This is a guest post by James Maverick.
There is a war going on in the developing world. It’s not your typical war with tanks, guns, and ammo. It’s a war for the people’s hearts and minds. While there are lots of things attempting to do just that, feminism, as usual, is trying to colonize the local cultures.
Take Brazil, for instance. The country recently had a presidential election. It was won by Jair Bolsonaro, a right-wing candidate, a sort of Brazilian Trump if you will.
As expected, he was heavily opposed by lots of different factions, ranging from environmentalists to liberals to—you guessed it—feminists.
Leading up to the election, there was a popular video that was circulating on the Brazilian interwebs. The video has over 1.5 million views and in it, a female journalist is screaming “O que é isso” (What is this?) repeatedly, while the future president is seen in the background trying his best to ignore her and continue his press conference.
This video was the rallying cry by the liberals in order to discredit Mr. Bolsonaro, but it seemed to have achieved the complete opposite: it galvanized the conservatives and even the young people (who are traditionally liberal), making his presidential victory all but assured.
In many ways, Brazil is an interesting country to experience a sort of a feminist backlash. It’s not a Western country like the U.S., Australia, or Denmark, so feminism isn’t exactly something that’s automatically accepted. Instead, it’s a Latin country with traditional values where liberal ideas such as feminism have always been met with deep suspicion.
One reason that feminism has become at the forefront of the battle of old traditional values and new liberal values is due to the expansive reach of Western media.
Influential Western publicans such as the New York Times never seem to miss the opportunity to pour gasoline on the fire by talking about women’s oppression and how they’re second-class citizens in their own country.
In Brazil, it doesn’t take much effort to affect Brazilian women emotionally and make them feel like they’re oppressed by the “evil” men.
After all, Brazil is one of the most sexualized countries on the planet. The women are extremely friendly and open, although I wouldn’t say particularly easy. Still, merely the fact that they’re perceived all over the world as easy is enough to create a backlash.
Ideologies like feminism nicely connect with these feelings of being unworthy and provide a rallying cry for this backlash. The formula is simple: some, but not all, women are unhappy because they’re treated as sexualized objects, so feminism must be the answer.
To be fair, not all women feel this way. Just like anywhere else, including the U.S., the birthplace of feminism, there are women who don’t need feminism to feel complete.
When I lived in Rio de Janeiro, I met plenty of women who indeed enjoyed feeling like women. Yes, even with guys constantly approaching them and asking them out and all that other sexual stuff.
Most of them didn’t think much of it; they were women after all. And part of being a woman is receiving attention from men. If the attention is unsolicited, a woman can simply ignore it. If it’s welcomed, a woman can reciprocate.
From Ukraine with Love
Another country that’s in the middle of similar cultural turmoil is Ukraine, my homeland and where I’m living now.
Ukraine has always been a country without a cohesive identity. In order to understand why, it really helps to view it as two countries: one with more traditional, Eastern European values and closely aligned with Russia, with the other against all that.
Ukraine is also linguistically divided; the Western part speaks mostly Ukrainian while the Eastern part speaks predominantly Russian.
Thus it’s no surprise that this lack of cohesive identity gives makes the country ripe for various types of propaganda and brainwashing, with feminism being at the forefront.
We’ve all seen this movie before. The Western institutions such as liberal media and various observers swoop in. They can’t help but notice “inequality.” The can’t help but see the women “oppressed” by men. They can’t help but see great injustice being perpetrated everywhere they look.
They have to see injustice. It’s their job. And so everywhere they look, injustice is exactly what they see.
So how do you find this injustice? How do you make the world “fair” again for the weaker sex?
The answer, as you’re probably already suspecting, is feminism. Never mind that women’s rights are enshrined in the Ukrainian constitution just like any other European country, and there’s not a single woman in this country that can’t do something that a man can do. On a legal level, true equality has been achieved.
But even with all these first-world advancements, some women still believe or feel that their rights are being infringed upon.
Of course, as is the case in Brazil, not all women feel this way. I have met countless women in Ukraine who shake their heads at feminism, believing that it’s aimed at “weaker” women who haven’t found success in life and need an ideology to make them feel whole.
There’s definitely some truth to that. A woman who’s strong, capable, successful and knows how to attract a great man doesn’t need to search for an ideology that reinforces her anger at the world.
But even a woman who’s not particularly strong or successful, but one that doesn’t take everything personally and one that believes the solutions to her problems lie within her, will not seek salvation in some external ideology.
It seems that Ukraine isn’t an easy target for Western ideologies as feminists had initially thought. They underestimated the country that fought countless wars, lived under various oppressive regimes, and waged several revolutions in its long and painful history.
What’s in Store for the Future?
Brazil and Ukraine aren’t the only countries at the forefront of this ideological battleground, but they’re definitely the most notable ones.
The theory goes that if Brazil falls, the rest of Latin America will soon follow; if Ukraine falls, Russia isn’t too far behind (although many have greatly underestimated Russia’s strong patriotic and nationalistic mood, which form a strong barrier to Western influence).
Although many traditionalists are pessimistic about what’s happening in their own countries and abroad, I remain optimistic. I don’t expect countries like Brazil, Ukraine, Colombia, or Romania to become the next Australia or the U.K.
For that to happen, there needs to be a rapid rise in the standard of living. After all, regardless of how you look at it, feminism is a luxury. All these ideologies can’t take root in societies that barely generate enough wealth to feed and shelter its people. That’s why you’ll never see feminism take root in most African countries, except for maybe the richest one: South Africa.
That is also why, for the most part, feminism and similar ideologies will be more receptive where they originally originated: the rich Western world, particularly the Anglo-Saxon world. And even there, it risks biting off more than it can chew, as witnessed by the current #MeToo movement.
James blogs at Maverick Traveler.
Read Next: The Backlash Against Feminism Has Arrived