In our contemporary society, we often like to use terms such as “safe space” and “open doors” to describe places where anyone can come in and feel comfortable, out of harm’s way. These are terms often exchanged between women, in Western culture, and in liberal communities. These places of unpassed judgment and uncensored discussion work beautifully to call together women of all identities to discuss and promote the greater cause of feminism. But do the boundaries really extend that far? Are the women commenting on each other’s Facebook statuses and exchanging Meetup pages representative of all women?

In the third wave of feminism there was a call for the end of an essentialist agenda employed in second wave feminism, that is to say, that no woman can be defined alongside all women. Individuality rings especially true as femininity plays a complex and unique role in every society, not just across the globe, but nationally speaking. The third wave sought to abolish the generalizations of women by women, and what we have in a modern society is a return to that but with a tone that rings with hypocrisy.

The feminism of 2017 is one of acceptance; one that calls for an end to misogyny across all plains and across all nations, but one that ignores so much of the wrong that goes on across the globe. The problems concerning women’s health in third world countries are something that, while incredibly relevant and so painfully underdeveloped in a rapidly developing globe, often go unrecognized. That is because feminism is a privilege and the voices that have the right to speak so often speak on the more minute wrongs of their daily life.

The term often coined to describe the more privileged aspects of feminism is called “white feminism.” White feminism should bring to mind connotations of pink hats and enamel pins, shirts with breasts drawn on the chest. White feminism, however, is a grossly essentialist term, which concludes that at the center of every white person is a privilege granted only to them and it can never be circumstantially superseded by anybody else or any other ethnicity.

But where feminists miss the mark is in their disregard for the difference between the communities they belong to and the communities of perhaps less fortunate white women. Feminists tend to forget that the women who are completely unphased by the Trump Administration are oftentimes the product of a toxic environment. An environment where they’ve been made to believe that what they have is all they can ever have and they should be grateful for this.

Feminists often forget that women of all races who don’t receive the proper education, be it because of financial circumstance or because of regional insufficiencies, will never be granted access to the knowledge that someone like myself, who goes to a liberal New York City public university, or someone who goes to a co-educational public high school in a neighborhood that ranges from lower-to-middle class and thus is at least given access to information. In understanding feminism, one must understand that the only thing which really plays a part in the way that a woman understands herself and her surroundings is completely through individual experience.

White feminism isn’t as strictly white as the name implies, but is a breed of feminism that belongs to those who don’t see that all around them are misactions taken against women that go beyond catcalling or fall short of the extremity of arranged marriages, but instead belong to a more naturalized and domestic setting. This is not a white-only problem, nor is it a problem which is deflected by white privilege. It is a societal issue and one that often fails to be addressed.

But even then, even in the most affluent community of feminists, it seems too often that discussions of women’s rights do not extend to such extremes as the fact that only 12% of women in India have access to feminine hygiene products. Or if they do extend so far, it is only in discussion. So many women across the world are being discluded from an agenda which seems so painfully centered around men vs. women, as in an individual man versus individual woman, as opposed to women versus the greater, androcentric world in which we live. So much of feminism is women’s health. So much of the rhetoric on women’s health deals with a woman’s right to birth control, as opposed to a woman’s right to health and doctors, as in something which is considered a luxury across so many borders.

That isn’t to say that it’s not important, because I am a woman and deserve a right to my own body, but I think that we need to open our causes up, to draw lines between barriers of women and help other women in the way that we so often don’t because our sight is so often narrow. Is feminism a privilege? It shouldn’t be, but it should be considered something of a privilege every time it shows no indication of getting better, and stronger, and most inclusive in ways that truly matter.