Did you, folks, see what women in Iran are doing? The feminist protests? That’s what real feminism is about, and it’s so beautiful and inspiring to see the photos of women from the protests.
I hope that the courage and the dignity of Iranian women will inspire people around here to remember what feminism is supposed to be about. And maybe they will finally realize that publishing stories about how “I became his girlfriend because I thought he’d help my career but he didn’t, so I now realize he harassed me*” is not about feminism.
* This is from the Concordia scandal.
Clarissa's Blog 
i’m note sure if this will show the right tweet..
https://twitter.com/HeshmatAlavi/status/958722478158897152
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Okay it does, the old lady climbing up on the fountain is my favorite so far.
This is essentially second wave feminism. Third wave is puritanical retreat to traditional femininity and calls for women to be put under the protection of institutional power….
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So it seems. Although the 3d wave types will say 2d wave was humorless and white. I do NOT remember them that way at all.
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And there is much more to 3d wave than that — despite the fact of it having been coopted to look like that, or represented as being that.
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“there is much more to 3d wave than that ”
Maybe there was more to it at some time, but there certainly isn’t now AFAICT.
The logical next step (in the late 1980s) was to start the dreary, depressing and brutal work of taking on non-western misogyny. I’d really like to see some of that but I can’t see any evidence.
Ironically the whole idea of intersectionality is now mostly used to attack white women (#whitefeminism).
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At least in the news and casual conversation / popular discourse, this is how it seems. I’m not convinced that white US types are the ones to take on non-western misogyny, though — so many of them are Trump voters. They’ve got western misogyny deep in their bones. And I wouldn’t say the likes of HRC are in any position to do it — they’d have to start seeing non-western women as people themselves, first, before they started going for the non-western misogynists.
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“I’m not convinced that white US types are the ones to take on non-western misogyny, though”
Who else is up for it?
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Iranians are white.
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Yes, most Iranians I’ve met blend into European populations (some of them only in the South but others could be from any European country even more than Turks) but I don’t think they count as white for purposes of intersectionality. I’m not sure if anyone from a muslim background has a place in intersectionality unless it’s against enemy number one….. white feminism.
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It bothers me that everything always has to be reduced to race. It’s tiresome. My 2-year-old came home from daycare the other day and announced “I’m white!” I promise we are not teaching her that.
I’m absolutely convinced that American and European women have a lot to teach Ukrainian, Latin American, Russian, etc women about feminism entirely irrespective of anybody’s race. Everything I know about feminism I learned from American feminists because we are so behind in this respect in my country.
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This reminded of how this woman I know called an Uber for her husband. So he’s leaving the house and she yells “es negro! Es negro!” And he goes, “and why are you telling me that? Am I supposed to care? What kind of a person do you think I am?” And she says, “The car is black, the car.”
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Downvoting an old lady taking off her hijab in an act of anti-theocratic resistance…. somepeople have noooooooo shame.
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I would say feminism or at least what called itself feminism when I was in college (Andrea Dworkin) does not exist outside the US at all. I have lived in the UK, Kyrgyzstan, Ghana, and Iraqi Kurdistan (very close to the Iranian border) and in all those years I never saw anything that looked like what billed itself as feminism on US college campuses in the late 1980s and early 1990s. What is happening in Iran is very different than feminism. It is a rejection of forced impositions on personal behavior from an authoritarian regime. Feminism as I saw it in the US was all about forcibly imposing restrictions upon the behavior of men. In particular regarding any commercialization of sex. Sometime in the 1990s when “slap your bitch up” was a hit song on the radio, feminism ceased to exist even in the US.
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I might suggest a course of readings, starting here. http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/wollstonecraft1792.pdf
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In related Iran news apparently the anti-government protests haven’t ever stopped completely just changed focus. Iran is looking more and more like non-USSR Eastern Europe in mid to late 1988 or so when all pretense that the system could continue or be reformed in any meaningful way was quickly fading….
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