It’s time for men to stop speaking for women and their bodies

Stop burning your bras, ladies. Delete your angry tampon-tax tweets and cash in your unequal pay checks, because feminism is dead.

That’s right, as of March 2016, feminism has been declared as over. Caput. That is, if you take Piers Morgan’s word as kosher.

Last week, eternal fountain of wisdom and messiah of women’s rights Piers Morgan finally made his views on modern women clear. He tweeted ‘RIP feminism’ alongside Kim Kardashian’s latest internet-breaking photo of her with model Emily Ratajkowski, topless, both giving the camera the middle finger.
 

RIP feminism. pic.twitter.com/dqxKla2i5Q

— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) March 30, 2016

Thoughtless hypocrisy: don’t you think we tried?

Piers Morgan’s thoughtless tweet is not only a desperately ironic and hypocritical thing to do (considering Piers has made a lot of money working for papers which have published topless women on their pages since news began) but it hugely misses the mark for being in any way true or well informed.

He is attempting to make a complete mockery of any woman who dares express her opinion on women’s rights. He is saying the great feminists of history strived not for this, but for peaceful, unassuming protests and soft-hearted speeches only to be given by the likes of Emma Watson.

As you all know, feminism is all about making sure men understand and feel comfortable with what women are doing to achieve equality. None of this abrupt, feminazi stuff that makes them feel weak and criticized. We should be constructive with our complaints about unfair work ethics, casual sexism and internet trolls, and not attack the poor men who have to put up with our slandering of their gender.

Sarcasm aside, this approach has been tried, tested and has proved to be absolutely futile, over and over again. Women are louder, more graphic and more forceful now because as it turns out, when you take the gentle approach, nobody listens.
 

Check your privilege Piers

It is not up to Piers to decide what feminism is or should be. He is a white, straight, British male and thus was born with privilege he will never truly understand. He has no right to say what women can do with their bodies, because he will never know the extent to which they constantly fight for the right to do so. He will never know what we are up against even if we merely voice our opinions or walk down the street in whatever we choose to wear.

You only have to look at the women in some developing countries, who are locked away, shamed, in dirty huts when they menstruate, or have to go through painful genital mutilation when they hit puberty, to know that women are second-class citizens in the world. But even in so-called developed countries, we are still looked down on.

The backwards First World

America might soon have its first female president, but sexism rears its ugly head constantly. On Twitter, the amount of hatred directed towards Hillary Clinton, all policies aside, just because she is a woman is outstanding.  

Be it on social media or with other presidential candidates, the Republican Party, as a whole, is deeply sexist. Many of the candidates in the latest presidential race are ‘pro-life’ and believe abortion should be made illegal in the US.

Donald Trump made a truly disgusting comment this week about abortion, and one of the most worrying things about it is that he has absolutely no idea how damaging his words are.

He said that if abortion was criminalised in the US then women should be punished for it, and that could include prison sentences.

This is, unfortunately, a potential leader of the United States of America, and he just said in 2016 that he couldn’t rule out imprisoning women who choose to terminate their pregnancies.
 

That is unbelievably damaging rhetoric. In El Salvador, women are being locked up in prison for years, even decades, for having miscarriages. There, women are treated so disrespectfully, that when they experience the tragedy of a miscarriage, they can be thrown in prison because nobody believes them.

They have so few rights, including those to their own bodies that not carrying a child to term is deemed their fault, and the foetus is instantly given more value than they ever had.

Spreading the hate-speech

As a potential leader of the ‘free world’, Trump’s words will spread further than he can probably even comprehend. It will justify the belief that abortion should be a crime, and women in the world who terminate, or perhaps even miscarry, should be punished.

It is a backwards, dangerous stance to have in any case, and it comes yet again from the mouth of another white man from his throne of privilege.  

More women are now finding their voices and not being coy about expressing themselves. I hope that soon the days of cowering in the silence and dark will be over. But this can’t happen until men from supposedly civilised and forward thinking countries really understand their role in defining feminism.

Spoiler alert: they don’t have one.