Arynne Wexler is right. The women of Iran are waging the most consequential women's revolt of this century, and Western feminism treated it as an inconvenience.
They are not fighting over pronouns, corporate boards, or who gets to use which locker room. They are fighting a theocratic police state that beats, jails, and kills women for showing their hair. Mahsa Amini died in morality-police custody. Nika Shakarami was murdered. The IRGC's Gasht-e Ershad is not a metaphor from The Handmaid's Tale. It is an official unit that exists to enforce religious dress and conduct on women's bodies. That is the regime. That is the enemy.
Western feminists spent years telling us this was the future if we didn't "believe all women," smash the patriarchy, and treat every Western institution as suspect. They marched in red cloaks. They treated religion as the original sin: except when the religion was political Islam. They made men in women's spaces a civil-rights cause. Then Iranian women stood up against an actual religious tyranny that does everything those costumes warned about, and the same movement went quiet.
A handful of statements and one-off pieces do not refute her. Token recognition is what an elite movement issues when it cannot ignore the pictures but refuses to reorder its priorities. If this were the issue, it would dominate women's marches, campus feminism, prestige magazines, and the activist class the way Roe, #MeToo, and gender identity did. It does not. That is the point.
Iranian women are not asking for a new academic theory. They want the freedoms Western feminists already have and now treat as insufficient or even suspect: to walk uncovered, to speak, to choose, to not be owned by clerics and morality police. Many of them look toward the West and America as the opposite of the cage they live in. That fact alone explodes the story Western feminism has been selling, that the real danger is always "our" patriarchy, "our" religion, "our" civilisation.
A movement that can mobilise endlessly against statues, speech codes, and sports categories, but cannot make compulsory hijab and state murder of women its central cause, is not a women's movement. It is a political instrument. It uses women when they are useful against the West and goes mute when women are useful against the enemies of the West.
Wexler named it without apology. The silence is not an accident. It is the tell. If Western feminism were sincere about women, Iran would be the headline, the march, the moral test. It is not. That is why her short lands hard. Ignored, of course by the feminists.
https://arynne.substack.com/p/why-are-left-wing-feminists-silent