Come after me with your pitch forks and torches if you will, being that I am not only a female millennial, but also an aspiring member of “the media,” but I am not a feminist, at least in a 2016 sense of the word. The whole abstract itself embarrasses its very founders and generally disappoints as a movement. As a woman, modern feminism has done nothing for me.
The first wave of feminism was a wonderful thing. Women decided that the idea that they were intellectually inferior to men was absolutely ludicrous. They used tireless dedication only found in one so stubborn as a woman to fight for their right to vote and own property.
The second wave of feminism proved to benefit society also. With this new-found brain they had, women everywhere realized that they no longer wanted to sit at home all day, and who other than society said they had to? Thus, women everywhere began to pursue education and careers, and today I can with great pride proclaim that a man who does not cook dinner or do the dishes is no man indeed.
But the third wave of feminism is the one that saddens me. Feminism today has taken such an immense amount of time and effort and done absolutely nothing with it. Feminism today says it fights for “women’s rights to their bodies.” Newsflash, feminists, Roe v. Wade gave you the right to kill your child forty years ago. Just because the hard-working public does not want to fund the termination of a life other than your own despite it being your mistake does not mean we are infringing upon your rights.
Feminists today say that they are fighting to break the “glass ceiling” and to mitigate the wage gap between genders. However, feminists today fail to take into account the fact that we live in a civilization which does not evolve over night. Women have only entered the work force in the past century or so, and the fact that we have achieved as high of positions in a mere 100 years as men have held for thousands is profound. We need to give women time to rightly adjust to their relatively new ability to “reach for the stars.” In due time, women will achieve any and all positions once held by men and the glass ceiling will evaporate. It is only an issue of cultural evolution, and it continues to dissipate each and every day.
Moreover, feminists who proclaim they want “equal rights to men” are the ones seeking to provide new opportunities to females and looking to fill female quotas in the workplace. Just as a second grader doesn’t want his mom to call the mom of the kid picking on him at school, I do not need anyone handing me a job simply because I am a woman.
Worst of all, feminists of today are selfish. Women in Saudi Arabia can’t even drive cars yet, and are required to wear dark coverings all over their bodies despite 110+ degree heat. Spousal rape goes unpunished all across the Middle East and there is a sex slave trade somewhere around a million strong.
Forget about the right to vote, women all across the third world just want access to pads so they no longer have to bleed all over the floor of their homes for a week straight every month.
So, feminists, PLEASE tell me again how you as an AMERICAN citizen are oppressed while all these injustices are occurring across the planet. PLEASE tell me again why you are spending your efforts on failing to solve nonissues when you could forget about yourselves for a few moments and fight on behalf of women who are actually in need of a social movement.
Feminists across America, I call on you to get your priorities in check. Let us lay this third wave of feminism to rest, as it will clearly never achieve the success of the first two. Here’s to hoping that maybe the fourth wave will finally accomplish something for all those actually oppressed women.
