Western feminism won real, hard-fought victories: the right to be heard, to work, to leave a bad marriage, to say no. Men in the West, for all their flaws, eventually had to listen.

That victory didn't happen everywhere. In many other societies, a man can still kill his wife for cheating and call it a “crime of passion.” A father can kill his own daughter for “shaming” the family — and in some places, face little or no punishment for it. Whatever #MeToo exposed in the West, it's mild compared to what many women live under elsewhere: the threat isn't losing a job or being disbelieved. It's losing your life, and having that killing treated as understandable.

And no modern movement has been harder on women than the most extreme, supremacist strain of Islamist rule. You'd expect the feminist movement — especially in its academic form — to call that out as loudly as it calls out sexism at home. Instead, it's largely done the opposite: showing sympathy and support for the very men enforcing that control, the same kind of control feminists spent decades fighting in the West.

Why? Because for many Western feminist scholars writing about women in the Muslim world, a bigger political story took priority: the idea that the West is the villain, and anyone resisting the West — even men actively oppressing women — is standing on the right side. Women's safety got quietly ranked below that narrative. This isn't new; it showed up as far back as UN conferences in the 1980s, and it's only calcified since.