[from my myspace] Feminism Revisited

[intro]
I used myspace.com blogs for the past few years for my randomly-spaced blogging. Therefore, I am jumpstarting my blog here with most of those blogs, lightly edited.
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Original posting: Tuesday, February 06, 2007, 11:45 PM
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I've decided to touch upon feminism again in this new Rant.

For those of you that might be tuning in just now (or just recently) or to those of you that have just forgotten, you are viewing a continuation of a series I call "Timmy's Rants." In this, I have evolved to sub-title each Rant over something that I plan on discussing. Sometimes I discuss that topic. Sometimes I get off on a tangent and never discuss it at all. And sometimes, I start off on the topic and then end up talking about how calculus is worthless or something. Furthermore, this is very stream-of-consciousness, so I just say what's coming to mind and don't really proofread what I write.

So feminism. Previously, I believe I said something along the lines of this: Modern feminism is useless now. It's done just about as much as it can. We need some sort of counterbalancing act to feminism so that it stays in check, like "equalism."

This time, I would like to delve into western feminism and possibly explore the emerging "feminism" in the eastern world. Western feminism had its beginnings in the western world, obviously. I'll just touch briefly on how I think feminism came into America, in particular, since I'm rather unfamiliar with its origins in Europe.

The American Frontier. As America was expanding from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the lands west of the Mississippi came to be known as the "Frontier." Here, men and women had to carry their own weight for survival, so it was no wonder a frontier state (Wyoming) was the first U.S. state to give women the right to vote since women had already essentially equal say to men.

About this same time, slavery was still going on in the U.S. Human rights and blah blah blah..... Anyway, according to the U.S. Constitution, all men had a say in our government. So then black men wanted these same rights. And I'm sure women jumped on this bandwagon (or slaves jumped on the women's rights wagon or something), and both blacks and women wanted rights of some sort. Emancipation stole women's rights' thunder, and women's rights came to become a background issue until it resurfaced again later in the 20th century and whatnot.

So that's how I think about western feminism in a nutshell.

Eastern feminism, and in particular "feminism" in the Islamic world, is a completely different issue. In the western world, people are quite individualistic, giving rise to democracy (each person has equal say, and so forth) and capitalism (an individual is responsible for his/her own ... capital or something). However, people in Islamic cultures are more family- or community-oriented. Men must marry women and support her and their family. A woman was dependent on her father until marriage, then dependent on her husband. There's this whole community thing going on.

Speaking of which, democracy makes sense in the Western world due to Westerners' individualistic nature. Can democracy work in a society where people think of themselves as part of a unit (such as family)? Maybe a new type of government must be thought up for such a different culture and society....

Anyway, so is it logical to push western feminist ideals onto women in the Islamic world? What is "feminism" when associated with peoples in Northern Africa, the Middle East, and Indonesia? Can "feminism" even exist, given the context of their culture, religion, government--their very way of life? Must we completely disrupt their lifestyle just because the western world deems it inferior?

So can a feminist exist in the Islamic world? If so, what does she (or he) fight for? If it is equal rights for women as for men, then what about the pre-existing culture? Should it just be smashed and destroyed? Can there be some type of medium? If so, what? What, I ask? Damnit, what???

These are the issues facing our world today.

This isn't where I wanted to end, but I feel like checking on my fishies now since I just did a massive water change and saved one of the snails from the filter (the crab actually went down there twice and I had to fish it out ... very annoying). So ... think about the world!

*I cackle at you evilly because I left things crazy open-ended*