There was a terrific show on NatGeo in the early 2000s called Worlds Apart. The formula was middle-class American family (mom, dad, two to four kids) are sent to a rural and traditional setting somewhere else in the world to experience something completely foreign in all senses of the word.

Families were sent to small communities in Africa, in India, in Mongolia. And the beats of each episode were almost exactly the same, but no less compelling for it. Usually the mother wanted the family to have a group experience which would shake up her kids and help them see how fortunate they were. Arrival in new place and CULTURE SHOCK. We have to eat WHAT? We have to do physical labor? Then the family starts to get the hang of things and fall into the rhythm of the community. Time to leave; everyone’s sad.

Except for one prominent family member. The mother was always pissed off. ALWAYS. And that was because adult women were never allowed to go hunting or foraging or, as in the Papau New Guinea episode, just go to play at the beach like the husband and children. In every single episode, the mothers were siloed off with all the other women ( and occasionally girls, too) and tasked with keeping fires going and cooking and all the boring, never ending domestic chores that are often eased/automated/farmed out in middle class American families so women can have careers and hobbies and be on far more equal footing with their male peers.

Every mother on that entire series waxed rhapsodic about getting home to her vacuum and electricity and how she so wanted to get “out of her rut” but the experience showed her that what she considered her “rut” was a freaking paradise compared to the women who had been born into these lives in tiny communities in the rest of the world.

In one episode a family went to a longhouse in Indonesia. The mom had to spend all her time tending a freaking fire while the rest of her family — even her prepubescent daughters — got to go explore the forest every day. Her birthday was during their time and her husband had brought a boxes cake mix and INSISTED on making it himself for his wife. The Indonesians kept telling him that she didn’t even deserve a celebration, but at the least, he should “make his woman prepare her own cake” because real men didn’t cook.

They called him a woman for the remainder of his time there because he made a CAKE FOR HIS WIFE.

I told my kids when we watched every episode that I would never go on one of those trips for the simple fact of the way the adult woman in the family was treated. I hammered home how wrong it was that certain tasks were only for women and pointed out how the other family members got happier because they realized that the women existed to work for everyone else, within the system. I’d be super happy if I got half the population to do all the stuff I didn’t want to so I could go hang out at the beach!

All these libfems need to be sent to these villages and communities which exist around the globe and experience having only one path in life. Even just the two weeks or so seemed to completely change the American mothers. Just watching that show showed me how fortunate western women, well, used to be, that previous women fought for rights and protections for us. Doesn’t make life perfect, but so much better than so much of the world.

And why we should be working to maintain our rights and fighting to spread the same around the world.

What a perfect comment, you said everything I want to say much more eloquently than I ever could ! Thank you so much for writing it.

We were chattel because of the type of bodies we have, that men don't have as males, that TIMs DON'T HAVE AS THEY ARE MALE!

Right ? It's really quite simple, TIMs were never exploited like women are, because they're not women. Any unfair law you can think of regarding women ? Didn't apply to TIMs. On the contrary, any unfair advantage given to men (and I don't mean biological, but societal) that you can think of ? It did apply to TIMs.

And I know what progressives are going to say. Men who dressed like women were oppressed, men who slept with other men were oppressed ! Depending on the culture, it can be true or not. Either way, it's a completely different issue from misogyny, because from birth these men were seen as having full human dignity and rights. It's simply not comparable to women being enslaved from birth because they were seen as property for the real human beings.

Even if I suscribed to the gender soul theory, I'd still be called a TERF. Because my feminist analysis would position TIMs as the most privileged women there ever were, benefitting from every advantage men could get in a patriarchy thanks to their body.

You still would be considered chattel of your male relatives in this century if you were born in a different country. In places where women used to be able to go to university, work and show their face in public. Compare 1970s Iran with current Iran, or Afghanistan. Women are still socially considered chattel in Western countries through the unequal division of household labour and through porn/prostitution. It's just so normalized and people can point to other countries as having it worse so it can be ignored here. Women's status has regressed across the world.

Exactly

If there’s no biological advantage to being male in sports, why are males so consistently quicker and stronger than women, over hundreds and hundreds of years? I know these assholes will go ‘oh, because of sexism’, ignoring the point that that’s the whole reason women’s sports began!

Good point, notice how the pro-women's sports argument in the last square comes from a typical boomer couple as well. Just another way to miscredit their opponents

These people aren't just dumb. They are evil. They have joined an oppressive, intolerant religion. They want to take away women's rights as surely as the taliban does.

Lol

That subreddit has some of the shittiest comics alive (Pizzacake, anyone?)

lmfao