Sasha Baron Cohen is funny, but his movie, “Borat,” is not. Let me tell you why.

A few years ago, a close friend of mine was taking a class on human rights. For her final research project, she wrote about female circumcision (the mutilation of the female genitalia to remove pleasure from sexual activity), which is practiced in parts of Africa with “culture” and “tradition” invoked in its defense. Paying a visit one day, I found her alone and in a truly foul mood. Responding to my inquiries, she finally explained, “I feel like women all over the world are made to suffer because of men. Men benefit from this suffering, and they don’t do anything to confront it — they usually don’t even recognize that their unfair advantage is a problem. It’s beyond the challenge of assigning women equal rights. It’s about assigning them human dignity, and at the moment, I don’t think that men, as a whole, even consider women to be human by their standards. How can there be any discussion after that?”

There cannot be. Then as now, I can say nothing to address this objection except to admit that the number of men who fight to build a more gender-equitable world is shameful. Quite apart from the fact that many men’s interests in women are exclusively limited to their sexual potential, a dishearteningly high proportion of male culture has come to view “Feminism” as synonymous with some imaginary, radical and anti-man Aphrodite cult. As is so common, this indeterminate and completely implausible conceptualization is more accessible to the uninitiated than the actual meaning of the Feminist Movement, which is (so much more simply!) justice for women.

Maybe this seems too abstract without something to ground us in the problem. Female circumcision — ok, that’s bad, but that’s also one of those “African problems.” Maybe Feminism is too, right? Maybe it only applies to, say, Africa or the Middle East, to some array of overtly foot-binding countries that look different from us and that aren’t, as Borat says we are, very “nice.”

Maybe not. Last week in Georgia an Ethiopian immigrant was sentenced to 10 years in prison for mutilating the genitals of his two year-old daughter with a pair of scissors in the United States’ first case of female circumcision. And this weekend I sat in a fully packed movie theater — in the heart of well-educated Silicon Valley — with a young audience that howled with laughter when Mr. Baron Cohen’s character, Borat, joked about the time his mentally-challenged brother broke out of his cage and raped his sister. The case of the girl from Georgia is a tragedy, whereas “Borat” is merely a travesty, but what they both demonstrate is that feminism, the pursuit of equal rights for women and their essential prerequisite of female human dignity, is not an “over-there” issue. Nor is it a question of personal decency and inter-gender conduct. In this century, we must think of women’s rights globally.

Why take out so much indignation on Mr. Baron Cohen’s new movie? After all, the man is a comedian, and it’s only satire. To me this question is the same as, “why should we be offended, why should we take Feminism seriously?” I’m sure there are volumes upon volumes of studies relating to the bad public image that Feminism has acquired, e.g., it’s a girls-only club, it’s whiny and unproductive or the ever-popular “subtle lesbian conspiracy” tack. Like Pamela Anderson at a wedding in Central Asia or the Caucasus, the motive ideas of Feminism have been tossed in a sack and carried off on horseback to serve the dominant, male order. Yet what is noteworthy in these distortions is not that such negative misperceptions have bloomed in the popular consciousness as rotting fleurs du mal, but that an accurate, positive image of Feminism has not grafted itself onto mainstream America. There was a time when justice was sexy, when the liberation of the oppressed was the province of our most admirable citizens. When will the average American realize that Feminism is the new anti-imperialism?

Do not fool yourselves; laughing at a viciously misogynistic film because its participants (aside from Borat and his producer, the film has basically no characters, only distressingly real people) and situations are absurd is not a form of protest against irrational injustice. If you happen to enjoy the film for the right reasons — because the man at the rodeo who believes all Muslims strap bombs to themselves is a clownish moron, and not because his truthful candor is refreshing — you are still doing no good by merely thinking correctly. First of all, there is no guarantee that everyone is laughing for the right reasons, and the film itself showcases exactly the sort of people who will misunderstand the very ways it is mocking them.

In the end, this is the reason why Mr. Baron Cohen’s movie is not funny but highly disturbing. The animal deplorations of idiot frat boys (“Are women your slaves in Russia? I wish we had slaves in this country!”) are, of course, absurd, but they are left to stand at that. We in the audience are expected to laugh, perhaps, because of the self-evident folly of the misogynists or the gay-bashers, or because of the racism and cultural chauvinism that seems to justify the nude, public combat between two men who act in this manner simply because they are Cossacks. But just because the foolish dupes of “Borat” do not have reason on their side does not make them unreal elements of a fiction. Their speeches of hate are not funny because they are absurd, but terrifying because they are real in spite of their absurdity. For a satirist as talented as Mr. Baron Cohen, it is inexcusable to miss this opportunity to shame these maladroit orators so that those of us without a Cambridge or Stanford education can be sure to get the point.

Peter Durning does not like when chauvinists are not challenged by their interlocutor, while simple people are mocked on an international stage merely for being average and unglamorous. If you think he missed the point, email yours to pdurning@stanford.edu