HILAL - Perception of Feminism

Recently, while I was talking to one of my close friends here on general topics, my friend said a sentence that surprised me. She said that she hates feminist people ! First, I thought she was not serious. But she was. I know there are many people who perceive “being a feminist” as a bad thing. But the thing that made me surprise was that she has same ideas that what feminism advocate. I couldn’t understand how she could hate feminism while advocate same ideas. And then when we talked about this, I realized that she hates “stereotypes” that are completely not true.

Based on this experience, I thought it would be really nice to address the misconceptions about feminists and feminism.

So we can start by listing common stereotypes about feminist people.

Feminists believe women are better than men.

Feminism is essentially about male bashing.

Feminist hates man.

I’m sure that all of you have heard these sentences before. I heard multiple times from different people. But in fact, feminism was founded on the basis of giving equal rights to both sexes rather than male hostility. When we look at the starting point of the feminist movements, we see that women are striving to benefit from rights and freedoms such as having the right to vote, participating in economic life, and having the right to divorce.

Feminists are a stuck up, crazy.

‘Hysterical’ is a word often used to describe feminists. However, they are not a violent group of people who instantly take to social media and create problems out of nowhere.

Feminists are against marriage.

They are trying to disrupt the family structure.

Feminists don’t want to have children.

Unfortunately, this is a big misconception about feminism. Not all people are the same, and not all feminists are the same. Feminism does not force people not to marry, and not all feminists oppose marriage.

Feminism is opposed to the sacrificing of motherhood and ignoring femininity, but this does not mean that feminists do not want to have children.

In addition to the above, when a person says I am a feminist, they may be exposed to various humiliating questions. For example;

 “Aren you lesbians?”

“Are you a feminist because you were cheated on?”

“I haven’t seen a beautiful feminist”

“You’re a man-hater, aren’t you going to get married now?”

 As you see there are still a lot of ideas that feminists are scary, social activists who are there to destroy society, beliefs, everyone, especially men.

I believe that if we try to spread true information about feminism, these ideas can be less. And we can start this by raising the awareness of people around us.

 

I’m sure that you heard a lot of bad things about feminism and feminist. What do you mostly hear ? Which sentence annoys you the most?

 

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