Picky Perspectives
There’s a hot topic on the social plate that’s permanently in focus because the liberal media tells us that that’s where it should be in today’s world: feminism. On one hand, it’s because the global left has won the cultural war and the upper hand in defining what we should eat, think or read. On the other hand, it reduced feminism to a cultural bumper sticker that easily sticks on everything, from self-help books and pop culture to serious academic discourse.
Especially in the West, gullible young people grow up believing feminism is about words, not actions: like Meghan Markle wearing a shirt with a message of support spelled in Arabic. It will maybe attract a bit of attention to the issue but the Duchess of Sussex is the only real winner here. The photo garnered thousands of likes, shares and inquiries where you can buy it. Who cares about the little Iranian girls wrapped into niqabs like fish in sushi rolls? As long as you’re tweeting about their plights and and posting selfies in Meghan’s statement shirt, that’s more than enough effort on your part. Except that it isn’t.
Activism requires education, time, money and sacrifice. More than most of us are willing to contribute. Mainstream media sometimes paints a rather monolithical image of feminism, with a fixed structure, ideas and outlets. That’s why women like the Roma feminist Jelena Savić are valuable, showing a more saturated, different perspective of the movement, a porous structure with its own upsides and downsides. A rhetoric that’s far from universal or even inclusive, concentrated on a particular, very specific type of woman: a martyr, a victim. Anointed as infallible due to inability to fight for her beliefs. And equally important: a caucasian.
Some like to carry the torch of saving other women from the burden of victimhood as if these were brainless twats needing protection only their enlightened white sisters can provide. Hence Savić distanced herself from several feminist movements in Serbia since according to her experience, women like herself are reduced to protest props, tokens of a cause that’s as chaotic as a Sunday market. While “headliners” whipped up the cream of intellectual discourse, Roma and minorities were playing the supporting act to the whole thing to add the cherished flavour of diversity to the mix.
If there’s a need for a platform, it’s only valid as long as it’s universally inclusive. Otherwise it discredits itself as a simple conscience booster for white middle class, fooling them into thinking they’re good people just because they don’t look away from human rights violations. Though they look at a car crash the same way: it’s bloody, disgusting and cruel, but you simply keep staring as if you’ve never seen it before. Even activism has a hierarchy of its own, but that’s what kills its credibility. Without it though, it turns into anarchy that blurs whatever message they were trying to convey. So it’s a double-edged sword that needs to be handled with care.
Every movement or a cause consists of a group of individuals that are connected through an idea but have their own separate agendas and identities. The success depends on its ability to find a middle ground and reconcile the differences in order to succeed in changing communities for the better, not tearing them even further apart.
Those are internal issues that need to be solved before any serious outside strategies can be applied, a need for consolidation instead of compartmentalisation. I know I will be told that I don’t need to tell women what’s good for them and that I’m a misogynist even for writing this essay, but there’s a reason everyone of us has a mirror at home: we need to look at ourselves first.
Bitterness should be replaced by kindness, since sinking too deep into the quicksand of any ideology eradicates that compromise which is the prerogative for productive dialogue and reconciliation. There shouldn’t be a fringe if the fight for the feminist cause is supposed to go beyond the fringes into the mainstream.
Capacity for self-criticism is what marks the difference between those preaching to the converted and those worth listening to. Feminism is no different in that sense: most of those that hold the microphone have really nothing worth listening to say, it’s a salad of generic affirmative vocabulary that’s supposed to inspire action and reaction. If you’re a teenager, you might be excused for being excited when you hear it.
It reminded me of Meryl Streep in a glamorous black (sic!) dress at the Oscars, stepping out with one of the protagonists of the #Metoo movement that was the the trendy issue at the moment. This absurd act of sympathy, similarly to Markle’s Arabic shirt, amounted to nothing more than affirmation of Streep’s social awareness credibility, which she most probably took off together with her dress when she returned home. Of course, none of the numerous journalists that flanked the red carpet asked her about her previously singing praises to Harvey Weinstein, the sexual predator who was the very reason that Streeps plus one wasn’t her husband but an activist who will be lucky if anyone of the elite in attendance sends her a Facebook friend request.
There are simply too many hidden skeletons in the closets of Hollywood’s woke celebrities that it’s hardly a surprise that most of them have a walk-in closet in their houses, with swimming pools cleaned by foreign immigrants they so passionately support. Because if they get deported, who’s going to clean the pool? Don’t be silly.
There are more women like Jelena Savić: a Roma girl called Leonora used to attend the same high school like me. In the mrantime, she graduated at the university and is now working at a local hospital. I highly doubt anyone with a large social platform encouraged or supported her as an example of inclusivity.
I don’t think my schoolmate Leonora is an outspoken feminist. She doesn’t need to be. She carved her way out of the predictable downwards spiral into sidewalk begging that many Roma people resort to through their own choice or a lack thereof. It’s the with us/against us ideological psychosis that’s at the root of animosity to feminism.
It creates more enemies than friends through its defensive, occasionally even agressive rhetoric. Like a diamond, it has many different faces that are rarely equally granted the same spotlight. The global feminist uprising fighting for the rights of Iranian girls and women is a priority: we need to honor and protect values that were bestowed on us by ancestors who laid the foundations on which we are now continuing to evolve. But to truly evolve, literature must also do its bit: it’s not all about martyrs and tears. And it’s something that needs to be adressed by women. They have an equal capacity for cruelty and destruction like their male counterparts because it’s a behavior driven by passion, not by reason, a human trait that’s not defined by gender but the capacity for self-control.
In the tales of Brothers Grimm, both the villains and the victims tend to be women. However nowadays this might be treated as a cultural residue of patriarchal tradition, it’s simultaneously an accurate depiction of duplicity that’s the very definition of inclusivity. Since all of us can be equally prone to the good and the bad in our heart, which one will prevail is ultimately up to us.
That’s why we need young, contemporary authors to write about the other side of the gender coin: women who are cruel, sadistic and delusional. Not just to each other, but everyone else. Hopefully there are women willing to do this: write about Magda Goebbels, Biljana Plavšić or Amelia Dyer. And I’m not talking about pamphlets, but serious writing that can carry the weight of the topic and deliver something new, challenging and insightful.
Would die-hard literary feminists be ready to explore a dark side of their own? Not a merely surface-dusting but a deep, painful incision into the rotten core of the matter? I still haven’t met one. It doesn’t mean there are none, they’re just harder to find. Being imperfect is what makes humankind capable of creating perfection through literature, arts and science. And sometimes, worthy of admiration.
It means that though there might still be an another Amelia Dyer somewhere, we shouldn’t allow people like that to kill not just our children but also our hope that we’re better than that. Determined to defeat and overcome. For evil prevails when we refuse to learn from it. Young feminists can lead the way to this if they choose to, in an all-inclusive manner. If they can’t, they should at least stay away and let others to the work that was cut out for them. Because the last thing women need on the way to true freedom is damage control.
But that’s what good literature is there for: to show us beauty in a time of desperation and offer a refuge from peril in hours of need. It won’t pay our bills or heal our wounds. But it will show you that there’s more to life than that. We are not machines. Just like Californian swimming pools, our souls need maintenance as well. For both our glory and our deepest darkness need to be exposed to be believed. Like two trees with imposing, tall trunks climbing high, their crowns intertwining into a shadow that’s simultaneously heavy and light.
