In a 21st century world, it should come as a shock to many people that we still need to campaign for women’s rights. Yet women all over the world are forced to demand basic rights as though they don’t deserve to already have them. And what’s even more shocking is that in our very modern 21st century, those who do have the courage to question the absence of these rights are simply branded as “feminists” – and somehow over time, being a “feminist” has become a negative thing.
Being a feminist used to mean you were someone who demanded that women be treated with social and economic equality. Now, even women have begun to stray away from calling themselves feminists in the fear of being ridiculed for the negative connotations that come with it. To many people, feminists are guilty of being too demanding, “hating all men”, or creating a fuss when they already have everything they need.
“They can vote and they can get jobs, what more do they need?” tends to be a common reaction towards feminists’ calls for change. And my personal favourite – feminists are “lesbians”, which has to be stereotyping at it’s best. We might live in a very developed, technological age, but we are definitely failing somewhere if half of our population is treated as inferior to the other half, and are scorned at when they try to change things for themselves.
Scarily enough it’s not just a small group of people do the scorning. Even some of our politicians have been known to echo these sentiments towards feminism, with UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom writing on Politics.co.uk that it is a passing trend that was started by “shrill, bored, middle-class women of a certain physical genre.” Bloom was quick to acknowledge that not only women are feminists, and that men can be feminists too. Of them he said they “have no link with the usual social and sporting male preserves”.
So in a world where we still have to fight for a woman’s right to be treated the same as her male counterpart, there’s now another battle to be won: the fight to demand your rights without being judged. One can only hope that this struggle will be overcome faster than the struggle for equality or we’re looking at a long road ahead.
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