Why, indeed. A hundred years ago, it was to demand the right to vote. Sixty years ago, it was for sexual liberation. Forty years ago, in Iran, it was to protest the mandatory hijab. More recently, in India, it was to vent outrage against the rising rate of crimes against women in the country. The reason why human civilization has always seen women’s marches and not men’s marches is quite clear- women, along the course of human history, have been marginalized and oppressed by patriarchal forces; they have been denied freedoms that men enjoyed and were (are, in a considerable number of societies) looked down upon as an inferior class to men. Modern women, empowered, strangely enough, by the very patriarchy, have therefore felt it their bound duty to voice their disdain for such oppressive mandates.
On 21st January 2017, however, when millions of women marched across the world (even in icy Antarctica), it was hard to discern what exactly they were protesting. The official website proclaims that the organizers’ mission was to send a bold message to everyone who was listening, the new government in Washington in particular, that women’s rights are human rights. The march is heralded a symbol of solidarity, unity, peace, positivity, and a dozen other buzzwords. Solidarity? It wasn’t long before POC feminists and transgender feminists began berating white female feminists for their disregard for women of other races and their fixation on the p-word (unprintable here, it often goes together with that malodorous pet-Felis catus) which offended the sensibilities of transgender women. Unity? Perhaps the women who voted for Donald Trump didn’t get the invitation. Peace? Flinging the filthiest of invectives at democracy and declarations of blowing up the White House are very much in the spirit of a peace sought by extremists of a religion that the march endorses blatantly. Positivity? This march, like the many efforts of third-wave feminism prior to it, managed to further galvanize conservatives and classical liberals, a sizeable majority of the population world over, against the perceived pseudo-pathos and egomania of the third wave.
Marches, largely, occur for a cause, to bring about a change desired by the marchers; a fixed objective always helps to accumulate support and subsist the collective focus. The march on the 21st had no such objectives. The call for granting reproductive rights to women was somehow lost in the stupidity and absurdity of the variegated manners in which it was voiced – crude diagrams of ovaries with cringe-inducing subtexts scrawled below, like “Why are you obsessed with me?”, “I hope to have the same rights as a gun”, “Don’t tread on me”, “P*****s have claws”. The chants intoned by the crowds too were similarly confounding to anybody who doesn’t subscribe to ultraliberal news websites. It was more of a flash brigade, an extravaganza, or perhaps a postmodernist art piece with millions donning pink-colored, pointed beanies and snarky social justice mottos painted on their flesh.
Empowerment and liberation are admittedly noble causes, but the manner in which they are sought must also be equally noble. It is true that to demand decency from the enraged is futile; revolutions are seldom docile. However, one cannot help but wonder if it is not anger but, its misplacement that has cost neoliberal feminism its credibility. Today, it has been reduced to being a moral talking point of uppity talk show hosts and out-of-touch and often out-of-depth celebrities. In its reincarnation, as ‘intersectional’ feminism, it battles for the rights of those who want to put women in burqas and men in women’s bathrooms. In France, the parliament gets into heated debates about how many hours a man should spend in the kitchen and conveniently ignores the plight of over one thousand women who were sexually molested in public at a New Years’ rave in Cologne. It has, owing to postmodernism, completely abandoned biology, science and history in order to pursue its sacrosanct goal of overthrowing the capitalist patriarchy. But, the several contradictions and fallacies that plague this ideology are enough to turn away any rational thinker.
Now, thanks to the extravagances and hysterics of liberalism, from the ‘Free Love’ movement of the 60’s to the women’s march, youngsters reportedly hold more conservative views than their ancestors who fought in the second world war. The unity that neoliberalism and its attendant ideologies strived to achieve has been shown to be an illusion conjured up by the global elite, the selfsame greedy pocket-liners who preach peace and love whilst practicing the exact opposite for their personal profits. The proletarians, the working man and woman, the real revolutionaries, who have, throughout the course of history marched together, in solidarity and unity to fight manic monarchs and oppressive oligarchs, now march to the polling booths. Democracy too, it seems, can be a form of revolution and the sooner putative liberals understand this, the better.
kleinsight 