(Original post by Miss Maddie)
How can I respect those cultures where women are treated as second class citizens whilst being a feminist?
You can't. Not in such a generalized fashion.
You can 'dissect' their culture into it's constituent parts, and respect some of those parts and not others. But really, to be frank, it's not our fight. I've observed that generally, unless the situation is truly awful and life threatening, barging in on people's behalf to solve their problems doesn't win their gratitude. You'll always be an 'outsider'. The bonds between those people are stronger than with outsiders, even those that intervene to help one side or the other. Once it is over, they have little use left for you.
Even when life threatening, I think this still holds true most of the time.
It's been true in almost any context. Geopolitics, or personal relationships. It's just people. Too many people have too much damn pride to admit they need help sometimes, or to even admit anything is wrong in the first place, or admit that they ever received help when they did. They could even turn against you, and they may even be right to do so. Not on you personally. My point here is, many people who barge in to "help someone" often do it out of some kind of self-interest, especially in politics, that is possibly infected with even up to 10x more psychopaths than the average population. Foreign aid is not really "help" as much as it is a ponzi scheme justified by principles of "income redistribution", only 20% of which goes to the people that 'need' it. 20% help, 80% fraud? Asides from administrative costs, I do not see any good reasons for this disparity.
Ultimately you can only help people who want to be helped. And there are some. Personally I'm not prepared to waste time on anything else. And at the same time, people are generally better off solving their own problems instead of living in debt to someone else the rest of their lives.
Sorry. There are no simple answers. I really have none. You have the most power to help individuals in your immediate environment, ones you can actually help
in person. When you're talking about something on the opposite side of the planet, what it really implies is trusting other people to help on your behalf by donating them money for example. They'll spend x% of it on advertisements showing how well they're doing, before it's even reached the people it's supposed to help. Unless you yourself want to travel there, which I suppose is one of the more practical solutions.
It's sick, and personally I'd like the people responsible for it hunted down by Liam Neeson, but there's little that can be done about it. Not giving them your money is a start, or if you do, research first and be sure it's spent right (which takes time to do).
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