Feminists Hate the West Beyond All Else, By Mrs. Vera West

The controversy surrounding modern feminism often reveals less about women's rights themselves than about the ideological frameworks through which political activists interpret the world. A recent essay by Janice Fiamengo, titled "The Feminists Who Hate MAGA More than They Hate the Mullahs," raises precisely this issue. Her argument is not simply that Western feminists fail to speak about oppression elsewhere; rather, she suggests that contemporary feminist activism has become so deeply embedded in a particular ideological narrative about Western power that it struggles to confront abuses committed by non-Western regimes with the same moral clarity it directs toward Western societies.

At the centre of the debate lies the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran, where women live under a theocratic system that enforces compulsory veiling, strict gender segregation, and legal inequalities rooted in religious law. The death of Mahsa Amini in 2022 after being detained by Iran's morality police triggered the "Woman, Life, Freedom" protests that briefly captured global attention. These protests highlighted the extraordinary courage of Iranian women who openly defied the regime despite facing imprisonment, beatings, and even death. Yet critics argue that the reaction among some sectors of Western feminist activism was noticeably muted compared with the intensity often directed toward controversies within Western societies.

Fiamengo interprets this disparity as evidence of a deeper ideological transformation within modern feminism. In her view, early feminist movements in the West were often quite willing to criticise oppressive practices in other cultures. Activists in the 1970s and 1980s, for example, openly condemned practices such as female genital cutting or enforced veiling. Over time, however, the intellectual climate of Western universities shifted toward frameworks influenced by postcolonial theory, which emphasise the historical role of Western imperialism and cultural domination. Within this framework, criticism directed at non-Western societies can be interpreted as reproducing colonial attitudes or reinforcing stereotypes about "backward" cultures.

The result, according to critics such as Fiamengo, is a kind of moral asymmetry. Western societies are scrutinised relentlessly for sexism, patriarchy, and structural injustice, while oppressive systems outside the West may receive more cautious or qualified criticism. The reasoning behind this caution is not necessarily indifference to suffering but rather an ideological concern about reinforcing narratives that justify Western intervention or cultural superiority. In this sense the debate is not simply about feminism but about competing interpretations of global power and historical responsibility.

This ideological tension is particularly visible in discussions surrounding the Islamic Republic of Iran. Critics of contemporary feminist discourse point out that the Iranian regime enforces laws that would be considered extreme violations of women's rights by almost any international standard. These include compulsory dress codes, restrictions on personal freedom, and legal systems in which women's testimony and inheritance rights are often unequal to those of men. Yet the language used to describe such systems in Western academic or activist circles is sometimes cautious or heavily contextualised, reflecting a concern about avoiding cultural generalisations or geopolitical narratives.

Defenders of contemporary feminist scholarship respond that this criticism misunderstands their position. They argue that feminist activism is not silent about abuses in countries such as Iran but rather seeks to avoid framing those abuses through narratives that portray Western societies as uniquely enlightened. Scholars influenced by postcolonial theory emphasise that women's rights movements exist within those societies themselves and that external "rescue narratives" can undermine local activism by portraying non-Western women as passive victims rather than agents of change.

The disagreement therefore reflects a broader intellectual divide. One side emphasises universal moral standards and argues that feminist movements should condemn oppression wherever it occurs with equal force. The other stresses the historical context of colonialism and warns that criticism of non-Western practices can sometimes reinforce global power hierarchies or cultural stereotypes. Both perspectives claim to support women's rights, yet they interpret the political meaning of advocacy in very different ways.

What makes the debate particularly intense today is the growing influence of identity-based political frameworks in Western cultural institutions. Within these frameworks, global inequalities are often interpreted primarily through the lens of race, colonial history, and power relations between the West and the Global South. Critics argue that this perspective can sometimes produce unexpected moral inversions, in which regimes hostile to Western influence receive more sympathetic interpretation than democratic societies whose flaws are constantly scrutinised.

The Iranian-American activist Masih Alinejad has been among those who voice frustration with this dynamic. Alinejad has repeatedly called for stronger international solidarity with Iranian women resisting the regime's gender laws. Her criticism is not directed at feminism as such but at what she sees as the reluctance of some Western activists to confront authoritarian religious regimes with the same energy directed toward domestic political disputes.

What the controversy ultimately reveals is the extent to which contemporary political activism is shaped by ideological narratives about the nature of global injustice. For some activists the primary moral struggle is against patriarchy and gender inequality wherever it appears. For others the central issue is the historical dominance of Western power and the need to resist narratives that might reinforce it. When these frameworks collide, debates about women's rights quickly become debates about geopolitics, colonial history, and cultural interpretation.

In that sense the dispute surrounding Fiamengo's essay is less about any single feminist position and more about the intellectual climate of the early twenty-first century. Modern political movements increasingly operate within elaborate ideological systems that shape how problems are perceived and which injustices receive attention. The question raised by critics is whether those systems sometimes distort moral priorities by filtering global events through rigid interpretive lenses.

Whether one agrees with Fiamengo's conclusions or not, the debate raises an important question about the relationship between ideology and universal principles. If advocacy for human rights becomes too closely tied to particular political narratives, it risks losing the very universality that gives those rights their moral force. The challenge for contemporary movements, feminist or otherwise, is therefore to balance sensitivity to historical context with a willingness to confront injustice wherever it appears.

Some commentators have expressed disappointment at the relative silence of feminists on the situation of Iranian women. "Isn't feminism supposed to be about women's liberation?" asked Iranian-born Sheila Nazarian, a Beverly Hills doctor and media personality.

Nazarian expressed shock that "with Iran, a country where women are governed by absolutist religious law that hardly treats them as human, so many Western feminists either maintain their silence or end up supporting the regime."

Annabel Denham, columnist and senior political commentator at The Telegraph, recently expressed similar astonishment, asking "Where is the support for [Iranian women's] glorious defiance? The Instagram carousels, the breathless declarations of 'solidarity' from former Harry Potter stars and pouting influencers?"

Others have noted the lack of outcry by feminist athletes, including the normally-vociferous Megan Rapinoe, over the request for asylum by members of the Iranian women's soccer team.

The questions expose two premises: that women are Iran's primary victims, and that the feminist movement cares about women. Both premises are false.

Iran is a bloody dictatorship that treats all of its citizens harshly, employing cruel punishments such as flogging, stoning, amputations, and blinding that decades of international condemnation have done nothing to mitigate. Focusing on the misogyny of the regime, as some pundits do, creates the false impression that men live well under the Islamic theocracy.

Male lives are cheap in Iran. Although the exact number of victims will probably never be known, we can assume that young men are the vast majority of those who have been imprisoned, tortured, and executed in the tens of thousands since January of this year. A report by the BBC noted that BBC Persia had identified "more than 200 of the thousands of people killed during Iran's brutal crackdown." The report focused, predictably, on female victims, but its own photo montage showed that at least 85% of those killed were male.

The Hengaw Organization for Human Rights issued a special report on Iranian human rights violations for 2025, finding that at least 1858 prisoners, probably a significant under-estimation, were executed in 2025, of whom 55 were reported to be women. The unstated reality: 97% of those executed were male.

In September of 2025, the Death Penalty Information Center reported that "In the three years since Ms. Amini's death [Mahsa Jina Amini, whose death in police custody sparked widespread protest], Iran has exe­cut­ed at least 2,910 peo­ple, includ­ing 83 women." That leaves at least 2,827 male victims in three years—again, 97% of the martyred. In an uprising sparked by a woman's death and characterized by its focus on women's freedoms, most of the victims were male.

Even a cursory glance through the Islamic Penal Code shows that punishments for various transgressions are just as harsh, or harsher, for men than for women. The punishment for a first-time offence of sodomy is execution while that for lesbianism is 80 lashes.

Punishment for fornication focuses on the male offender, as in the following description in a Death Penalty report: "According to Article 224 of the IPC: "A death sentence shall be imposed on the male party in cases of incest, fornication with their stepmother, fornication of a non-Muslim man with a Muslim woman and fornication by force or reluctance. The punishment for the female party shall be decided by other provisions concerning fornication."

Hundreds of men have had fingers and hands amputated for theft in the past two decades, a punishment carried out using a hideous guillotine-like device that is employed without anesthetic. I could find no documented cases of a woman having a hand or fingers amputated. Men are more regularly flogged and given electrical shocks for various offences, including petty theft and peaceful protest.

It is safe to say that life is hard for both men and women in Iran, especially for those who fall afoul of the regime's rules.

Doesn't Feminism Support Women's Liberation?

Yet the persistent lament about feminism is worth noting. Over decades, feminism has postured as a movement for female well-being, and most people are still surprised when feminists do not speak out clearly about women's mistreatment by barbaric regimes.

Such commenters do not realize that while feminism does advocate for female power over men globally, it has other ideological commitments—particularly the mobilization of political hatreds and the destabilization of democratic societies—that are equally if not ultimately more important.

Annabel Denham gets at some of the truth in "This is why Western feminists are silent on Iran." She notes that while Iranian women have been tearing off their hijabs in the streets and defying the regime, "much of the Western progressive commentariat has been out to lunch."

Her diagnosis is that feminists gradually lost their way over the decades, focusing on easy targets at home and maintaining a simplistic ideology of western malfeasance. She argues that "The progressive instinct to avoid [Muslim] cultural offence has trumped the need to defend women's autonomy." For most feminist pundits, it is satisfying to agitate about "boardroom quotas, pay gaps and microaggressions."

Further, she notes, "To acknowledge out loud and repeatedly the Islamic Republic's misogyny, brutality and sponsorship of violence abroad would disturb their belief that all injustice stems from Western imperialism."

In conversation with Brendan O'Neill, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has also addressed the issue of feminist evasion, explaining that western feminists are so wedded to their neo-Marxist commitments that they cannot fully sympathize with Iranian women's demands, which tend to focus on individual rights and economic opportunities. She joined with O'Neill in condemning feminist "cowardice."

Denham's and Ali's diagnoses are powerful, but the truth is even more shocking. Modern feminism is not merely keen to "avoid cultural offence." It is not merely repulsed by so-called "choice feminism." It is so genuinely committed to anti-western agitation that it would rather fight Trump and American conservatism than condemn the mullahs of Iran.

Feminists feel such profound revulsion for the west that they claim there is little to choose between a culture in which women are allegedly "objectified" in their bikinis and one in which they are forced to cover themselves in cloth from head to toe on penalty of police beating.

In fact, there is amongst many feminists a covert preference for the vigor, determination, and death-daring fervor that expresses itself in wanton executions and chants of death to America. Some feminists seem to revel in Islamists' single-minded devotion to totalitarian purity.

If cornered, these ideologues will admit that some Iranian atrocities have been unfortunate, but they will quickly shift the blame to the United States, which should bear full moral accountability, they believe, for the Iranian regime's fanaticism.

Feminism's Anti-Western Turn

Denham notes that there was a time in the past when western feminists stood shoulder to shoulder with their female compatriots around the world. "In March 1979, as Ruhollah Khomeini seized control after the Iranian Revolution, the American feminist Kate Millett travelled to Tehran to protest against the regime's plan to make the hijab compulsory. She marched beside Iranian women against the tyranny of pitiless old men with beards."

Denham admires this gesture by Millett, not realizing, perhaps, that Millett suffered from mental illness most of her life and was not representative even back then of the holier-than-thou feminists who would shape the movement in her day. In her landmark Sexual Politics, Millett had been adamant that western patriarchies were significantly less intolerable than non-western ones. She condemned non-western patriarchies with relish, angrily enumerating the evils they had done and continued to do:

"The history of patriarchy presents a variety of cruelties and barbarities: the suttee execution in India, the crippling deformity of footbinding in China, the lifelong ignominy of the veil in Islam, or the widespread persecution of sequestration, the gynacium, and purdah. Phenomenon [sic] such as clitoroidectomy, clitoral incision, the sale and enslavement of women under one guise or another, involuntary and child marriages, concubinage and prostitution, still take place — the first in Africa, the latter in the Near East and Far East, the last generally" (Sexual Politics, 1970, p. 46).

Millett might then have been shocked to understand how quickly American feminists like herself would learn to refrain from criticizing African, Islamic, or other non-western cultural practices. As feminism became increasingly fervent and utopian, it became less interested in the practical conditions of real women and more interested in ideological purity inspired by Marxist and Maoist anti-westernism.

The Shame of White Feminists Before Their Third-World Compatriots

…

Soon it became forbidden for feminists to admit that white men had created freer and better societies, including better for women, than existed in other parts of the world. In Looking White People in the Eye (1998), feminist academic Sherene Razack let white women know that preferring the rights, affluence, and culture of western societies was a form of white supremacism. White men were responsible for imperialism, racism, capitalist oppression, homophobia, and Islamophobia, and unless white women denounced these in turn, they too would be classed as imperialists, racists, oppressors, homophobes, and Islamophobes.

Razack's words dripped with angry sarcasm as she described white women's bias and treachery in recognizing the goodness of white men:

"Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh men confirm handily the superiority of Western men …. White women's responses to articles on Muslim women and the veil include the sentiment that in comparison to Eastern women, Western women should consider their own men as gems of enlightenment and kindness" (83).

In other words, white women were wrong to be grateful to live in a western country or to trust their own fathers and brothers more than they trusted foreigners. Because white women could not bear to be accused of complicity in racism and imperialism, they found themselves willing to agree that white male systems were the ultimate origin of all suffering and injustice.

That is why Narges Bajoghli, assistant professor at John Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies, writing in 2023 about the women's movement in Iran, made direct parallels between Iranian women's resistance to the Islamic regime and the #MeToo and LGBTQ+ movements in the United States. All were named as protests against "patriarchal control and domination," allegedly rampant and resurgent, unvaryingly and indistinguishably, across the globe.

Bajoghli made no distinction between the treatment of women and homosexuals in Iran and in the United States, retreating into vagaries and historical misrepresentation in order to pretend that women and sexual minorities in the United States are harshly persecuted.

In the same manner, author Andrea D'Atri, a writer for Left Voice and founder of the Argentinian women's group Bread and Roses, refused to say that the defeat of the Islamic regime by American and Israeli forces could be a good thing for the Iranian people. While admitting that the Iranian regime is repressive and harsh, D'Atri still called on feminists to "fight for the defeat of Trump and Netanyahu in Iran" and claimed preposterously that women's and LGBTQ+ rights are equally under threat by "Far Right" forces in America and elsewhere.

"Trump, the Far Right, and their allies, such as Milei in Argentina, attack women's and LGBTQ+ rights every day in their respective countries; they spew hate against feminism and exude misogyny in their government policies while displaying crude machismo in their public and private lives."

**

Clearly, we should stop expecting that feminists will be reasonable in their assessments of national or international affairs. They feel as their political masters direct them to feel, with little energy left over for independent thought. They will certainly never express any appreciation for a country that tolerates and protects them.

These are not mistakes or confusion. Feminism really does support the enemies of the west, believing that these enemies may ultimately help to bring about the fall of an abhorred western patriarchy. Feminists may not agree on the precise outlines of the new utopian collective, but they are keen to try the experiment. Ordinary men and women's suffering pales before their ruthlessly perfectionist vision.