America has a history of valiant (and not so valiant) protests and we even have an enumerated right to “peaceably assemble.” As a woman myself and someone very concerned about preserving and protecting fundamental rights, I have to ask, what exactly defines “women’s rights?” Historically, this meant that women should have the same legal, social, and governmental privileges as men. This is what women traditionally meant by equality — literally, having equal status. Right?
But in the past few decades, this idea of women’s rights has evolved to mean some sort of additional, special rights or privileges that position us above men, categorically.Though feminists won’t admit it, this isn’t actually equality. It’s playing governmental favoritism and demanding to in fact not be equal. Feminism has gone from demanding equality to demanding entitlements. While there is a gender pay gap -- and it sucks, it's menial. So while you're out there naked protesting about men cat-calling you, how you make less than a man -- at your full time job, thats year round. So while you drive home, from that protest that you attended after work -- take some time to think if you're fighting the right war in the right place.
I have yet to see an Odyssey article (or a protest for that matter) talk about how how Afghan girls were barred from school, how women were stoned for adultery or beaten for showing an ankle or wearing high-heeled shoes, how they were prohibited from leaving the house unless accompanied by a male relative, how they were denied medical help because the only doctors around were male.
In the United Arab Emirates, husbands have the right to beat their wives in order to discipline them—“provided that the beating is not so severe as to damage her bones or deform her body,” in the words of the Gulf News. It's literally okay to BEAT your wife in order to get a message across.
In Saudi Arabia, women cannot vote, drive, or show their faces or talk with male non-relatives in public. They can’t talk to men over the airwaves either -- when Prince Abdullah went to President Bush’s ranch in Crawford in April 2002 he insisted that no female air-traffic controllers handle his flight.
Women there are literally treated like they are nothing. They can't have a job, let alone protest the gender wage gap, they can't vote to protest against whatever a politican said this week that offended someone. Because they have no rights. They barely have human rights.
So keep fighting the good fight on #freethenipple and keep turning a blind eye on how feminism is AWOL in Islam.