If you haven’t heard yet, Ugandan marathoner Rebecca Cheptegei was burned alive by her boyfriend and died. She had just run in the Olympics and went to Kenya only to be doused in gasoline and set on fire.
There’s a bunch of discourse going around the internet right now about how the media is wording her death, but I wanted to address something that’s been on my mind for a very long time. Misogyny is not solved just because women in the United States are now allowed to vote, work, and more.
Of course, feminism in America is a whole different conversation, and violence against women is a problem everywhere. But I’ve heard far too many people in past years talk about how feminism is stupid because “all women have rights now.” But why are we only counting Western women when we say “all women?”
Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Eygpt, Congo, Kenya, Nigeria, Qatar, Uganda, Syria–actually let’s stop because the list continues for 183 counties. Because only 14 countries have full legal protections for women, and I’ll give you a hint. The United States isn’t one of them.
It’s a bit of a scale, right? You have your countries with complete legal protection for women at the top. Then countries where women have basic human rights, but not necessarily equal rights. Take the U.S., where women can work, but they may not necessarily receive equal pay to their male counterparts for example. Then there are countries where the treatment of women is a religious issue (a whole different topic to tackle). And there are countries where women are murdered daily and it’s considered normal.
In India, a young female doctor was raped and murdered by several men and has yet to receive justice. India has continuously had a violence against women crisis. As of 2022, there were 90 rapes per day in India
Or Kenya, where 30 women were victims of femicide in January 2024. Or the use of femicide in Congo as a tactic of war to clear villages. Western people will claim that feminism is some woke lie because their people have achieved basic human rights, hence ignoring the rest of the world. As Americans typically do.
American exceptionalism is the thought process that basically means that America is the superior country in every single way. While many people think like this today, it’s a very problematic way of thinking because of how harmful it is to Eastern countries.
In my philosophy class last year, we read an article on American exceptionalism toward Middle Eastern women post-9/11. “Do Muslim Women Need Saving?” by Lila Abu-Lughod is a really eye-opening piece. I would recommend reading it–it really exposes how American’s are almost taught to think about history.
Post-9/11 the U.S. announced that they would save the women in Afghanistan from being forced to wear burqas, a religious face covering. At the time, the Taliban mandated that women wear them, so the U.S. swooped in.
However, Abu-Lughod points out that this savior mindset was very hurtful to some women, as they willingly chose to wear the burqa. So while men are the ones forcing laws upon them, men who claim to be saviors are assuming that they are too small-minded to make decisions for themselves.
It’s important that we all get out of the American exceptionalism mindset in order to help those around us. We’re all guilty of it…it’s built into our education system to think that we’re better than everyone around us.