Christina Hoff Summers points out the feminists' massive blind spot in the Weekly Standard (thanks to Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi):
The subjection of women in Muslim societies--especially in Arab nations and in Iran--is today very much in the public eye. Accounts of lashings, stonings, and honor killings are regularly in the news, and searing memoirs by Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Azar Nafisi have become major best-sellers. One might expect that by now American feminist groups would be organizing protests against such glaring injustices, joining forces with the valiant Muslim women who are working to change their societies. This is not happening.If you go to the websites of major women's groups, such as the National Organization for Women, the Ms. Foundation for Women, and the National Council for Research on Women, or to women's centers at our major colleges and universities, you'll find them caught up with entirely other issues, seldom mentioning women in Islam. During the 1980s, there were massive demonstrations on American campuses against racial apartheid in South Africa. There is no remotely comparable movement on today's campuses against the gender apartheid prevalent in large parts of the world.
Read it all.
Wasn't the women's movement always primarily one of middle-class women wishing control of their ovaries and a way to better salaries? I believe the movement was not a cry for autonomy so much as a response to the lack of responsibility among men, whose behavior began the destruction of the American family. And then there was the pill, which added to the devastation.
The consequence of the women's movement has been a further destruction of the American family. Islam? No, the movement is too comfortable for that.
The women's movement is interested in holding on to the power that they created back in the 1960's and then cemented by guilting politicians into accepting any and every demand that they can come up with, using name calling and blackmail against anyone who stands in their way. As long as abortion stays legal these women can not be bothered to help some poor, backward sister in a foreign country, just because she has had her clitoris cut out, gets beaten on a regular basis, is killed if she gets raped or gets dumped because her husband spots a new hottie and she doesn't want to be a co-wife.
Talk about an inconvenient truth.
Western feminists will not do anything because as far as they are concerned, the sisters need to be doing it for themselves.
They do not seem to understand that the oppressive "patriarchy" they laboured under for so long in the western world is nothing compared to the literal slavery that women under islam are subjected to.
And, again, they don't want to risk their ill-gotten gains.
This is in addition to Isabella's point.
L.Drummond
Used to do some voluntary work for Women's Refuge years ago-Co ordinator got an excellent salary but we volunteers just got bossed around...Noticed most of so called 'working class' inmates of Refuge resented patronising attitude of 'Middleclass' Femmes running the show. Men were allowed to be volunteers too until one of them
ran off with one of the 'clients'...After that-sisters only. As I am a frivolous creature who likes perfume & jewellery got into an argument with a Puritannical Sister who denounced Make up,
trinkets & anything stronger than a deodorant.
Got the impression only ones who did well out of
'Feminism' were already well off ladies.
Movement seems to almost have petered out here : sometimes see a familiar face protesting about Iraq War or George Bush but nary a squeak of protest about treatment of women in Islam. Mind you,to be fair most peole are AFRAID of mentioning ROP-which is the way Muslims shut up
any opposition. As for 'feminists' such as Germaine Greer-she seems to have gone completely
bonkers & refutes most of her earlier stuff...
Worrying so much about the "glass ceiling" they fail to see the approaching "iron burqa".
Islam is a "male chauvinism" so morbid, the Western feminists are apparently afraid to even confront it in words.
Prefering to "gloss over it" as something "cultural"... as if they allow do this excuse / b.s. to be made if it were white guys in America making the statements that Islam does ("a woman is only worth half of a man", "honor killings", ad absurdum).
Feminist cowardice, posing as "understanding".
This from the article:
Seems pretty straightforward to me.
There's no real good or evil don't you see. It's a kind of scheme.
A scheme? A word game? An artificial set of made-up categories?
These are the terms these people think in.
Ummm... Robespierre the Ayatollahs and ... Ken Starr ?!?!?!?!
I see. So prosecuting Mr. Clinton for perjury is the equivalent of torturing and murdering thousands. OK.
Of course we all remember the horrifying reign of terror that Ken Starr initiated in Washington DC, when the streets ran red with blood.
And note the quotes around the word "good" above. These are the famous cheap irony quotes. But look how they are being used. They serve two purposes, first to compare Ken Starr's values to those of Robesspiere and the Ayatollahs, and second to mock the notion of the good, to imply that there is no such thing.
And now we come to the bottom line, the real nitty gritty.
Note that flag waving is something to be accused of.
And that's what really burns their tails, American patriotism -- the ultimate evil.
(Even though they claim out of the other side of their mouths that there's no such thing as absolute good or evil).
American flag waving that's what has to be stamped out. And, as it happens, what disqualifies all of Sommers' arguments in their eyes. If it reflects well on the US it must be denied at all costs, true or not.
BTW, the article is worth reading in its entirety. It's a pip.
from the Philadelphia Daily News
http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/20070313_SOME_WOMEN_MORE_EQUAL_THAN_OTHERS.html
SOME WOMEN MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS
This is a pretty good exposition of what America's largest feminist organization is really about....
The feminists are only interested in attacking white males and aborting life in the womb.
Their whole agenda is to usurp what God did not give them. They'll carry placards and march en masse to promote more baby-murdering in the name of right to choose (to murder), but can't be bothered to advocate for anyting else.
The legalization of abortion has cost this country in countless ways including the need for illegal immigration to bolster the U.S. population to compete with China, India, Brazil.
When the fighting starts, remember to thank these same feminazihags for their service to their commie, wobbly masters.
I was particularly struck by this section of the article that points out the utter ridiculousness of western feminists trying to compare the "struggles" of "feminists" in the west with what Muslim women are struggling with:
“Eve Ensler, lionized author of The Vagina Monologues, makes the same point somewhat differently in her popular lecture "Afghanistan is Everywhere":
"We all have different forms of enforced burqas. Every culture has it. Whether it's an idea or a fascist tyranny of what women are supposed to look like--so that women go to the extremes of liposuction, anorexia and bulimia to achieve it--or whether it's being covered in a burqa, we all have deep, profound, ongoing daily forms of oppression."
Referring to Ensler further, the author notes:
“Ensler has firsthand knowledge of the unique horrors of Islamic gender fascism. But her "feminist theory" obliterates distinctions between what goes on in Afghanistan and what goes on in Beverly Hills:
"I went from Beverly Hills where women were getting vaginal laser rejuvenation surgery--paying four thousand dollars to get their labias trimmed to make them symmetrical because they didn't like the imbalance. And I flew to Kenya where [women were working to stop] the practice of female genital mutilation. And I said to myself, "What is wrong with this picture?"
“A better question is: What is wrong with Eve Ensler? These two surgical phenomena are completely different in both scale and purpose. ……. The women who elect laser surgery, moreover, are voluntarily seeking relief from physical irregularities that cause them embarrassment or inhibit their sexual enjoyment. The practitioners of genital mutilation, in countries such as Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia, believe that removing sensitive parts of the anatomy is the best way to control young women's sexual urges and assure chastity.”"
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I simply don't know how to convey my contempt for Eve Ensler here and the significant number of so-called western feminists that she presumably speaks for. It reminds me of a study I read about some time ago commissioned by Duke U. that cited the deep suffering that so many Duke women experience in their attempts to be perfect. It's all such a burden you see. You have to be smart! And you have to be thin! (And one might add - you have to have the perfect tight vagina to boot!) - to make it in this world! AND you have to make all that perfection seem so effortless!
It's all so unfair! Feel my pain! Experience the oppression!
Good God. Anyone with half a brain knows that most women are well – average. Average looks, average weight, average sized vaginas. Statistically speaking, it’s just a normal bell curve on any given trait.
No – these sorts of affluent western women who complain about the oppression that causes them to have to become anorexic and bulimic and undergo liposuction etc. in order to be perfect , aren’t feminists at all. Rather, it’s abundantly clear that they want to be BETTER than other women. They want to be smarter and thinner and prettier and have a tighter vagina than the average woman. They aren’t oppressed at all. Rather, they are by and large extremely competitive women who are actually in competition with other women and want to best them. And yet they have the sheer gall to blame their desire to come out on top, what is in fact an aggressive and actually hostile stance to other women - on men!
I don’t blame them for their competitive spirit. Hey, that’s life. Human beings are competitive, women included. What disgusts me is the fact that rather than being honest about the fact that they want to “win” as women in competition with other women, they mask their aggressive aims towards other women in the language of victimhood and blame men for it (even as they are the ones who, through their perfectionism and competition with other women to be thinner and more youthful, end up raising the bar for all women). But far worse than that little sleight of self-deception, is the fact that they are so utterly narcissistic as to equate their competitive struggles with other women in the west, with the very real struggles of Muslim women to escape REAL male oppression! It is beyond sickening!
Caroline:
Astutely observed.
I wonder about the connection in "feminist" psychology, between competitiveness (and the will to power) on one hand, and the sense of victimhood and envy on the other.
Certainly the observations you make would seem to give western "feminists" more in common with the mentality of the jihaddi, than with the women they oppress.
I consider myself a feminist, and I'm here. I don't understand women who enjoy all the benefits previous generations of feminists got for us (education, votes, legal equality etc) but who despise the very term 'feminism'.
If you don't think feminists did great things for us, presumably you don't vote, have a male guardian as your legal representative and never bothered with university, hmmm??
As for the idea of not controlling one's fertility: what, back to endless pregnancies, ill-health, misery, and vast overpopulation! Well, I guess any woman who really wants to be constantly pregnant can manage that. Funny that so few want to, even in Catholic countries.
Note that the religious Christian lobby have to dive in with their propoganda, as usual entirely missing the point. "Don't let them oppress women and not give them the right to choose, let us do instead, it's what Christ would have wanted."
Feminism is tied tightly to a general Left Wing veiwpoint, the reason they are so silent(in my opinion), is because the Left have, whilst simultaneously denying race, ethnicity and culture, elevated it to a venerable, almost worshipful status. It's become, ironically, given the religious squabbles of the third world, almost a cult. Cognitive dissonance taken to an almost fanatical extreme.
I don't know why I'm surprised, there silence over Stalin and various other butchers sets the precedent, but still I am. Perhaps it's their continual bleating about injustice, whilst simultaneously ignoring injustice if it's caused by primitive societies. But then we all know, they love primitive societies, they're all so just so colourful.
Perhaps Middle Class feminists are class ridden, but isn't that what equalities all about, the right to be as bigotted and small minded as the next guy?
I agree with Lili - everything she said.
The "vast overpopulation" of Muslims, because Muslim females are slaves and forced to start breeding at puberty to "manufacture men," as Muhammed said, scares me.
Majority rules. Somehow we have to stop the Muslims' demographic conquest.
Most of the feminazis I have encountered are so absolutely brainwashed there is no hope for them as human beings. They are simply going to throw themselves into the mouth of the Islamic beast believing to their last breath that it is America that is the evildoer of the ages.
A tragic spectacle. One need only observe the likes of Jane Fonda or Gloria Steinem to discern the scope of the tragedy.
Pythagoras - I'm a feminist and completely opposite to what you said.
Believe me, I don't want any "Islamic beast," - you can take that to the bank.
You should read Phyllis Chesler's latest book, "The Death of Feminism."
Seems to me that folks who believe in full legal protection for the constitutional rights of women, as an extension of proper American individualism and dedication to rights, need to be differentiated clearly from those people who promote statism, socialism, antagonism towards men and anti-Americanism generally under the banner of "feminism".
I'd say Phyllis Schlafly would be a good example of the first group and the jokers and losers at Ms. magazine (does that still exist?) are examples of the second group.
Clearly people who are fighting the jihaddis can, indeed must make common cause with the first, and indeed, can hardly be differentiated in any significant way from them.
But as to the second group, it seems to me that by omission or commission they will be making common cause with the jihaddis and care not a tinker's damn about the fate of women oppressed by mohammedans.
They are as blind to the dangers the jihaddis present as were the communists that fought alongside of the Khomeinists, only to be exiled, jailed, tortured and murdered once the Shah was gone.
I think the primary onus is on women who are rational defenders of human rights as they apply to women, to differentiate themselves, in a visibly clear and obvious way, from the rip-off artists of the feminist left.
==============
And so now tell me, are we in a situation where we are about to begin debating what is the real meaning feminism ? ;-)
One of the hallmarks of feminism is the right to a safe and "legal" abortion. (Remember, slavery was one time "legal" in this country.) But legalizing abortion did not make me free. In fact it has succeeded in enslaving millions of American women, who can't get over the fact that they've killed their own child. It is a ticking time bomb and there are walking wounded everywhere in the United States, with no one to talk to and no way to get it out. These women are told constantly that it is their right to have an abortion, but no one told them they would feel the inexplicable loss and guilt that comes along in the aftermath. And since it is not fashionable to admit that anyone might feel bad about having had one, these women suffer in silence.
Abortion has also caused a most contentious debate in our country. For those of us that feel strongly that life must be protected, especially life that cannot protect itself because it is too young to do so, we've been sold down the river and told just to live with it. I'm told that while it is completely against my beliefs and everything I stand for, I get the privilege of paying for it with my tax dollars. Well, just like I can't live with jihad or as a dhimmi, I can't stop working to make abortion illegal because others who are not born yet deserve their God given right to be born.
Feminism puts forth the belief that we are all equal, except some are more equal than others. I say that's B.S. I am not where I am today because some rebels in the 1960's burned their bras and DEMANDED equal rights. They get the credit for the change in our society but that's a bunch of garbage too. During WWII when the men went off to war, the women stayed behind and still took care of the kids but also built the bombs and planes and ammunition. They got out of the house as a necessity and found that they liked it and then continued. As far as going to "university" women were going to school a long time before the Kent State shootings. Who do you think was teaching all those kids in the little red school house?
I'm so tired of self proclaimed feminists telling me how lucky I am that Bella and Gloria and Betty are the reason that I enjoy the status and privileges that I have at this stage in my life. I have those things because I've worked for them and because whenever someone said I couldn't do something I just did it anyway.
But this article posed the question of why western feminists are not helping less fortunate women in other parts of the world and the answer is the same as always, because it isn't about equal rights for women, it's about building a power base , in the name of protecting women's rights, that will feed their need to be in power terminally and the rest of us be damned. Don't even think for one minute that the feminist movement speaks for the majority of American women. Ask them and you'll see that it doesn't.
This thread is obviously dead but these DW threads tend to get buried a whole lot slower than the JW threads so before the thread gets buried, I would like to clarify the point I was clumsily trying to make above.
When I take issue with the likes of Eve Ensler equating plastic surgery among women in the west with the oppression of the burka - what I am trying to convey by pointing out the "female competition" angle, is that this supposed "fascistic" control of women's bodies in the west isn't about male oppression. Rather, it's something that has been created by women in the west. The evidence that all these sorts of things that feminists cite as "objectification" of the female body are being driven by women rather than men - labial surgery, anorexia, bulimia, (and one could add breast implants, skimpy clothing etc.) - is that it has all completely coincided with women's freedom's - all of it has exploded since the start of the sexual revolution that freed women in the west from male tyranny! It's not at all the same thing as enforcing the covering of a woman's body with the burka.
To make such a claim would be like making the claim that men in the west who hit the gym everyday and work their butts off all day to make money in order to buy the hottest car in order to get a trophy wife on their arm - are the victims of "female oppression". Anyone would laugh at that claim, obviously because any man has a choice about whether to play the game or not. But it's really no different for western women now. They have a real choice about whether to play the game or not. The tyranny of female perfectionism, in its modern incarnation, cannot be laid at the hands of men, as it's obviously something which has exploded AFTER the emancipation of western women. It appears to be a consequence of women now having to deal with the kinds of standards that men have always dealt with in the public realm. But it's women who are driving it - not men. It's part of the whole movement of women's liberation that tells women that they can "have it all" - that they can be smart and conquer the workplace and also that they can be thin and youthful forever (something that men can much more naturally accomplish). But the reality I think, is that men are much more forgiving of women's imperfections, especially about the very sorts of things that Ensler cites as evidence of "male oppression". No. That sort of perfectionism is driven by women themselves. I think it is thoroughly dishonest to blame men for it.
But what is really problematic, is that a Muslim outsider would agree with Ensler's take on western women - that they are "oppressed" and "objectified" by western men. And so their solution to that would be to slap western women in a burka because Muslim men supposedly "respect" women by doing that, while western men "objectify" women (as Ensler appears to argue with her misguided supposedly feminist theories), which is what angers me so much! The likes of western feminists like Ensler are handing the ammunition to our enemy, by wrongly attributing to male oppression - what are actually the fruits of women's freedom (which includes the freedom to play the social game and up the competitive ante among women, same as its always been the case for men - or NOT).
Well, it's a big topic to explore. And I think that western women's confusions about it all are partly responsible for their amazing silence about Islamic oppression of women. Maybe they are too confused really to respond and that explains their silence. But it really presses my buttons (as if one couldn't tell!) to accuse western men of misogyny and to hold them responsible for western women's preoccupation with their bodies as if this were somehow equivalent to the Muslim male oppression of Muslim females, because it's not!
To elaborate on Caroline's point.
Size zero models, catwalks, and fashion, if they cause dietary disorders in women, by creating a image of a slight frame for women to aspire to( which is in itself debatable) is a problem fuelled by women.
Even a cursory look at a porn mag, or movie, will show you the kinds of female figure that men aspire to, and it's not generally a ultra skinny one.
If anorexia is caused by body image, it's a body image promoted by women for other women.
There is one simple correlation though. The more free and liberated the society, with regards to sexuality(immoral?); the very things that the christian and islamic lobbies are always fulminating about in their tight arse way, the better off women are: the more rights they have, and the more equality they have. Take away the things that "objectify" women, as the feminist lesbian social contructionist lobby want, and the more rapes and child molestation you get, you just don't get it reported. That's why the Catholic church covered up pedophiles for years, not because Christ told them to, and why Asian immigrant societies do also.
Do put it simply, failing to allow sexual license for women, equals sexual license for men, whether the woman in question likes it or not.
Ian
Ian: "If anorexia is caused by body image, it's a body image promoted by women for other women."
It's also interesting to contemplate that the 2 decades in the 20th century when female thinness was especially celebrated - the 1920's (which ushered in a big change from the previous ideal of the zaftig figure) and the 1960's (when Twiggy was the fashion icon) were both associated with big jumps in women's freedoms - the right to vote was granted in 1920 and the 60's of course brought in birth control. By contrast, a decade like the 50's, which is associated with a more traditional female role, is characterized by a fuller female figure. As to the popularity of breast implants, one big reason for that is that really skinny women don't normally have very large breasts so they resort to adding back in artificially what they dieted off in the first place. You're also correct about the disparity between the male and the female ideal of women's bodies. Studies have shown that women falsely believe that men's ideal for women is thinner than it actually is.
I was just comtemplating further the observation I noted above, namely the apparent fact that the ideal of the thin woman appears to coincide historically with decades in which women actually made great gains in their independence and I was wondering - why would that be the case? And then it hit me. It's because the ideal of thinness is one which de-emphasizes the traditional role of women as mother. The drive towards thinness involves getting rid of the breasts and hips and stomach and thighs that go along with female fertility.(I guess women must have sensed that that was going too far as so many women are trying to stick the breasts back on, artifically if need be). But in any case, who exactly was behind the movement to de-emphasize woman's traditional maternal role in society ? Was it men? No - it was the feminists! So now we apparently have the rather ironic situation of feminists like Ensler implying that western men are fascists for trying to enforce an impossible physical ideal upon women that was actually created by feminism itself! I'm not someone who has actually read much feminist literature, which accounts for the fact that I'm just trying to think some of this through on this thread. I merely know as a woman who has spent my life in the west that western men are not predominantly a bunch of controlling misogynists. And so I know something false when I see it, especially something like Ensler's statement (the title of her popular lecture apparently) that "Afghanistan is everywhere". No. It's not.
I'm not anti-feminist in making these statements. As a western woman I very much appreciate the gains of feminism. But it's probably also the case that western women are very much conflicted about their desire to have it all and it doesn't help to dishonestly retreat into "victim" mode instead of being honest about what western women themselves are responsible for - and where they may now have prisons that are essentially of their own making. (It's going too far to even call it a prison as women in the west are entirely free to make a choice about whether to work or stay home and have children, whether to be thin or fat, masculine or feminine and so on). But that sort of confusion at the very least isn't terribly helpful when we are facing an enemy that really and truly does oppress women.
darcy:
I appreciate your speaking up. But I believe you to be in the minority. Most feminists that I have encountered (and see in the media) are completely left-wing, socialist-leaning, and very vocally anti-American. Therefore Islam wins out over western democracy with the feminists (even if it is through default and even if many feminists such as yourself don't care for this outcome).
I wish I saw feminists sticking up for America. But I don't-- and I can't say that I ever really remember seeing them do so.