Accidentally Feminist?

Someone asked me in the comment section a little while ago about the possibility of women holding feminist ideas and beliefs without knowing that they are feminist ideas and beliefs. The same way that men can hold red pill beliefs without knowing that they are red pill beliefs. Just because a man might hold ideas that are red pill, he just doesn't call them red pill. He may call them Quran and Sunnah, but they're actually completely consistent with red pill ideas. Here's my problem with that.

Red pill theory is very clearly articulated. They have a fixed set of beliefs that they explain unambiguously over and over and over again. Women are hypergamous, they marry up, men marry down, men have to become high value alpha males, a woman's value is based on her youth, beauty, and fertility, and she loses her value the moment she turns 25 or 30 depending on which red pillar you talk to. Men have an idealistic approach to love. Women are opportunistic.

Education and career hinder women from marriage, and so on and so on and so on. The red pill theory is not opaque. You can't miss it, and you can't mistake it for something else unless it's one of the Tomasiin who deliberately obscures the fact that he's red pill. Feminism on the other hand is incredibly vague. As an ideology, it manifests what Allah said about women in the Quran that they are I mean, is it feminism to want higher education?

Not really. Is it feminism to want a job? Not really. No. This is an issue that was settled by the Alama ages ago.

I mean, aside from some abstract idea of smashing the patriarchy, it's not really clear what feminists believe in. We could maybe look at specific policies that are designed to advantage women like say preferential hiring practices or the bias of the Western Family Court system and see whether or not a woman agrees with those things and then make a determination as to whether or not her agreement with those things is based on feminist ideas, but it's hard to say. If we're talking about any blatantly obvious examples of radical feminism among Muslims, like say believing that women should be able to be imams in a mixed jama'ah or that they reject the hijab or something like this, it's hard to believe that any Muslim woman who would hold those kinds of beliefs wouldn't know that she's feminist. Other than this, women might have a confused concept of gender equality in Islam, like thinking that they shouldn't have domestic duties if the husband doesn't, or thinking that they should have equal say in the decisions that affect the family or something like this. But it's hard to attribute that kind of thing specifically to feminism and not just women being women.

Another complication is if you're talking about third wave feminism and many of the things that happened in the wake of the Me Too movement, frankly, there's a lot that agrees with Islam, although inadvertently. They call for women's only spaces. They basically want men to be responsible for anything and everything that happens in a male female interaction. They essentially believe that women have a diminished capacity and limited agency relative to men, and they want everything to be made easier for women because it's too hard for them otherwise. Well, we don't disagree.

So you see it isn't that easy to identify what feminism is and what it isn't. What agrees or contradicts with Islam or doesn't. And what makes it distinctly feminist and not just the standard female sense of entitlement that has always been around. And then it becomes even harder when we have Muslim men using the word feminism as if it is synonymous with kufr as an accusation against any attitude or behavior from women that they dislike even if it has validity in the sharia. And to be honest, this is what I see more than anything else.

I see women who may well have nothing to do with feminism being accused of having feminist ideas really simply because they don't have Tomasiyin ideas. There are more men who have feminism on the brain than women, at least in the Muslim world. World. Now there may well be plenty of difficult, spoilt, obnoxious women, but that doesn't necessarily correlate to feminism. And frankly, I feel like the Tomasin are inventing feminist Muslimas where they don't exist solely as a device for promoting their ideology which justifies itself at least partially as a counterweight to feminism.

So they have an interest in exaggerating the existence of feminists among the Muslims. But again, as I have reiterated many times before, what women believe is never as consequential as what men believe. I mean, think about it. If every woman in the world today believed that the earth is flat, it would have no impact on how the world operates unless men believed it.