Words4Thought 2: Feminism v Human Rights

Most people would probably say that feminism is the belief in equality between men and women. I strongly disagree with that. Feminism is bigger. The recognition of systemic oppression – the realization that sexism, racism, heterosexism, classism stem from the same source and intersect in way that makes them inseparable – is key here. Feminism is the philosophy that systemic oppression distributes power unequally amongst all people, not just between men and women, and that it must be re-distributed so that all people have equal power and equal access. Equality is fundamental here – but it’s bigger than men and women. The power of feminism is bigger than recognizing that the personal is political and creating an equal distribution of power because it can mean so many things for different people. Feminism, in being a philosophy, can be more than an identity or social change for some people; it can be a life-style, a political ideology, a social ideology, a spirituality, maybe even a form of therapy.

Though some people would say that this definition of feminism lends itself to human rights and therefore, all people would be feminists, I would again have to disagree with that. First, not all people would be feminists because there are some people who benefit from this unequal distribution of power and therefore, they would not want power to be distributed equally among all people. Second, while feminism and human rights are similar and often overlap and compliment each other, they are different. Human rights has a global connotation – it’s an international movement. And in the U.S., global seems to mean everywhere but the U.S. So with human rights, there is a connotation of lifting all other societies to match the civilization and progress of the U.S. The U.S. has a lot of work to do, so it shouldn’t be the standard, but that is what has happened to the concept of human rights. Because of that, it seems that human rights has unintentionally developed its own unequal distribution of power, and that is anti-feminist in my book. This is not to say all human rights missions or activists are anti-feminist – far from it, in fact; this is just to say that the philosophies and sub-conscious motives are.

Moral of the story:  stop using Human Rights as a substitute for the F word; they are different and feminism isn't going any place.