Why does a movement so fiercely dedicated to policing everyday language and demanding corporate quotas in the West go completely silent when facing actual, legal tyranny abroad?
For decades, Western feminism positioned itself as the vanguard of universal liberation. Its leaders demand institutional overhauls, enforce gender ratios in boardrooms, and push to ostracize anyone who questions their playbook.
Yet the moment they have to criticize state-enforced, brutal oppression in fundamentalist regimes, that fiery passion for female autonomy evaporates into quiet cultural excuses and political calculus. During the last month, we have seen a lot of feminists defending Linsey Clancey, there has also been a lot of support for Jane Doe from Cornell University but you hear very little protests about the Iranian woman handed death sentence for ‘blasphemy’ in Iran just a few days ago over a social media post.
The Double Standard at Home
Walk through a university campus or scroll through LinkedIn, and the domestic double standard is glaring. Celebrating female achievements is treated as a moral duty, but acknowledging male contributions is routinely met with suspicion.
Under this worldview, Western democracies, among the most equal societies to ever exist, are painted as oppressive patriarchies that must be dismantled.
The rules of this discourse are simple:
- Any field where men outnumber women is treated as a proof of systemic bias. The straightforward idea that men and women might on average make different choices or have different skill sets is dismissed as bigotry. This is why universities are investing millions to reduce the gap between men and women in STEM and in leadership roles implementing the Athena Swan initiative.
- Criticism only flows one way. Terms like “toxic masculinity”, “manosphere”, “patriarchy” are common currency, while comparable criticism of women is immediately flagged as misogyny.
- Hostility is normalized. Just last week, in a recent video filmed at Trinity College Dublin shared on X.com, several students candidly admitted to support misandry—hatred of men. It was a small snapshot of a broader shift: open hostility toward men is no longer just tolerated in academic circles; it’s trendy. Just read the article by Brendan Courtney in the Irish Independent where he says that every day, a straight middle aged man does or says something stupid and that he only votes for women. Reverse the gender or the sexual orientation and just wait for the backlash.
When Feminism Becomes a Secular Religion
In a recent interview, Canadian scholar Professor Janice Fiamengo—author of The Goddess That Failed—traced how modern feminism transformed from an equality movement into a rigid, unquestionable doctrine. Borrowing from The God That Failed (the famous 1949 collection of essays by disillusioned ex-communists), Fiamengo argues that Western feminism has largely replaced traditional politics to become a secular religion.
Notice that the professor retired in 2019, otherwise her academic career would be at risk.
It rests on three dogma-driven pillars:
- The Oppression Narrative: Framing all history not as a shared struggle for survival, but as a permanent war between male oppressors and female victims.
- Sanitized History: Rewriting early activist history into a spotless mythology while ignoring its radical edges.
- The Empathy Gap: Completely ignoring crises that disproportionately devastate men—such as high suicide rates (roughly 80% male), workplace deaths (over 95% male), and falling academic marks for boys—because acknowledging male vulnerability ruins the narrative.
The biggest failure of this worldview isn’t what it says at home; it’s what it actively ignores on the street and abroad.
Real Problems Ignored
When Western activists discuss mandatory religious garments in cities like London or Dublin, they endlessly insist that wearing a burqa or full hijab is purely a matter of “empowerment” and “personal choice”. They even say it is a good thing because it makes a more diverse society.
This stance exposes a profound lack of empathy and moral clarity:
- Ignoring Religious Coercion from Childhood: When five-year-old girls in Western cities are dressed in full head coverings, pretending this represents an uncoerced “personal choice” is absurd. It is obviously driven by religious and cultural enforcement passed down by elders, not autonomous individual preference.
- The Obvious Gender Asymmetry: If full coverage is simply an innocent expression of modesty or religious piety, why are men and young boys never expected or required to wear it? The burden of concealment falls exclusively on females.
- Little empathy towards Iranian and Afghan Dissidents women: Declaring full veiling an icon of “choice” or “diversity” in Western capitals shows utter contempt for women in Iran and Afghanistan who are beaten, imprisoned, or executed for daring to throw those exact garments off.
Activists who spend endless energy auditing microaggressions in comfortable Western offices show remarkably little interest in standing up to actual, state-sanctioned subjugation.
In Taliban-controlled Afghanistan or Iran, women face public executions or floggings for “blasphemy” or defying religious police, while girls are flatly banned from secondary schools and universities.
Why the Silence?
The refusal to stand with oppressed women isn’t accidental, and maybe it comes down mainly to partisan politics and ideological cowardice:
- Protecting Electoral Coalitions: Modern progressive groups rely heavily on alliances with minority and religious blocs. Calling out fundamentalist Islamic laws threatens those political coalitions. In raw electoral logic, keeping left-wing voter blocs intact matters more than defending women in Kabul or Tehran.
- Refusing to Agree with Conservatives: In Western politics, criticism of fundamentalist Islamic regimes is often led by conservative commentators. For many progressives, avoiding any overlap with right-wing talking points is priority number one. They would rather stay silent on severe foreign tyranny than risk agreeing with their domestic political opponents.
- The Fear of “Islamophobia” Charges: Under modern intersectional rules, non-Western cultures sit high on the victim hierarchy. Western activists panic that condemning patriarchal laws in these societies will get them canceled for “cultural imperialism”, “Islamophobia” or “Racism”.
A movement cannot demand total authority over language and hiring metrics in Western democracies while turning a blind eye to young girls being conditioned into subjugation at home and foreign women being executed for blasphemy abroad.
If feminism is truly about universal human dignity, it cannot aggressively police speech in the West while hiding behind political convenience when confronted with real tyranny.
The moment a movement chooses political tribes and domestic posturing over defending genuinely oppressed women, it loses any claim to moral authority.