Abbe Eliasof

Professor Jennifer Byrd

WGST 2310-001
12 November 2018

To the Editor of Camera Obscura Journal:

Do you ever think about inequalities? Not the math problems, but the social issues that

plague the world. As a feminist, I’m sure you do. Society wreaks of inequality. One can notice it

when they see a colored person being treated less respectfully than a white person or when a

woman is not taken as seriously as a man or when a gay person is refused service, but those are

subtle examples. One can see it when unarmed African-Americans are shot by cops, when

women are sexually assaulted and then called liars for speaking out, when a gay couple is

physically attacked for holding hands. As horrible as all those things are, they happen in

America, and America is still considered progressive. What happens when we look to a less

progressive country? How much worse is the inequality there?

Most of us don’t think about this on a daily basis unless it directly affects us. Even I don’t

think about the atrocities occurring in other countries all the time, though I came from one of

those countries. It’s just not something talked about or thought about often in civilized America.

I’d like to change that. With all the talk of fighting for equality, I think we should bring some of

that energy overseas to the countries that still see rape as legal, to the countries that tolerate only

one religion or no religion, to the countries that kill queer identifiers, and to the countries who

legalize deadly oppression.

I’m from China, a country that does all of those things, a country that values its women

so little that female infanticide prospered for 2000 years, a country that didn’t declassify

homosexuality as a mental illness until 2001, a country that is openly racist towards other people
of color and other Asians (Ausdall and Iimuro 338). We all know that Eastern countries tend to

be more bigoted than Western countries, but we never truly discuss why or how. The seriously

outdated and traditional values these countries cling to has always been hazardous to their

citizens and the social progress we are trying to advocate for in the world, and while I tend to

focus on misogyny in Asian cultures, this is more than just a problem for females.

Females make up a very significant percentage of the human population in Asia, yet they

are still often treated as less than human. These cultures have a strong history of oppressing

women in horrific ways, however it is not always out of blatant sexism. These societies, like all

societies throughout history, are severely classist. They do nothing to help their poor, in fact,

China’s one-child policy (which was only revoked recently) was created out of classism to stop

the poor from overpopulating. This resulted in a surge of female infanticides and female infant

abandonments, because poor adults needed male children to help them in their old age and could

not afford to pay dowries. (“Still Playing With Fire” 432-434)

When females are empowered, they bring other marginalized groups up with them. One

should not mistake feminism as just women looking for equal rights for cis, straight, white

women, feminism is about equality for all (Chin 12). Bringing mass amounts of feminism to a

country like China would help not only their women, but their other oppressed groups as well. If

we fail to bring feminism to these countries, then we are idly sitting by and silently watching the

marginalization of millions of people. We live in America, one of the most progressive countries

in the world, this should not sit so comfortably with us.

Yours Truly,

Abbe Eliasof
 Works Cited

Chin, Jean Lau., and Chin, Jean Lau. Women and Leadership Transforming Visions and Diverse
Voices . Blackwell Pub., 2007.
“STILL PLAYING WITH FIRE: Intersectionality, Activism, and NGO-Ized Feminism.” Critical
Asian Studies, vol. 41, no. 3, Sept. 2009, pp. 429–45, doi:10.1080/14672710903119818.
Van Ausdall, Mimi Iimuro. “‘The Day All of the Different Parts of Me Can Come Along’:
Intersectionality and U.S. Third World Feminism in the Poetry of Pat Parker and Willyce
Kim.” Journal of Lesbian Studies, vol. 19, no. 3, Routledge, July 2015, pp. 336–56,
doi:10.1080/10894160.2015.1026708.