Pseudo Feminism
Emily: Hello my name is Emily!
Rachel: Hello I’m Rachel! I’m a feminist haha.
Emily: um ok! Have a nice day.
Over the past few years the term feminism has created quite a buzz across the world be it online or offline, everyone claims to be a feminist today knowing/not-knowing the weight of the word, but just being a part of the trend.
A person that claims to be a feminist yet ignores the main point of feminism, equality. Pseudo-Feminists will tend to blather on about how terrible men are, or assume how men do not face social issues in regards to their gender.
“She called him skinny? Well, he IS skinny!”
“What? He called her skinny? That is female objectification!”
From the above definition a pseudo feminist would quickly jump on to infer how this term was coined by men itself. But in fact this term is used by every other individual who would want to look at every gender with the same lens , unbiased and absolutely no filters.
Feminism is that women deserve respect like any other human being. Pseudo-feminism is saying women deserve more respect, or that people of other genders deserve no respect.
That said feminists don’t carry a badge of feminist all the time, it flows naturally in their views, their perspective of what world they envision for themselves and their future generations to grow up in.
We talk about women’s safety, women empowerment, women’s alliance, but no one talks about men’s safety or in general gender-neutral safety, right? I mean if a group of people follow me on a deserted road I no matter my gender am helpless.com.org.gov.
How can we ensure that we have a safe and inclusive environment for “all” of us ?
A). A gender neutral grievance cell in our workspaces which address our problems.
B). An exercise where we all gather and confess about our actions/words which were unjust towards the other gender. This not only gives you an outlet to vent out but gather perspectives from others on how you could’ve handled the situation better.
C). Having sensitization sessions for people who are not aware of the pronouns to address someone, this becomes important since we work as a team of diverse individuals.
Wasn’t the idea of Feminism about being treated equally and have the same rights ? Since when did it become this competitive, to beat(not literally, metaphorically) the other gender , as if it’s some race. Shouldn’t it be like this : We have a universe full of people exercising the equal rights given to them and all of us living in peace and harmony.
Maybe we all have some thinking to do here.