Tom Myles @TomMyles14 - Twitter Profile

When I was in “Women’s and Gender Studies” in college, we spent a lot of time talking about “systems,” “the patriarchy” and all these hidden structures supposedly shaping women’s lives in the West I entertained a lot of those ideas back then and I was trying my best to understand the frameworks they were teaching But the one place I never gave them an inch on was women in the Middle East Every time someone would say “that’s just their culture” something in me short-circuited. No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t reconcile it We were told American women were oppressed because of wage gaps or subtle social expectations, but when the conversation turned to women who could be punished by the state for showing their hair, suddenly we were supposed to become culturally sensitive (some of these lunatics even romanticized it!) My professors used to get irritated with me when that topic came up bc they knew I wasn’t going to play along and my pushback would cause a rift in their narrative They didn't like it when I pointed out the hypocrisy of calling Western women oppressed while treating literal legal restrictions on women’s bodies as a cultural difference One of my professors even had a running joke she'd use to preface discussions on Islam—she'd do this smug smirk and say something to the effect of “we all know Stepfanie's take on Islam” as if I was the ridiculous one Looking back, I wish I had the language and wit to verbally obliterate her but I was 22 and simply did not have the intellectual capacity yet. I didn't know the first thing about geopolitics, I just knew in my bones how fucking stupid it sounded to be bitching about making 20 cents less than men when women in the Middle East were being stoned to death for showing their hair Even back then, before my politics changed, that contradiction never sat right with me. And it's one of the many reasons I despise so-called feminists so much today

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