Individuals at times lack what it means to live in a patriarchal society. Actual patriarchy is when women are second class citizens due to the system upon which they live.

Patriarchy is when a woman can’t do anything without the permission from a male within her family because it is written in country’s legislation. This is happening all throughout the Middle East, especially in Saudi Arabia, and you know what? Western feminism fail to address this time and time again.

When you’re too busy trying to find the nonsensical notion of micro-aggressions here in western civilization and then calling it “oppression.” When you’re too busy worrying about trolls on the internet. When you’re too busy in the comfort of your own safe space, you massively fail to address actual patriarchy in places like Saudi Arabia and other middle eastern countries.

In the patriarchal and oppressive hell hole of Saudi Arabia, there is something within their legislation called “Male Guardianship laws.”

These laws restrict adult women from things such as: traveling abroad, marrying, working, obtaining health care, pursuing an education and even being released from jail without the contractual consent of a husband, father, brother or even a son.

From the day women are born until the day they die, they must have permission to do any of these things.

This is real oppression ladies and gentlemen. A constant overseer approving or disapproving your every move.

However, no system stands without a fight of opposition. A petition has been filed in Saudi Arabia by an estimate of 14,000 women to end male guardianship.

The demand of this petition is to make laws that allow women to make their own choices at a certain age.

Many of these women risk their lives in putting their full name on the petition. This is what first wave feminism was all about, the liberation from being disenfranchised from making a choice.

Women in our country can make these choices and have been able to do so for quite some time. There is no law that is given to a man that isn’t given to a woman. In other words, there are no more systemic dragons to slay. That isn’t so in other parts of the world.

It’s time that feminism confronts these issues as it did in the days of the suffrage. Stop looking for micro issues and see that there are bigger issues at hand. There are real patriarchal systems that need to be opposed that aren’t here in the west.

Feminist ideology must become a universal fight, not just a western one.