My Response to women who are against Feminisim.

Imagine this:

The year is 2015. You are a white Western woman. You
wake up in the morning in a comfortably sized house or flat.
You have a full or part-time job that enables you to pay your
rent or mortgage. You have been to school and maybe even
college or university as well. You can read and write and
count. You own a car or have a driver’s license. You have
enough money in your own bank account to feed and clothe
yourself. You have access to the Internet. You can vote. You
have a boyfriend or girlfriend of your choosing, who you can
also marry if you want to, and raise a family with. You walk
down the street wearing whatever you feel like wearing.
You can go to bars and clubs and sleep with whomever you
want.
Your world is full of freedom and possibility.
Then you pick up a newspaper or go online. You read about
angry women ranting about sexism and inequality. You see
phrases like ‘rape-culture’ and ‘slut-shaming.’ You furrow
your brow and think to yourself: ‘What are they so angry
about? There is no such thing as sexism anymore.’


Now imagine this:

The year is 2014. You are a 25 year-old Pakistani woman.
A few months ago, you married the man you love. A man
you choose for yourself. You are also pregnant with his
child. You see your life stretching out before you, filled with
hope and happiness. Suddenly, you and your husband are
dragged away from each other. You are both beaten with
bricks and batons. You can’t fight back. You can’t escape.
No one comes to help you. Through your fading vision, you
look up, and look into the eyes of one of your assailants:
into the eyes of your father.

The year is 2013. You are a 23 year-old Indian woman. You
are a physiotherapy student with a promising career ahead
of you. You are sitting on a private bus travelling home
alone on a warm December evening. You gaze out of the
window as the buildings of New Dheli rush past you and feel
content. Suddenly, a blunt force hits the back of your head
and you fall to the floor of the bus. A group of strange men
are standing over you. They bring the metal bar down on
you again and again and again until all you can taste is the
blood filling up your mouth. You pray that you will die soon.
And you do, but not then. You are raped, beaten, and
tortured over and over again. Death is slow and agonising.

The year is 2014. You are a 13 year-old girl from Niger. You
no longer live there though. You are now living in the
  neighboring country Nigeria, sitting alone in small room on
a small bed in a small apartment high above the city of
Kano. You are not allowed to leave. Your stomach is
swollen from the unwanted life growing inside of it. You had
no choice. The father is a man in his 40s. He is a
businessman. He has bought you as his wife. You were a
penniless, uneducated girl when he came for you. You don’t
know of any life you could have had. Neither did your
family: just one less mouth for them to feed. You still have
the body of a child, and it’s straining under the pressure
from the one inside of you. You feel like you’re about to be
split in two. You don’t wonder if you will survive the birth. A
part of you doesn’t want to.

These are fictionalized accounts of real events that have
happened to real women living in our world today. They
follow the past 250 years of women and men campaigning
for women to be given equal rights to men to prevent these
kinds of injustices and abuses on the grounds of gender
taking place. Over the course of this time, campaigners –
Feminists, both female and male – have been locked up,
beaten, tortured, and even killed, in the pursuit of equality.
They did this with pen and ink and print; they did this with
their voices; they did this with their bodies; they did this
with art and music; they did in courts of law and halls and
houses of government that they fought be to allowed into.
They did this so that women would no longer been seen as
property, livestock, breeding machines, sex objects,
punching bags, or infantile morons. They did this not just
for themselves, but also for their daughters, and their
daughters, and their daughters for generations to come.
They did this for women they would never meet – women
who lived across countries, across vast oceans, across the
entire globe, and even across time.
They did this so that women like me – a black African woman
 – could attend school and university; to learn to
read, write, and think critically; to gain a degree; to get a
job and be paid an equal salary to a man in the same
position; and to sit here with my own computer and type all
of this.

Feminism is a movement for freedom, equality, choice, love,
compassion, respect, solidarity, and education. We may
argue, we may disagree, we may struggle to understand the
choices and perspectives of others sometimes, but these
core beliefs of the movement have never changed, and they
never will.