sexually abused by her teacher. Another was disfigured by an acid attack from someone she had refused to marry. One of my best friends almost got roped into an arranged marriage with a misogynist in America, who planned to cut her off from family, friends and university so she could be his obedient housewife. Yeah, the “land of the free” also has its fair share of misogynists too.

What the leftists in the West trying to perpetuate misgoyny and pick and choose “who” gets to do it fail to understand is that “Muslim” men aren’t better than “Christian men”, and “atheist men” are not better than any other men either. In general, American and European men and African men and Arab men and Desi men aren’t different when it comes to their treatment and views of women. I don’t fall for the fallacious arguments that one group thinks of women better than the other group, that one group of men is acceptable and another isn’t. That it’s okay for one group of men to be misogynyists and not for the other. Misogyny is wrong, period. It’s wrong for African and Desi men to abuse women and girls no matter their skin color or racial background, just as it’s wrong for any other man to abuse women and girls. 

Back to family, I cannot in good conscious even think about the media pushing how “father-daughter relationships are so pure” when my dad and other people’s fathers just showed how men in the real world think. How girls like my friends, my sisters and I were trapped under men like this as the rest of the clueless world gushes about how men who become fathers are so good to and for women. Yes, I’d still say that my father is a better man than some stranger men I’ve come across - that doesn’t mean I defend what he does or thinks about other women and girls, and that doesn’t mean I don’t acknowledge that there are men and boys like him.

We always look for ways to justify at least some men or find a way to sympathize with them, and it’s depressing. I believe that nearly anytime we idealize a relationship with a man in it, we reflect this mentality so much.

“Sure, most men are like that, but Muslim/Christian men don’t - !”

“Sure, you might mean men like that, but your father/husband is someone who protects you, he’s different-!”

“This group of men can’t do that, they’re also oppressed-!”

It’s why I believe you shouldn’t hesitate to criticize a man who deserves to be criticized. It’s why I believe you don’t need to make convoluted reasons to defend a man or call out his crimes. It’s why I believe in the rights and dignity of women and girls above all else, even if I don’t agree with many girls either.

I’m not saying women and girls are angels who do no wrong - far form it, unfortunately, so many women and girls either enable men and/or actively abuse other women and girls too. 

If saying “men and women should be equal” means denying how much of an unfair edge men have held over us for years and erasing the sex-specific oppression and injustices that women and girls have had to face, I wonder if true equality is possible.

I’m saying that regardless of how many women and girls you find who are toxic, nearly none of them will cause the wide-scale societal humiliation, horrors and subjugation that so many men and boys, as a class, have unleashed for generations. It’s why the whole “women can be worse than men” shtick does not at all make sense to me, given what I’ve seen. You will never find a woman who is allowed to have multiple husbands because she’s not happy with the kids she had with a previous husband, you will never find a woman who became a dictator and ordered an army of women to rape and enslave men. You won’t find men gang-raped by groups of women and said groups of women let free. You won’t find a woman who threw acid in the face of a man who didn’t want to marry her. You will never find a woman who has the legal authority to limit and cut down men’s education or healthcare. You do not see women trading off boys in marriage and expecting boys to pop out daughters, you do not see men and boys having their bodies ruined by childbirth and forced intercourse and the depression that results from losing your studies, your career, your life.

But you will find men and boys who can do nearly all of these things. In some cases, who have done all of these things to women and girls and continue to do it.

No, not every man does. But any man can. That’s the danger. And when they do, it’s even more dangerous.

Nothing tells about the misogyny in society more than how mothers of daughters are treated and expected to behave, and how many mothers of sons talk down to other people’s daughters, defend their son’s abuse of other people’s daughters, and spout women-hating filth against other women and girls. And it needs to stop.

Obviously, “not all” mothers of sons. I know there are mothers of firstborn/only daughters who also perpetuate some level of sexism, and it largely comes down to mindset. But so many times in my life, I have heard the worst things come out of women who try to defend sons, regardless of the culture and place (I’m South Asian, but I’ve seen this amongst other Asians, Arabs, Africans, Europeans, etc). Women who defend their sons over other women and girls often pretend like they’re better than regular women because they’ve helped the patriarchy, look down on and criticize women who bear and raise daughters, pretend like the women and girls their sons abuse are wrong instead of the boy or man, and are even found to have the most archaic, “traditional” (read: backwards) mindsets about how girls should act. You’re part of the problem.

So tired of the “feminism means everyone is equal and happy” or “feminism means supporting men too” like no. No it does not.

Feminism is, and should be, centered and about supporting and empowering women. Women being supported. Women being empowered. Women living dignified, safe lives without needing to worry about giving up education or work, without being dehumanized, without being stopped from prospering. Without needing to worry about rape and murder, humiliation, assault, or threats to their loved ones.

Men aren’t our responsibility. Even with the most feminism in the world, women will never truly be “superior” to men in the way you “fear” nor will we come to a point of treating many men and boys the way that they have mistreated many women and girls for centuries. We need more feminism. Period.

Also tired of the “if you’re so feminist, why do you hate other women?” discourse because the most hate received are the very people at the forefront of the women’s rights movements. For helping other women and simply speaking the truth others are afraid to, said feminists often get assaulted, stalked, even killed. The people you call “feminazis” aren’t comparable to the actual Nazis, who - like many other military forces during war-torn eras - were men. Men who raped, beat, killed, humiliated thousands of women and girls. 

We can’t unconditionally smile and agree with every single woman (especially if she supports male rapists and murderers), we’re just raising our voices regarding the oppression and subjugation of women worldwide. It’s not about your personal satisfaction or definition, it’s about women needing and deserving to live safely, happily, successfully. If one woman holds other women back, that woman is not someone we will agree with. If another woman “chooses” to make stupid choices that put down women who are just trying to live their own lives, we’ll call it a stupid choice. 

We don’t need to waste so much breath apologizing and clarifying that we’re not targeting men. We don’t need to waste breath praising every single woman who doesn’t agree with us. We’re targeting help for women and girls who need it and want it, by women and girls willing and able to give it. If you believe that women and girls getting closure and support is “bad for men”, you are the problem.

If you’re looking for something to twist to your definition and constantly demonize things that simply don’t revolve around you, you’re fundamentally forgetting how ideology and activism works. 

We know it’s “not all men”. We know it’s “not all women agree with you.” But that doesn’t negate that feminism is needed and still should exist. Because feminism isn’t stating that men don’t deserve to exist, it’s stating women who have been put down by men and other women deserve to exist better than the state that they exist right now. 

It’s. About. Women.

The narrator went something along the lines of “just as (name of the surrogate mother) saved (name of the family paying) from the grief of infertility, they saved (name of surrogate mother) from the horrors of war.” How unthinkable is your privilege if you think "suffering from the grief of infertility” is equivalent to a poor woman living through a fucking war and still being paid to carry your baby? A baby YOU are paying for?

The concept of surrogacy reducing women and hurting mothers specifically already has so many points proving how awful it is and why it shouldn’t be allowed, and this doesn’t even take the top of the cake, but damn. I’m just. so mad.

At most, it’s a piece of cloth. At best, a “lifestyle”. 

It’s weird to me that radical feminists get lectured on “western privilege” when most of the time, nothing screams “Western privilege” more than both anti-feminism and liberal feminism? Literally, so much of “radical feminism” is just “normal feminism” in the East?

(Unless that choice is, say, not to commit actual crime like murder, but that’s different.)