All of a sudden, everyone’s now a feminist

Today, we’re all feminists.

It’s been a long time coming, hasn’t it? The street protests. The courtroom battles. And oh, the scorched bras — so much lace, so many tiny ribbon bows sacrificed to the cause. To think we shouldn’t have bothered. Ladies, we may as well have laid around in our corsets at home, grabbing the smelling salts only this autumn when the patriarchy died at the hands of that brave defender of womanhood, the Conservative party. A couple of centuries of struggle couldn’t rally everyone under the banner of women’s rights, but the Conservatives did it in a single election.

All they had to do was say the word “Islam” and suddenly everyone’s a member of women’s lib.

Sure, you might ask, where was Harper, Our Hero, when aboriginal women were getting murdered and an inquiry was missing? When a debate on women’s issues was cancelled? When battered immigrant women were forced to stay with their abusive spouses so their permanent residency wouldn’t be lost? When the doors of Status of Women offices were nailed shut? When overseas abortion providers lost our support?

But if you do ask those questions, and if you arrive at the answer that the Conservative government is responsible in several instances for hurting or ignoring women, then you are, I’m sorry to say, among the last of the misogynists. Real feminists are nothing like the prissy loudmouths squealing with fake outrage over First World non-problems like domestic violence and rape and stuff. Real feminists save their shrillness for a fashion emergency: Some women are wearing some clothing some people don’t like.

Real feminists, that is, stand up for women by enshrining the best-dressed version of femaleness in public policy and punishing the style unconscious. That may mean sacrificing an individual woman to the cause — a few burkas into the fire. A woman in a niqab might not get citizenship or a job. A woman in a head scarf might have it torn off, be elbowed aside in a store.

And a woman in a war zone or near one might have her refugee resettlement application secretly stalled and personally inspected by the prime minister, who will determine that she’s not from a sufficiently fashionable religious minority — presumably while he himself is dressed as a white knight or, perhaps, wearing a This Is What A (Canadian) Feminist Looks Like T-shirt. He, like many others before him, protects women by hurting women.

That’s progress, you understand. First a group scapegoats women. Then it scapegoats a group that it accuses of scapegoating women more. How to know if you, a woman, are in the barbaric stage or the freedom stage of history? Just check your attire in the mirror, apparently.

Now I suppose a modern-day misogynist might argue that in Canadian rhetoric, law and action, women’s couture has nonsensically collided with national security and foreign policy, which has muddled people’s anxieties about women — ones who wear long dresses, veils and scarves — with anxieties about outsiders who have something to hide, offering voters a way to feel both safe and liberal. The new chauvinists might even claim non-clothing-related human rights issues are at stake and that Canadian politicians are hurting Canada’s ability to help address them — that when they use the existence of repression as an excuse to repress more, when they substitute shallow indicators of repression for concerted efforts to address repression, they compromise the trust placed in Canadian humanitarian workers, human rights researchers, doctors and even military personnel who are genuinely dedicated to chronicling, remedying or preventing abuses like slavery, female genital mutilation, early child marriage, kidnapping and honour killings.

So maybe, beneath the surface, the anti-woman women’s movement is a little absurd, a little cruel. Still, as we’re obsessing over appearance, it’s turned out to be a remarkably good look for Canadian politicians, if a bad look for the country. And on a surface level, the only level that matters in politics, feminism finally won.