Demons of Wattpad

Why am I feminist?

[Article originally published in Italian, by Sonja Korvin]

[This article on the situation of women in Russia was posted in June 2018 on the Italian Facebook page of this blog. We chose to publish its translation on the blog now, on the occasion of International Women's Day, especially given that the criminal invasion of Ukraine unleashed by the Russian dictatorial government is still claiming victims. War is in fact one of the greatest expressions of the toxicity of patriarchal society, and of the machismo that sees violence as the only way to resolve tensions and conflicts. In the photo, women protesting before the elections of 18 March 2018 in Russia. Text on billboard: "A woman will not go to the elections of parties none of which care about her rights."]

I heard about the feminist movement not too long ago. In fact, there was not much information about feminism in Russian, and I read and heard about this movement for the first time from some foreign media. Even now, in Russia you can only learn something about the subject if you know a foreign language or otherwise have some education in a related field. Also, if you ask "are you a feminist?" to a liberal-minded person, or a homosexual, or an academic, for example, the answer may be no, because they may simply believe that women's rights issues are not Russia's most pressing problem, or a problem at all. In addition, due to historical reasons, it is not so obvious what we feminists fight for.

Despite this, statistics say that women in Russia receive about 30% less wages than men who do the same job. This often forces women to depend on men economically. In January 2017, the government abolished all sorts of punishments and sentences for many forms of domestic violence from the penal code. As can be expected, most of the victims of such violence are women (97.1% in 2013), and men are the ones who in most cases perpetrate it (99.7% in 2013). Furthermore, women are often afraid to go to the police or to talk about the beatings they have received from people close to them, because they can easily be blamed or convicted. This forces a woman to stay with a man out of fear.

Still with regard to the way the Russian government treats women, due to the World Cup there have been many comments from parliamentarians who thought they should tell women who to have relationships with or not. For example, Communist Party lawmaker Tamara Pletnyova said: "If it's another race, then it's even worse. We should give birth to our own children. I'm not a nationalist, but nonetheless. I know that the children suffer as well, and then they are abandoned and stay here with the mother."

https://www.rferl.org/a/russian-lawmaker-pletnyova-warns-sex-foreigners-world-cup-soccer/29288609.html

In addition, it should be mentioned a concept about which a quite famous feminist, Bella Rapoport, wrote.

I will call it "turning the tables", and in fact it concerns those small situations that we experience every day and to which we are therefore very used to the point of not realizing them, but which nevertheless make a woman seem less than a human being. Therefore, imagine living in a world where men are reminded every day of how they have to worry about their appearance, why they have to find a good girl and conclude a good marriage, where there are advertisements for male prostitutes on the streets, where every commercial product is advertised with a photo of a half-naked man, where men have the right to express their opinion only if they're handsome, or where a woman can decide to leave a man just because he's gaining weight. This image seems really strange to me, yet it is the reality for women.

Indeed, this is precisely the concept behind the film I am not an easy man, which I highly recommend you watch.

In the early 2000s there was still hope of making Russia liberal and democratic, but, after the 2014 invasion of Crimea (starting point for the permanent state of tension that led to the war of invasion of Ukraine on February 24 2022), the government has been clearly on the road to abolishing as many freedoms as possible, and women are the ones who suffer the most from the consequences of an authoritarian regime.

There are people who want to build a liberal and democratic country in Russia, but, among them, there are far fewer who want to lend their support to feminist claims.