What is feminism?
Marilyn Leggett has written a book on the history of feminism, entitled “Women in Their Days“, translated by Niloufar Mehdian and published by Ney Publishing. Legit examines the history of feminism on three levels.
The first level is individual rebellion against the institutional definition of femininity in society. Perhaps the monasticism of “Rabia Adavieh“, the discovery of the veil of “Tahereh Qara Al-Ain” and the erotic poems of “Forough Farrokhzad” can be considered as examples of this level of feminism in our society.
The second level of feminism depends on a broader change in the culture of society:
Spreading the view that social traditions are not divine matters, but human contracts. Accordingly, Wilhelm Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morality and Michel Foucault’s History of Gender can be considered feminist movements. At the national level, books such as “Ahmad Kasravi” and “Sadegh Hedayat” can also be placed in this category of the feminist movement. However, we may not see much emphasis on women’s issues in them.
The third level of feminism is the creation of a “class consciousness” in women, which leads to the creation of social movements for the realization of women’s rights. An example of such a movement was the women’s suffrage movement in the late nineteenth century, which led to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which recognized women’s suffrage in the 1920s. So before answering the question in the title of the article, I need to clarify which level of feminism I mean by feminism. I mean the second level of feminism, in the sense that one of the institutionalized intellectual traditions that is incidentally important in changing the social conditions of women is being challenged.
The intellectual tradition is: “Sex is a service that a woman gives to a man and she should be rewarded for it.” The roots of this intellectual tradition go back to the age of hunting!
Meat against sex!
In the age of hunting, providing food was a difficult task that required a lot of muscle strength. On the one hand, women’s muscle weakness hindered their success in gathering food, and on the other hand, pregnancy, childbirth, and frequent breastfeeding, which occupied them from adolescence to old age, limited their ability to search for food. The result was that women could not afford to feed themselves and their children and had to rely on men for this purpose. These conditions required women to make the supply of men’s sexual needs conditional on food.
Thus, in the age of hunting, “prostitution” was the normal and common behaviour of women. These conditions continued with changes in the agricultural age, but the industrial age created new conditions: productive activity did not require muscular strength, so women had the same opportunity as men to provide food. At the same time, the development of an effective method of contraception (contraception) has made it possible for women not to spend all the useful periods of their lives during pregnancy, childbirth and childbearing. Thus, women could see their sexual activity not as a commodity for sale but as an opportunity for pleasure. Women were therefore expected to abandon the trade of “sex for food”, “obedience for alimony” and “pleasure for security”, but this did not happen. What prevents this intellectual tradition from being broken?
Product as “fetish”
“Fetish” means a sacred object. In psychiatry, the term “fetishism” is used to refer to people who are sexually aroused only in the presence of a certain object (such as a woman in red high heels). Karl Marx, the founder of Marxism, has raised the issue of “goods as fetishes.” In his view, in capitalist society (capitalism), the object is not bought for objective needs, but the purchase of objects takes on the aspect of “enchantment”! Humans look at the objects behind the windows as if they are sacred objects necessary for baptism and salvation! In the words of the humanist psychoanalyst Eric Fromm, “having takes the place of being.” This “enchantment” is the product of the vicious cycle of the capitalist system: we produce to consume and we consume to produce! In the capitalist system after the Industrial Revolution, machines carried the burden of “slaves” but slaves were given a new task:
Buy more than you need!
The rise of the mass media in the industrial age gave capitalists the opportunity to cast their spells, and in this game, women were to be given a greater share because of their dominance of “collective consciousness” over “individual consciousness” (to In other words, more indoctrination (audience) is considered more important. The propaganda of the capitalist system, which aggrandizens all the protrusions and depressions of the female body to propagate a hand bag, promotes the culture of “sexual representation” or, in psychiatric terms, exhibitionism, although the high prevalence of this type of “sexual ostentation” – which was necessary in the age of hunting. And in the post-industrial age, unnecessary – makes psychological and psychiatric resources pay less attention to this “cultural representation” in case reports.
Extreme cosmetic surgery, cheek and lip injections, excessive use of cosmetics and stimulants, and the body keep sexism alive, and prevent women – as well as men – from having chromosomes and organs. Let’s look at their genitals. It is only in the decline of the capitalist system that sexism gives way to feminism.
Which socialism?
At the beginning of the article, I clarified what I mean by feminism. Now I have to say what I mean by socialism. Obviously, socialism is the name of a socio-economic system, and its connection to Soviet Stalinism and the former East Germany and North Korean totalitarianism was purely historical. According to Ernesto Che Guevara, the claim that the Russians are Marxists is as ridiculous as the claim that the Pope is a Christian!
A socialist system is one in which the distance between the ceiling and the income floor is reduced by the enactment of economic laws on labor law (labor rights), tax laws, and the intelligent distribution of national resources. However, Karl Marx believes that real socialism is the product of a system of production, not a system of distribution.
He sees socialism as the ultimate destiny of the capitalist system: conditions in which increased production leads to the availability of goods to all, even without being forced to work! In his view, those who see socialism as the product of a change in the distribution system are “imaginary socialists.” But if Marx survived and saw that one day the Americans dumped wheat into the sea so that the price of wheat would not fall, he might be convinced that the only way to achieve socialism was to change the distribution system.
Dr. Mohammad Reza Sargolzaei – Psychiatrist
Translated By: Negar Kolkar
Photo From: medium.com/
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