I critique not because I seek destruction, I critique because I yearn for improvement.
My job as a writer isn’t to be trying to draft legislature, my job as a writer is to write and to allow those who do activist work to do activist work.
So, no, this isn’t activism, this is a perspective, and an opinion, and more than anything this is a voice that seeks to be recognized.
That, and so many other reasons, pushes me to defend the views that I write about because I don’t want them to be twisted and taken out of context.
Which is why I wanted to write yet another article to defend my first one.
Perhaps PC culture deserves to be lambasted for its biased approach.
How many times have we read the same story on the mainstream media, and how many times have you heard me, and many others like me ask for a more thorough report from the media. PC culture panders, and anything that panders tends to take the wrong side enough times to cause harm; it started as a movement to defend those who had no voice, but as it grew it developed some thorns.
On the one hand, it was partly the push of PC culture that coaxed the fashion brand Michael Cinco to rename one of their designs from Persian to Kurdish.
On the other hand a few years ago H&M debuted a brand new design that was inspired by the clothes worn by Kurdish YPJ fighters, and no Kurd complained, yet the politically correct left was in outrage, claiming that the design was stealing from a culture they had no right to steal from. We Kurds did not care that they took inspiration from the YPJ.
So, you see, it has its bad sides.
It has aspects that are trivial, time wasting, and quite frankly self-aggrandizing.
But sometimes these trivial aspects can be poisonous; it can empower opinions which can harm, and place punishment on people who don’t deserve punishment. It changes the meaning of language, and it censors arguments that shouldn’t be censored.
Maajid Nawaz is one example of the bias of PC culture: you’d assume that someone who pushes for reformation and moderation of Islam to be popular with the left, seeing how many leftist values stand firmly against many Islamic values. Yet, due to his somewhat aggressive approach to critiquing modern Islam and Islamic extremism, Nawaz has been more or less shunned by the mainstream left. While an actor like Ben Affleck, who has never read the Quran and never practiced Islam or even lived in an Islamic society, gets applauded by the mainstream left for defending an ideology that he knows nothing about.
These bad sides of the politically correct have manifested themselves in all parts of society, including what we’ve been talking about for four articles: feminism.
In my first article, I wrote about how due to PC culture so many Muslim issues are ignored out of respect for Muslim culture, and referenced Joanna Palani’s memoir in the article, placing my critique on European feminism and its lack of activity in European Muslim societies, but throughout your responding articles I was faced with your words arguing with me for saying I want the feminist west to fix Islamic countries, which is not something I want, but a push and some help from them wouldn’t go amiss.
Let’s be honest here, you and I both know all too well the effect of the west on the rest of the world, (we’re writing our articles in English for god’s sake) so if they’re what the world looks to, then how is it not a just argument to ask them to care about all feminist issues.
You’re right when you say that feminism is a set of ideologies, not one large united movement, but I only directed my criticism towards European feminism, not all, but your rebuttal made it sound like I’m critiquing feminism as a whole.
I will say what I implied in my first article: European feminism is out of touch.
Yes, the Free the Nipple movement is a valid one, and a good one, but as I said in my first article, some causes are worth the time and resources more than Free the Nipple.
European feminists have the most liberty and resources, so is it odd to ask them to part some of those resources with people who are fighting the same fight in other parts of the world?
Once more, as I said in my first article, instead of checking privilege, let’s focus on what issues privilege has caused. Let’s change the course of dialogue so that it focuses on parts of the world that need feminism more than most, parts of the world where without feminism young girls suffer physically and mortally, parts of the world where women are honor killed and raped in silence.
What is being done now is not enough, there’s been progress, but if feminists from northern Europe, who have significant access to the media, to their politicians, and journalism, acted, the progress would come faster and fewer women would suffer.
That is my argument, and that is the perspective I share in my articles. To me, it seems like a fair one, and one that is well placed, but if you choose to not see it how I see it, then there’s nothing more I can do.
Jîl Şwanî 