feminist colonialism

Currently there is frantic drive to support women in developing countries. Just like environmentalism and green movement, it is everywhere.

This strong feminist push in my view comes from some reasons.

First, there is western feminists’ fantasizing of building a feminist utopia in a developing world, a world which has not yet experienced an modernization or even industrial evolution and thus has not been tainted by patriarchal gender system that accompanies the modernization and industrial revolution, according to feminist theory. Western feminists who find it quite difficult to break into and eventually dominate the already developed social and economic institutions in the developed world would find it much easier to do so in developing States, where such institutions are weak or non-existent. For example, if your goal is to increase the number of female politicians by whatever means necessary (after all, it’s supposed to be good), it’s much easier to march into a post-conflict country, and amidst all the chaos and confusions, furtively impose a gender quota on national parliament, than to support women candidates in elections and campaign district by district in western developed states. This is why countries like Rwanda have THE highest ratio of women in parliament - higher that US or even Sweden (Rwanda is surely a feminist heaven – I suggest feminists whiners to move to Rwanda if they feel their daily lives are so miserable just because they don’t see many women politicians in US).

There is also a hint of racism or colonial mentality in western feminists’ promotion of feminism in the third world. Just like feminists’ great-great grandfather (or great-great grandmother’s husbands, if we were to take women-centric worldview) did in the 18 th and the 19 th centuries, today’s western feminists tend to think westerners (this time women!) would be in a better position to think what’s best for the people (especially the kinder, gentler half of it) in the Third World and benevolently (or so they think) provide assistance to realize their plan. According to feminists, those poor women in developing countries were so uninformed to realize that women’s real place is in workplace, and family is not a bedrock of society but a place of oppression for women.

Of course, all these efforts to build feminist utopia in the third world is going to do no good.

For one thing, micro-financing to women is not going to lift the country out of poverty, contrary to what well-meaning western intellectuals want you to believe. Bunch of women selling gums, soaps and other household items with the money borrowed from microfinance scheme organized by western feminists is NOT going to pave a way for country’s rapid economic development. While feminists’ strong wishes that women become, for the first time in human’s history, a driving force for strong economic development is understandable (after all, they are feminists!), wishes alone do not make people richer.

No country in the history of the world has had strong economic development by relying on women’s power. It has always been, and by always I mean without a single exception, men’s ingenuity and hard work that drove economic development. This is probably why Bangladesh, now a world center of microfinance, is still stuck near the bottom of economic development and GDP per capita in the world, whereas China, a country not especially known for being nice to women, is poised to become the second largest economy in the world next year, in a matter of just a few decades after adopting a de-facto capitalist economy.