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Feminism is about giving women the choice to be whatever they’re comfortable with. Not killing them, not mentally or physically abusing them, harassing them or bullying them for it. Become a cricketer or a housewife. Become a moral or an astronaut. Become a taxi driver or a President. Understanding that women are people who don’t exist to look pretty or shrink themselves to fit your tiny misshaped standard of what they’re supposed to be like.

Feminism is the means of giving women the choice, the control over their own bodies to decide what they wanna do with it. Cover it from head to toe or go however else they like because it’s their body. Telling women they have to expose skin is as bad as telling them to cover it.

After the world war II, the Western culture grew and changed dramatically. They were just as bad as conservative villages in Pakistan, sometimes worse. But they made mistakes, destroyed half the world, learned from it and grew. East on the other hand, never went through that dramatic phase. Except for the initiation of Islam when men used to have 100’s of wives and kill infant daughters out of shame (this culture still exists in some conservative villages in India) Islam fought against all this stuff and compared to that era liberate the women, providing most respect and status as compared to other religions of the era.

Now 1400 years later, those rules, in my opinion, are not sufficient because time has changed, needs to be changed, the air we breathe is changed, humans evolved. As Sir Syed Ahmed Khan said, “those traditions were perfect for the time they were created in but time changes”

But people are afraid of changes. Change is an unknown, undiscovered territory. Fear of what’s different and unknown and curiosity to explore it is human nature. When fear overpowers curiosity, as in most of the Eastern culture, we get stuck in the paradox of repeating the same mistakes like trying to find the sun in the sky after dusk because you could see it a few hours ago.

People in most Eastern cultures are stuck in that time loop while people in West HAD TO share power with women and other minorities, HAD TO change because they destroyed everything and had nothing to stick to, so they had to evolve. They learned their lesson the hard way but they learned ( the present situation in the USA seem to differ though).

The wise learn from others mistakes. East should learn from West’s mistakes. West has a long way to go but they are ahead of us. We SHOULD NOT repeat their mistakes. We should not repeat our mistakes. But we MUST evolve. Create a world we haven’t found yet. That’s what looking forward means, evolving to peace and equality that we created.