So my friend and I have been recently embroiled in a feud that looks like the 100 Years' War at 50 paces and has hospitalized at least 6 people who chanted 'oh God oh God not AGAIN' until their throats were like very small Mexican shoes. It was about WOMEN and LIFE and ABORTION and WHY I CAN NEVER REMEMBER ANYONE'S NAME AND WHETHER I SHOULD BE CHECKED OUT FOR EARLY ONSET DEMENTIA BECAUSE IT'S REALLY QUITE WORRYING AND MAYBE I SHOULDN'T DRINK SPRITE ANY MORE BECAUSE IT IS MELTING MY BRAIN.
(That last bit was actually my mum, but that's hardly relevant)
Basically it came down to whether or not it was feasible to be a feminist and believe that abortion was a Bad Thing. I used to think this was valid on a lamp-post. My friend did not think it was valid on any kind of post at all. But it was a debate I found really interesting and cool and stuff so I'm going to talk about it here. It's not really conducive to anything to misrepresent her arguments, so in the interests of justice and her not killing me with those fruit pastel things that taste like pritt stick I'm not going to. I'd also like to clarify that I think abortion is totally cool and I'm not Pro-life at all so no one is allowed to stake me through the heart on that grounds. I'm also going to apologise for revelations of stupid unprecedented since J.J. Abrams failed to include William Shatner in the new Star Trek movies. These revelations are impending later in this article. Look away now if you value your hair/intestines/German exercise books which you will be obliged to shred in despair and bury in a rhododendron bush in the shoe of a small child in Sri Lanka as your heart is eviscerated by the small, coat-hanger shaped, stupid bacterium pulsing in your veins. I'm sorry.
My friend thinks that the way a cause works is this: that cause outlines its agenda, and you subscribe to them totally and utterly or you're out. She says in the instance of feminism, these agenda are all policies pursuing complete gender equality (I think her set of agenda needs to be expanded considerably if abortion is one of the policies she brackets under this, when you take into account that a man can never actively choose to get pregnant, whereas abortion permits women to be able to determine whether they or not have a thing inside them, but I'm maybe being a tiny bit facetious). She rejects my notion of cultural relativism where gateway rights need to be established before civil rights can be pursued (you'll get to it, and it'll all be very exciting, and I'll give you a metaphorical lollipop if you stick with this, but scroll down if you're confused on definitions and things), and believes that my claiming this is OK robs feminists in countries where gateway rights aren't established of a concrete long-term goal to pursue, even if that long-term goal conflicts with their religious principles. She says if we don't strive for civil liberties in these countries it institutes a distinction between Western feminists living in democracies and non-Western feminists living under people with bad moustaches and penchants for genocide which isn't helpful on the whole 'unified cause' front. Basically, she thinks 'half-arsed feminism' - not her phrase - isn't really a thing that counts.
My definition of feminism differs quite a bit from my friend's. I kind of feel like it's tricky to actively not be a feminist unless you hand in your vote, quit school, get yourself a chastity belt and sit very quietly in a room making tea cosies out of your own eyebrows until you get married to a man you've previously had as much of a romantic relationship with as you've had with the parking penalty system in South Korea.
I think that if you're conceding to the bedrock of equal rights on which the feminist movement is founded, that's a valid grounds for calling yourself a feminist. It's a movement made by women for women, it wasn't instituted as a concrete set of civil rights agenda, and it's dependent on women being able to project their views on everything from toilet roll prices to invading Syria. Our liberal Western projection of equal rights is primarily based on civil rights like free speech and standing in elections and nice stuff that makes porcupines cry with its undying democratic beauty, but there are places like Saudi Arabia and Iran and the DRC where those kind of civil rights aren't conceivable when your non-existential air-inhaling existence as a woman isn't a given. Where gateway rights - that's like rights you've got to have before you can get all the awesome civil rights, in a sort of you've-got-to-have-bread-before-you-get-triple-caramel-frappucinos-at-Starbucks type way (I totally live by this analogy and absolutely do not spend my parent's savings on drinks with more sugar in than Ethiopia) - aren't automatic because of water that gives you cholera or getting stoned for witchcraft or normalized domestic abuse, civil and political rights are sort of renderedless of a priority.
We have to make concessions. We have to understand that there are cultures where to walk out on the street as a woman basically constitutes a feminist act, and while I think civil/political rights are pretty much incontestable in re awesome and a world where everyone has them is one I really like the look of, I still think that the fact is until we're in a position where universally we can say these gateway rights are obtained we have to accept this and respect how much of a massive deal things like clean water are when we're not secure in the knowledge it'll still be there tomorrow.
There is a distinction between feminists in democracies and feminists living under dictatorships, and it's one that shouldn't be there, and it's founded on institutionalized repression, but it's there nonetheless: our fight for life, for security, is largely over - and even here we've still got gigantic issues guaranteeing a woman's safety if she goes out at night wearing heels. Their's isn't. We can still institute a long-term goal of universal access to civil rights without shoving down their throats a series of Western projections of what gender equality means and compelling them to stick to them before those projections make sense against a backdrop of often violent, relentless, suppression of women's voices, where the poorest are sometimes grateful just to have survived at the end of the day.
I also think given that feminism is like a cause for really the biggest minority ever, it's problematic to bar women whose agendas conflict with preconceived civil rights agendas of an educated minority. I've sort of talked already about why I think this idea of a Feminism Club doesn't really work in a previous blog post so you can read that if you care.
AND NOW I ISSUE A DISCLAIMER OF SHOCKING REVELATIONS OF MY STUPID ON A STICK.
When I was editing this post, I realized that I had been thinking about abortion in a way which was massively wrong. Because it's not a civil right. It is as much of a gateway right as the right to life or the right to not get hit over the head with a machete. In precisely the countries I was talking about which have restricted access to these civil rights, having a baby is a condition which means you can't have the right to free speech, or the right to stand in a political party, or the right to work. Societal expectations of mothers, especially in non-secular dictatorships, end up meaning a whole lot of rights get precluded so you can conform to a pre-determined role. And that's besides the whole death thing - sexual pressure means totally different things for women if there's an off-chance they'll conceive and be subjected to stuff which could, y'know, kill them like, y'know, having a thing in their womb which sort of drinks their blood for 9 months.
I cannot believe it took me so long to realize this. I think we've established this culture by which if it's something we elect to do rather than are compelled to do or we will, y'know, shrivel and die like Matt LeBlanc's Friends spin-off, its status as a gateway right is negated. We consider freedom from - freedom from getting raped in a back alley - as a priority over freedom to - freedom to abort a foetus conceived as a result of that rape - in a way which is kind of really absurd and one of those arbitrary distinctions that everyone shuts up about despite the pretty blatant: 'yeah but wait a second that's stupider than a quiff on a fish' pre-frontal cortex activity going on in the background. And I think this is the kind of thing we're really going to have to address if we want to establish a basic level of human rights we have to get before we can level up and do all the cool stuff like join the Monster Raving Loony Party or wear shoes with heels.
But despite my revelations of shocking stupid, I'm still pretty enormously uncertain about whether it's conceivable to have a minority-embracing cause which explicitly excludes a number of major religious minorities by saying 'it's not okay to be a feminist if you don't totally subscribe to this principle which clashes with the teachings of the religion you subscribe to.' Hyper-Orthodox devotees of Catholicism, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism and a bunch of other faiths have all-out vetoes on abortion. Is it seriously infeasible for them to participate in feminist activities on grounds of their prioritising religious belief over a non-universal world view?
That wasn't rhetorical. I'm genuinely asking. I'm really confused. Don't let me have an existential crisis. Comment and things.
This is my life as a baffled lemur.
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