Feminist Cultural Relativists

How criticizing actual patriarchal societies has become conservative-coded

If you’re a feminist you cannot be both philosophically consistent and a cultural relativist. The stable core of feminist ideology is anti patriarchal. What exactly being “anti patriarchal” means and whether you think America is still a patriarchal society will depend on what you believe about, sex, gender and history. Infighting within feminist movement goes back to its birth. But regardless, being feminist explicitly means that you think some cultures, the less patriarchal ones, the ones that treat women better, are better than others.

I’m still fuming over the failure of mainstream feminist voices to express the appropriate feelings of rage and disgust in response to the use of sexual violence by Hamas on 10/7. Instead, they mostly ignored it, brushed it aside as an unfortunate downstream effect of settler colonialism or even worse, flat out denied it. Quoting from the NYT piece on how Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7: “Israeli activists have been outraged that the United Nations Secretary General, António Guterres, and the agency U.N. Women did not acknowledge the many accusations until weeks after the attacks.” Israeli activists were outraged!?! Not feminist activists. Israeli activists. Apparently only Zionists care about the brutal rapes of Jewish women.

The response to the sexual violence of 10/7 is just one particularly grotesque example. I’m certainly not the first to point out the absurdity of the “queers for Palestine” set, but as Dr. Sa’ed Atshan helpfully explains “many people in the queer Palestinian movement are connecting the struggles for queer liberation and the Palestinian liberation struggle as inextricably linked and fundamentally connected”. Ah, that makes sense then. Liberating a society that’s fundamentally patriarchal, heterosexist and religiously intolerant is inextricably linked and fundamentally connected to queer rights, it must be feminist too! 

To be clear, I don’t think being a feminist or queer means that you can’t criticize Israel or support Palestinian liberation. But I do think claiming that these causes are “inextricably linked” without actively and loudly criticizing the sexism and homophobia within Palestinian society as a part of that activism is confused. A misapplication of the concept of intersectionality seems to have resulted in the most pressing feminist issues, the ones that affect women living in truly patriarchal cultures, falling to the bottom of the priority list. As Yascha Mounk explains the view in The Identity Trap: “...because different forms of oppression reinforce each other, any effective form of activism against a particular injustice also needs to fight all other forms of identity based oppression”. So we can’t get to the feminism stuff until we deal with all the settler colonial stuff.

Moving on to something less charged: the idea that wearing a hijab can be “empowering”. This is part of a broader confusion where the feminist aim to protect women’s liberties is confused with a belief that feminists must applaud every choice a woman makes. As Zara Cachepas explains “The implicit assumption of hijab is this: your female body is primarily a sexual object that elicits an uncontrollable urge in men, and so must be covered up so a man isn’t distracted by it.” Depending on your situation, wearing a hijab or otherwise conforming to modest dress codes may be the smart thing to do. But as Vaish talks about in his post on the topic, that doesn’t mean the cultural norms which lead to that being the case are deserving of “respect”. I’m not doubting that some women freely choose to wear a hijab or to dress modestly just like some women freely choose to self-objectify (a topic for another day) or engage in sex work… but not every choice a woman makes is empowering!

The importance of protecting women’s right to choose in all aspects of her life is a key part of any feminist movement I support. This is why I’m strongly opposed to policies that seek to prevent women from wearing a hijab or any other type of religiously identifying clothing (the French seem to be particularly fond of this sort of thing). But protecting women’s right to choose doesn’t mean you have to praise the choices they make let alone claim them as feminist.

This all reminds me of an old interview that Sam Harris did with Yasmine Mohammed. In the interview she described how, as a child growing up in Canada, she was unable to get protection despite going to the police about her step father’s abuse. She says that the judge decided that the fact that she was Arab gave her step father the right to physically discipline her in ways that would never be considered acceptable from a white Canadian caregiver. Of course, cultural norms do matter to how we judge individuals. If you’re from somewhere where it’s normal to hit your kids and you hit your kids it doesn’t say the same thing about you psychologically as it does of a white Canadian who hits their kids. But… the kids are still getting hurt obviously, and in this case, where it was severe enough for the child to seek help from other adults, not providing that to her is inexcusable.

While this post focused exclusively on feminist failures to criticize Islamic cultural norms, the issue extends to a reluctance to criticize non-western cultural practices in general. That said, it does seem like feminists particularly struggle to take the correct stand on issues when Islam is involved. Criticizing social media “trad wives” for instance, and Christian conservatism in general seems to come pretty easy. A fear of being seen as intolerant of another culture too often leads to uncritical support for the views held by those with the most power within those cultures at the expense of supporting their most vulnerable (as in the Yasmine Mohammed story).

The “conservative coding” associated with criticizing non-western cultural practices is a symptom of a broader sensitivity to being seen as racist. And the way that “improving women’s rights” was talked about as a benefit of the US being in Afghanistan probably didn’t help either. There is certainly a place for humility and curiosity when learning about other cultures, and you should always be open to appreciating what they may have to offer that your culture may lack. But some things really are much better in the west, and the status and treatment of women is an obvious one. A failure to consistently and stridently fight for the rights of women who are suffering within truly patriarchal societies not only fails those women but also destroys the credibility of feminists, making it even more difficult to engage in the nuanced conversations about sex and gender that are relevant in the west.