For the cover story of its May 21 issue, the Weekly Standard featured a brilliant piece by self-styled “equity” feminist Christina Hoff Sommers in which the controversial author of Who Stole Feminism? and The War Against Boys examines the feminist movement in the Muslim world, comparing and contrasting it with the feminist movement in the US (from its largely unacknowledged traditionalist roots to its current incarnation as propagator of dangerous social engineering policies and largely impenetrable—and at times simply ludicrous—academic cant).
From “The Subjection of Islamic Women And the fecklessness of American feminism”:
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.
It is not that American feminists are indifferent to the predicament of Muslim women. Nor do they completely ignore it. For a brief period before September 11, 2001, many women’s groups protested the brutalities of the Taliban. But they have never organized a full-scale mobilization against gender oppression in the Muslim world. The condition of Muslim women may be the most pressing women’s issue of our age, but for many contemporary American feminists it is not a high priority. Why not?
The reasons are rooted in the worldview of the women who shape the concerns and activities of contemporary American feminism. That worldview is–by tendency and sometimes emphatically—antagonistic toward the United States, agnostic about marriage and family, hostile to traditional religion, and wary of femininity. The contrast with Islamic feminism could hardly be greater.
[…]
One reason [for the differences between the competing views of feminism] is that many feminists are tied up in knots by multiculturalism and find it very hard to pass judgment on non-Western cultures. They are far more comfortable finding fault with American society for minor inequities (the exclusion of women from the Augusta National Golf Club, the “underrepresentation” of women on faculties of engineering) than criticizing heinous practices beyond our shores. The occasional feminist scholar who takes the women’s movement to task for neglecting the plight of foreigners is ignored or ruled out of order [as in the cases of Martha Nussbaum, Phyllis Chesler, Cathy Young, and Hoff Sommers herself, among other apostates]
[…] In the literature of women’s studies, the United States is routinely portrayed as if it were just as oppressive as any country in the developing world. Here is a typical example of what one finds in popular women’s studies textbooks (from Women: A Feminist Perspective, now in its fifth edition):
The word “terrorism” invokes images of furtive organizations. . . . But there is a different kind of terrorism, one that so pervades our culture that we have learned to live with it as though it were the natural order of things. Its target is females--of all ages, races, and classes. It is the common characteristic of rape, wife battery, incest, pornography, harassment. . . . I call it “sexual terrorism.”
The primary focus is on the “terror” at home. Katha Pollitt, a columnist at the Nation, talks of “the common thread of misogyny” connecting Christian Evangelicals to the Taliban:
It is important to remember just how barbarous and cruel the Taliban were. Yet it is also important not to use their example to obscure or deny the common thread of misogyny that connects them with Focus on the Family and the Christian Coalition. . . .
In a similar vein, journalist Barbara Ehrenreich characterizes Christian evangelical movements as “Christian Wahhabism,” using the name of the sect that is the state religion of Saudi Arabia and the inspiration for Osama bin Laden. 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.
On most American campuses there are small coteries of self-described “vagina warriors” [hi, Amanda!] looking for ways to expose and make much of the ravages of patriarchy. Feminists like Pollitt, Ehrenreich, and Ensler can cite several decades of women’s studies research supporting the charge that our culture is ruinous for women. Many scholars—including Camille Paglia, Daphne Patai, Noretta Koertge, Diana Furchtgott-Roth, Christine Rosen, and myself—have questioned the quality of the findings and warned that the studies are twisted and unreliable. But academic feminists rarely engage with such criticism. They dismiss it as “backlash.”
Soon after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Katha Pollitt wrote the introduction to a book called Nothing Sacred: Women Respond to Religious Fundamentalism and Terror. It aimed to show that reactionary religious movements everywhere are targeting women. Says Pollitt:
In Bangladesh, Muslim fanatics throw acid in the faces of unveiled women; in Nigeria, newly established shariah courts condemn women to death by stoning for having sex outside of wedlock. . . . In the United States, Protestant evangelicals and fundamentalists have forged a powerful right-wing political movement focused on banning abortion, stigmatizing homosexuality and limiting young people’s access to accurate information about sex.
Pollitt casually places “limiting young people’s access to accurate information about sex” and opposing abortion on the same plane as throwing acid in women’s faces and stoning them to death. Her hostility to the United States renders her incapable of distinguishing between private American groups that stigmatize gays and foreign governments that hang them. She has embraced a feminist philosophy that collapses moral categories in ways that defy logic, common sense, and basic decency.
Eve Ensler takes this line of reasoning to equally ludicrous lengths. In 2003 she gave a lecture at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University in which, like Pollitt, she claimed that women everywhere are oppressed and subordinate:
I think that the oppression of women is universal. I think we are bonded in every single place of the world. I think the conditions are exactly the same [her emphasis]. I think the nature of the oppression—whether it’s acid burning in one country, or female genital mutilation in another, or gang rapes in the parking lots in high schools of the suburbs—it’s the same idea. . . . The systematic global oppression of women is completely across the globe.
Though Ensler’s perspective is warped, her courage and desire to help are commendable. She went to Afghanistan during the reign of the Taliban and smuggled out now-famous footage of a terrified woman in a burqa being executed at close range by a man with an AK-47. 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 number of American women who undergo “vaginal labial rejuvenation” is minuscule: There were 793 such procedures in 2005, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. By contrast, a World Health Organization 2000 fact sheet reports: “Today, the number of girls and women who have undergone female genital mutilation is estimated at between 100 and 140 million. It is estimated that each year, a further 2 million girls are at risk of undergoing FGM.”
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. Genital cutting causes great pain and suffering and often permanently impairs a female’s capacity for sexual pleasure. Thus, the intentions of the handful of American adults who choose labial surgery for themselves are exactly the opposite of those of the African parents and elders who insist on cutting the genitals of millions of girls.
Given her capacity for conceptual confusion, it is perhaps not surprising that Ensler cites “gang rape in a suburban high school parking lot” to show how women in America are menaced. Yes, that is an atrocity. But it happens rarely, and America’s allegedly “misogynist” culture reacts to it with revulsion and severe punishments.
And there, in a nutshell, is the difference: despite establishment feminists’ strained protestations to the contrary (which, for those who pay careful attention to such things, always turn on attempts to tie their ideological opponents’ beliefs and motivations to a patriarchal “mindset” that establishment feminists claim is either actively embraced or else institutionally insinuated), Americans aren’t rape apologists, and they do not react with casual indifference to institutionalized oppression, provided they believe it to exist. But for establishment feminists, the convenient fictions about “backlash,” “denial,” and “indoctrination”—as a means to dismiss their female critics—are effective precisely because they cannot be readily disproven, except through denial, which has already been indexed as a symptom of the pathology. Or to put it more plainly, denying that your opposition to contemporary feminist social prescriptions is based on concerns located outside those adopted by the feminist establisment is proof that you have either been colonized by the patriarchy, or else are actively aiding it.
Nice ideological work, if you can get it.
But, as Hoff Sommers goes on to show, it is not the kind of ideological position that interests Muslim feminists:
On February 20, 2007, a Pakistani women’s rights activist and provincial minister for social welfare, Zilla Huma Usman, was shot to death by a Muslim fanatic for not wearing a veil. And he had a second reason for killing her: She had encouraged girls in her community to take part in outdoor sports. The plight of women like Usman does not figure in NOW’s “Six Priority Items,” although Global Feminism is one of the 19 subjects it designates as “Other Important Issues.” NOW hardly mentions Muslim women, except in the context of the demand that the U.S. military withdraw from Iraq. So what sort of issue does the flagship feminist organization consider important?
NOW has just launched a 2007 “Love Your Body” calendar as part of its ongoing initiative of the same name. The body calendar warns of an increase in eating disorders and includes a photograph celebrating the shape of pears. There is also an image of the Statue of Liberty with the caption, “Give me your curves, your wrinkles, your natural beauty yearning to breathe free.” The calendar bears these inspiring words: “None of us is free until we are all free.”
To breathe free, college women are encouraged to organize “Love Your Body” evenings. NOW suggests they host “Indulgence” parties: “Invite friends over and encourage them to wear whatever makes them feel good–sweat suits, flip flops, pajamas–and serve delicious, decadent foods or silly snacks without the guilt. Urge everyone to come prepared to talk about their feelings and experiences.”
This is pathetic. To be sure, serious eating disorders afflict a small percentage of women. But much larger numbers suffer because poor eating habits and inactivity render them overweight, even obese. NOW should not be encouraging college girls to indulge themselves in ways detrimental to their well-being. Nor should it be using the language of human rights in discussing the weight problems of American women.
[…]
Hard-line feminists such as Seager, Pollitt, Ensler, the university gender theorists, and the NOW activists represent the views of only a tiny fraction of American women. Even among women who identify themselves as feminists (about 25 percent), they are at the radical extreme. But in the academy and in most of the major women’s organizations, the extreme is the mean. The hard-liners set the tone and shape the discussion. This is a sad state of affairs. Muslim women could use moral, intellectual, and material support from the West to improve their situation. But only a rational, reality-based women’s movement would be capable of actually helping. Women who think that looking like a pear is an essential human right are not valuable allies.
The good news is that Muslim women are not waiting around for Western feminists to rescue them. “Feminists in the West may fiddle while Muslim women are burning,” wrote Manhattan Institute scholar Kay Hymowitz in a prescient 2003 essay, “but in the Muslim world itself there is a burgeoning movement to address the miserable predicament of the second sex.” The number of valiant and resourceful Muslim women who are devoting themselves to the cause of greater freedom grows each and every day.
They have a heritage to build on. There have been organized women’s movements in countries such as Iran, Lebanon, and Egypt for more than a century. And many women in Turkey, Morocco, and Tunisia already enjoy almost Western levels of freedom. But as radical Islam tightens its grip in places like Iran and rural Pakistan, and as it increasingly threatens Muslim women everywhere, even some devoutly religious women are quietly organizing to resist. Mehrangiz Kar, an Iranian human rights lawyer, now a researcher at Harvard Law School, predicts that “a feminist explosion is well on its way.”
Islamic feminists believe that women’s rights are compatible with Islam rightly understood. One of their central projects is progressive religious reform. Through careful translation and interpretation of the Koran and other sacred texts, scholars challenge interpretations that have been used to justify sexist customs. They point out that forced veiling, arranged marriages, and genital cutting are rooted in tribal paganism and are nowhere enjoined by the Koran. Where the Koran explicitly permits a practice such as the physical chastisement of wives by husbands, the feminist exegetes try to show that, like slavery, the practice is anachronistic and incompatible with the true spirit of the faith. This kind of interpretation of scripture has been practiced by Jewish, Christian, and Islamic scholars for centuries. Now Islamic women want to play a part in it, and nothing in Islamic law, they believe, prohibits their doing so.
[…]
The feminism that is quietly surging in the Muslim world is quite different from its contemporary counterpart in the United States. Islamic feminism is faith-based, family-centered, and well-disposed towards men. This is feminism in its classic and most effective form, as students of women’s emancipation know. American women won the vote in the early 20th century through the combined forces of progressivism and conservatism. Radical thinkers like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Victoria Woodhull, and Alice Paul played an indispensable role, but it was traditionalists like Frances Willard (president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union) and Carrie Chapman Catt (founder of the League of Women Voters) who brought the cause of women’s suffrage into the mainstream.
In particular, Frances Willard–today an almost forgotten figure–was beloved and immensely famous at the time of her death in 1898. She had a gift for reaching out to devoutly religious women and showing them how political equality was consistent with piety. This moved men too. She was critical in turning the once elite suffrage movement into a groundswell.
Today’s feminists have anathematized Willard because she held two conventional views they find intolerable: She regarded “womanliness” as a virtue and a source of strength, power, and beauty, not as a socially constructed domestic prison; and she advanced women’s rights within, not in opposition to, the framework of traditional religion. These two traits are precisely the ones that gave Willard mass appeal in her own day and that make her philosophy relevant to women struggling for their rights inside highly traditional Islamic societies.
In Search of Islamic Feminism, a 1998 book by University of Texas Middle Eastern studies professor Elizabeth Warnock Fernea, offers a rare glimpse of Muslim women activists. In Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Turkey, and Iraq, Fernea kept encountering what she calls “family feminism.” Several of the women she interviewed reject what they see as divisiveness in today’s American feminism. As one Iraqi women’s advocate, Haifa Abdul Rahman, told her, “We see feminism in America as dividing women from men, separating women from the family. This is bad for everyone.” Fernea was not only struck by the family orientation of the women she encountered, she was also awed by their feminine graciousness. The Italian novelist and essayist Italo Calvino once made a list of requirements for a successful liberation movement. Almost as an afterthought, he added, “There must also be beauty.” There is beauty in Islamic feminism.
slamic feminism has some celebrated adherents, among them the Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi, the Iranian Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, and the Canadian journalist and human rights activist Irshad Manji. In her 2004 feminist manifesto, The Trouble with Islam Today, Manji writes, “We Muslims . . . are in crisis and we are dragging the rest of the world with us. If ever there was a moment for an Islamic reformation, it’s now.”
Manji is right: In particular, a feminist reformation could be as dangerous to the dreams of the jihadists as any military assault by the West. After all, the oppression of women is not an incidental feature of the societies that foster terrorism. It is a linchpin of the system of social control that the jihadists are fighting to impose worldwide. Women’s equality is as incompatible with radical Islam’s plan for domination and submission as it is with polygamy. Women freely moving about, expressing their opinions, and negotiating their relationships with men from a position of equal dignity rather than servitude are a moderating, civilizing force in any society. Female scholars voicing their opinions without inhibition would certainly puncture some cherished jihadist fantasies.
For those who are looking toward an Islamic Enlightenment—or, to put it in terms less offensive to those who would decry such a wish as a bit of western imperialist longing, for those who are looking for a paradigm change, in which a new viral meme gains traction and mitigates the current orthodox narrative of Islam guarded fiercely by radicals and accepted by a genuinely partriarchal culture—support of Muslim feminism is imperative: like the introduction of individual freedom, pluralism, and representative government into the Muslim world, it is a necessary precondition of the move away from a social order that accepts terrorism as a legitimate (and even heroic) “religious” act.
For establishment American feminists, however, the exoticism of the Other—coupled with a feminist movement in Muslim culture that runs counter to their own understanding of feminism as it currently exists in the academy and the salons—allows them to regard the struggle from a safe ideological distance; and while they give lip service to the plight of Muslim women, one gets the sense, at times, that they’d rather use the oppression of women in the Muslim world as an awkward and strained corollary to “oppression” here at home than to galvanize their forces in defense of a movement that would promote the kind of traditionalist feminism that they find so abhorrent when preached by feminist sell-outs—“anti-feminists,” to some—in the West.
Notes Hoff Sommers:
Is an Islamic feminist reformation a realistic hope? In the last speech of her life, in 1906, American feminist pioneer Susan B. Anthony famously told her audience, “Failure is impossible.” Anthony, however, was formed by and worked within a liberal democracy founded on the proposition that all men are created equal. Even when the American women’s movement was at its most controversial in the 19th and early 20th centuries, its exponents, with few exceptions, risked only ridicule or shunning. Today’s Muslim feminists face imprisonment, lashing, disfigurement, and murder. The leader of the radical wing of the 19th-century American women’s movement, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was a religious skeptic and harshly critical of sexism in the Bible. Her views were met by social antagonism and stern disapproval from more conservative feminists–all of it civil and peaceable. Stanton’s present-day counterpart, Somali-born Dutch author Ayaan Hirsi Ali (now my colleague at the American Enterprise Institute), is a religious skeptic who is harshly critical of sexism in the Koran. Her views are met by violence and death threats from Muslim fanatics. She has to be escorted by bodyguards.
Success, then, is not certain. […]
[…]
I asked Daisy Kahn, executive director of the American Society for Muslim Advancement […] how Americans can help. Her answer was simple: “Support us. Embrace our struggle.” That is already happening, though mostly outside feminist circles. There are scores of independent organizations—groups like Freedom House, Global Giving, the Independent Women’s Forum, Project Ijtihad, Equality Now, and the Initiative for Inclusive Security—that have begun to work in effective ways to support Muslim women. Such groups, both liberal and conservative, may not identify themselves as feminist, but they embody the ideals and principles of the classical, humane feminism of Stanton, Anthony, and Willard.
Those “First Wave” reformers made history. Their classical “equity” feminism was predominant in the United States long before the current band of activists and theorists transformed and debased it beyond recognition. Their understanding of equality was never at war with femininity, never at war with men, or with family, or with logic or common sense. It is alive again in Islamic feminism.
The women who constitute the American feminist establishment today are destined to play little role in the battle for Muslim women’s rights. Preoccupied with their own imagined oppression, they can be of little help to others—especially family-centered Islamic feminists. The Katha Pollitts and Eve Enslers, the vagina warriors and university gender theorists—these are women who cannot distinguish between free and unfree societies, between the Taliban and the Promise Keepers, between being forced to wear a veil and being socially pressured to be slender and fit. Their moral obtuseness leads many of them to regard helping Muslim women as “colonialist” or as part of a “hegemonic” “civilizing mission.” It disqualifies them as participants in this moral fight.
In reality, of course, it is the Islamic feminists themselves who are on a civilizing mission—one that is vital to their own welfare and to the welfare of an anxious world. A reviewer of Irshad Manji’s manifesto celebrating Islamic feminism aptly remarked, “This could be Osama bin Laden’s worst nightmare.” Ipso facto, it should be our fondest dream. And if, along the way, Islamic feminism were to have a wholesome influence on American feminism, so much the better.
Precisely. Contemporary establishment feminism is at odds with the kind of traditionalist feminism practiced by those of us who find ourselves de facto feminists simply by virtue of espousing classical liberal ideals. And given that the Muslim feminist movement closely resembles the “equity” movement that establishment feminists go out of their way to marginalize and ridicule here at home (in favor of an activist feminism that is less interested in a reaching a level playing field than in continuing the “fight” itself—something it must do, given that it defines itself by the perpetual continuation of its activism), contemporary establishment feminists are, by way of their indifference, largely a non-factor in the most important worldwide feminist struggle of our time.
I blame the patriarchy.
Sorry to make this all about me.
David Thompson has some thoughts on this as well.
But, I mean, shouldn’t we allow women their frivolities? I think it’s ungentlemanly to point them out.
One day I’ll put up an original post. And people will cheer.
Geez, Jeff. I think you took the analysis way further than David did.
What a day ! First, a virtual cock-slapping, followed up by a rhetorical labia-slapping. Lord help us all once Amanda catches wind of this.
ME!
Question,
As our pop culture spreads throughout the world are Western feminists actually making it harder for feminists from other cultures, like Islamic femenists to take on the mantle of feminists? I mean if your culture celebrates family life and a strict adherence to a moral law (no matter how vague the principles) and yet the women you would look to for guidance, the women who should be the caretakers of a mature movement, are out of their freaking minds, are you even talking about the same thing?
Feminism is broken and irrelevant in our culture, academic feminism is a full-employment program for the perpetually pissed-off. I’ll believe that women are still oppressed in the US when I stop working for one, and when they take Shrek 3 back to the editing room and make it a movie my four boys would actually want to see.
I’m glad you asked my opinion though, I was beginning to think this site was all about you.
Mantle? That’s like, soooooo patriarchal.
With the willingness of America’s vagina warriors to perform at the latest International ANSWER paid peace rally or other America bashing occasion, it should be an easy task to come up with a catchy slogan to generate support among American womyn for Islamic feminism. After witnessing the lack of complaint over the inconvenience caused by increased airport security measures, we know that no sacrifice is too great for the American vagina victims.
The possibilities are endless:
Walk a mile in my burqa (Get pledges per mile walked)
I’ll take a beating for you (American womyn sign up to take an ass whoopin’ for a muslim woman)
Take a jigsaw to my genitals for global gynopower (self explanatory, but great t-shirts and bracelets)
I think the best part of articles such as this one, other than the author’s ability to help us see through the fog, is that we get to learn of the organizations that really are trying to help. I had not heard of them for the most part, but now I have a better understanding of who really deserves support.
Were that only true.
Certainly some Vagina Warriors are all about how “fantastic” it is to see burka clad womyn as part of the fashion police of Iran even if it was “depressing” to see them beating the shit out of other women.
Yeah, yeah.
Ah yes, the “..and in America, you lynch Negroes” communist propaganda all over again.
A great post, but you could have just said “Drop the ‘femi’ and replace it with ‘gender commu’” and achieved the same thing in nine words.
And there’s the multicultural twist again.
They used to apologize for the communists.
This led them to apologizing for various Third World tin horn communist clients.
This led to apologizing for anything barbarous coming from those parts of the world.
After the Soviet Empire fell apart, that apologizing for Turd World barbarism was what remained. Combine it with reflexive anti-Americanism, and voila.
You’re being much, much too generous.
See those girls43? (yeah) No you don’t. Those are Womyn-ists…call them girls, and they’ll rip your dick off.
One of the most heartbreaking, but also inspiring, places I went in Parwan was to the Charikar Women’s Center. Started out as a place to help widows, and silently started helping women who had fled abuse that was going in a soon-to-be-fatal direction.
They had almost nothing – a partly banged up building and some basic furishings. Our Task Force helped in what ways we could, but I wish I could have done more. Very brave women there…
When I see pronouncements like the ones you highlighted above, Jeff, my blood damn near boils.
BINGO!
This is why I love this place.
I beg to differ, LMC. It’s broken, certainly. But it’s hardly irrelevant. In fact, it’s dangerous.
Pablo,
I probably shouldn’t have said irrelevant now that I think of it. I’ve spent 16 of the last 20 years of my working life under the direct supervision of women. It’s very relevant.
I don’t know if this modern “feminism” is dangerous, but it is kinda silly. And as Jeff says, it describes itself in mostly impenetrable jargon.
But at least they can spell.
Pablo
Feminism where it is indistinguishable from Leftism is dangerous
However, “feminism” from a Life, Liberty, Pursuit of Happiness POV is relevant and necessary.
I consider myself a feminist, without regard to what the Mandys/Jills/et al have to say about my “authenticity”.
I know this discussion has been done long and hard here, but I consider what you’re talking about to be humanism, and I’m down with it. By and large, the VW’s have taken “feminism” and run away with it, in a manner similar to what’s happened to being a liberal.
You slave to the patriarchy, you.
It’s semantics really, but when people like CHS and Cathy Young and Wendy McElroy and yourself are considered traitors to something, that something is “feminism” as it exists today.
We can all get along. Just not with those assholes.
tw: also69
Now cut that out, Jeff!
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…
I LOVE this.
I’m not, by any means or stretch of the imagination, the embodiment of any feminine ideal. I’m pudgy, short-waisted, long-nosed, indifferent to fashion, and not terribly skilled with makeup and hairstyling.
And yet, this “fascist tyranny” has done nothing to me. No one throws acid on me for not being thin, I don’t get gang-raped as punishment for not obsessing over shoes, and no honor killing looms when I have to buy the next size larger pants than last year.
Besides, the “fascist tyranny” is imposed more by other women than by men. Women don’t dress to impress menâ€â€who only notice a dress for what it doesn’t coverâ€â€they dress to impress and intimidate other women.
It killed me no end to hear these university feminists, unquestionably some of the most privileged women in the history of the world, continue to whine about what they don’t have. They’d go on and on about “what the Latino woman wants,” when I knew from having spoken to dozens of them in their homes that what the wanted was for their husbands to be faithful to them, not beat them, for their kids to grow up safe and happy.
Uncoupling woman from the family is not helpful to women. Those women who prefer not to marry and reproduce are welcome to chose that path, but their catcalls at those who do is revolting. Some “pro-choice” position that is.
You know when someone has gone over the edge when they persist in straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel.
Americans aren’t rape apologists, and they do
theynot react with casual indifference to institutionalized oppression, provided they believe it to exist.Jeff, is this the correct meaning of the sentence? I was confuzzled.
LMC, just spend some time with VAWA and Title IV-D. Or sit in on some divorce proceedings.
It’s not only dangerous, it’s also very expensive.
Vintage Goldstein. Another reason why doing what you do works, Jeff. Irrefutable, rational, reasonable, and realistic.
(Except, natcherly, by a pithy pagetop-left quote from some moron feminazi blogger about, oddly, the hoped and yearned for stupidity at pw. Because questioning PC is, well, not smart or something.)
Yes, this is a pretty good summary of why I’m not a “feminist”. Because if I am a feminist, I’m one in the spirit of Islamic feminism; there’s nothing wrong (IMO) in “socially constructed” gender roles that celebrate the talents and biological predispositions of women provided they’re not also about letting men beat the bejeezus out of us, take our money, and keep us in the kitchen barefoot and pregnant.
This also brings to mind one of the bloggers over at IWF lamenting that you could no longer be a housewife and a Democrat, since the two are rapidly becoming exclusive sets.
Sigh.
In other news, good stuff, Jeff. I have long disliked American feminism for these exact reasons, and my heart hurts for women who are actually suffering (rather than being exasperated by) for want of help from this politically correct idiocy.
I blame the patriarchy.
Scream and leap!
Remember when Mavis Leno was out shaking the bushes for RAWA?
It used to be chic to rail against the suffering of women in strict Islamic cultures. Now, BDS precludes it.
– What the Islamic world needs, is a popular, screedy, transgressive play celebrating the fact that women can think, drive cars, and even in some cases, learn to read or even to speak out loud in public… AND IT DOESN’T MEAN THEY ARE PROSTITUTES OR ZIONIST HO MONKEYS! Not *every* time they do it, anyhow. I know this is pretty brave, radical stuff for that part of the world. We could call the play The Medina Monologues. You could have women, y’know, talk. Or mime driving cars. Or pretend to read. It would be *crazy*. Noted film reviewer Adam Gadahn would say, “I’m exploding over this play!” Maybe Eve Ensler should get on it. Y’know, if she wasn’t afraid of getting all Pym Fortuyn-ed up for speaking Truth to Powerless.
– Dicentra, Pellegri – holy crap. How did we miss you two? I’ll send a note to Patriarchy Central Command, and we’ll send some oppressors out for you to fight, stat. Sorry we overlooked you. It won’t happen again. Next time I see you two gals, you’d better be hoisting the patriarchy on its own ineffective (yet still oppressive) phallic symbols. Do I make myself clear?
– Jeff, nice cutting and pasting work, bro. I’m betting your index finger needs a long, relaxing soak in the dew on the edge of a martini glass after that one. I recommend a 5:1 mixture, preferably Bombay Gin, with a little olive juice thrown in, just to demonstrate your reactionary tendencies. Maybe 6:1 if you’re feeling really right-ish. Think I may just skip the Vermouth altogether, to tell the truth… extra dry, baby. Extra dry.
Speaker? Is that you?
dicentra:
Oh, thank God. I thought I was the only one who noticed that. Since I’m a guy, I’m not really allowed to say it, but this is the absolute truth. Men don’t give a rat’s ass about who made a piece of clothing, or whether its color goes with your shoes; that’s a woman-to-woman status game.
The male equivalent is the toys our hobbies/work around the home require.
I spent some time reading and commenting over at Marcotte’s place the past few days and got to experience some of this narrow-minded feminism myself. I was called a “rape-apologist” and eventually banned when I failed to agree vociferously enough (my agreement was unwavering, I might add) about the prosecution of a gang-rape in California (the charges had been dropped by the female DA), suggesting that the truly liberated woman would prefer to arm herself with something more substantive than a turgid essay blasting the evil patriarchy…something like a nice Smith and Wesson revolver. Hell, every ex-beauty queen knows that.
At last glance, the thread was taking the usual tack of implicating – by our sins of omission – the entire male sex of supporting the “rape culture.” These folks
Yeah! Like Milwaukee drills and All-Clad pans! That’s also why I seldom polish my shoes, too.
Because those are precisely the same, aren’t they?
The sad part is that there are some who can’t even comprehend that I’m being sarcastic.
Fortunately, not many of those hang out here.
This Hoff Sommers article is a good companion piece to the Naomi Wolf post from Dan Collins yesterday. In that piece, Ms. Wolf experessed admiration, even a sense of awe, at a friend of hers, an Orthodox Jew, who covers her head in a scarf execpt when around her husband. She was placing this in the context of discretion and how it can create sexual mystery that is now absent from American culture. However, I couldn’t help but think how Second Wave feminists have spent decades railing against such behavior as being oppressive and the byproduct of fundamentalist beliefs that have no place in a “civilized” society. Now, she’s embracing it. There seems to be no limit to American feminists capacity for rationalization.
This is what pisses me off about these so-called feminists, these Enslers and Pollitts and Wolfs: they are so well-off, so middle-class white bread, so insulated from anything really bad, they indulge themselves thoughtlessly in the luxury of whining about their poor widdle feewings and their poor widdle twibuwations of living in the richest and most egalitarian society in all of history. And herstory, for that matter.
Bitches, one and all. I learned to speak the theory, got my doctorate in part of that trash (all the while knowing it was trash but playing the game, because I didn’t have the luxury of sitting on my ass, maybe TA-ing a couple of sections for beer and sex-aid money) and I know that all thier verbiage masks a great and awful emptiness of mind and experience.
And as for Marcotte: Nobody cares what goes on in and around that frumious bandersnatch, least of all me. I’m a hell of a lot more concerned about “FGM,” a nice set of initials that masks the ripping and tearing and scarring of women’s flesh. Steinem, Walker, Moore and others used to give a shit about it–but hey, there’s a Rethug in the WH, that’s soooooooooo much worse.
Fucking useless “feminists.” Susan B wouldn’t even deign to spit on them.
Jeffersonian
I just hopped over and saw the entry…but I’m not going to read the comments because I’m on vacation and I don’t need to go through that kind of aggravation … I LIKE being a little relaxed once in a while.
What I’m itching to know is why the DA is not filing charges at this time (the linked article said the Sheriff’s office has not closed the case). In any felony case, the DA office has three years to file and most of the time, if the DA delays filing on a particularly heinous crime it is because they really want to get their ducks [evidence] all in a row, because time starts running the day of arraignment (and if the defendant doesn’t waive time, the prosecuter may find themselves in front of a jury with a case that more resembles swiss cheese). I wonder what is going on behind the scenes, because as someone who works in a DA office in California (so cal), I’m purely speculating it may be because they can only sustain a misdemeanor filing under PC261.5(a)(b)…sex with a minor less then 3 years younger than the accused. Depending on what the 17 y/o vic’s bloodwork bears out, it is possible that the DA could file charges under PC261(a)3 … rape=sex with an intoxicated person (thus incapable of understanding and/or consenting). This could be a strategy thing, because if the DA office files only a misdemeanor charge and the defendants sprint to plead guilty, the case is over. Period. The DA cannot come back and file any felony charges arising from this case.
Of course, St. Amanda says
without any irony considering her OWN ROLE in supporting a gangrape HOAXER.
Roosting chickens, Mandy, roosting chickens.
http://www.aqoul.com/images/DifferenceofLove.jpg
Actually, I only have one entry as Jeffersonian…I was also “Reality Czech.”
Apparently the victim was intensely intoxicated during the alleged assault and remembers nothing about the party or the assault from soon after she arrived. She doesn’t know if she consented or not. The friends that rescued her from the ordeal apparently didn’t see enough or were also too tipsy to be able to provide enough information to prosecute.
I agree about the statutory charge, though if she was 17+10 months old at the time and represented that she was 18+ to the party-goers, that charge might evaporate, too.
Though the Pandagonians are busily indicting honky, penis-possessing AmeriKKKa right now, so justice might indeed prevail.
further54? Sorry honey, it’s all I got.
Darleen, thank you for inserting some tactical sense into those charges. Much of the timing depends on the state’s staute of limitations for such charges – when do the SoL’s begin to run, what evidence do we have now? Can we get better evidence if we wait? How long can we wait?
It wouldn’t surprise me that Ms. Marcotte is acting in a knee-jerk fashion rather than planning the case. Planning does not seem to be high on her agenda. Do you want a conviction? Then do not go off half-cocked (heh); Don’t Be A Nifong.
“Do you cache Czechs?”
— Martina Navratilova, defecting
If you really cared about feminism, you would have made this a long post, not your usual two liner.
Pig.
I love the feminist slogan “Well behaved women rarely make history.” The irony is that American academic feminists are remarkably well behaved. They do what they’re paid for, which is to complain about white heterosexual American men, and they don’t challenge anything which might get them fired, much less hurt.
I don’t see what would be so exceptional about Islamic society that they won’t experience other waves of feminism. Once Islamic women are able to vote, work, drive and get educated like the west, they’ll turn to any other inequities they see.
Oh and everyone should donate to RAWA. As they say: “If you are freedom-loving and anti-fundamentalist, you are with RAWA. Support and help us.”
Well-behaved people rarely make history, FJ. You only get written up if you rock the boat, or diss the skipper.
Regards,
Ric
BECAUSE OF THE TWO SETS OF LIPS !!!
Abraham Lincoln had this to say about how slavery “benefitted” the black man:
In so many ways, that statement is even more appropriate today than it was 150 years ago.
She has the rope, any tree or lampost will do, what more planning do you need?
RAWA:
Politically-correct multi-cultural hypocrisy kills.
I asked Daisy Kahn, executive director of the American Society for Muslim Advancement […] how Americans can help. Her answer was simple: “Support us. Embrace our struggle.â€Â
Daisy Khan was one of six debators on NPR over whether freedom of expression included the “right to offend.”
This was in response to the Danish cartoons.
Guess which side she supported?
Against (Hitchens was on the other side and was a treat).
She can embrace my middle finger.
Unless “dissing the skipper” is your job. (I.e., if the skipper is white heterosexual males, and not, say, your department head before you’ve got tenure.)
I’m not arguing the truth of the slogan, only the irony of it being used by very well-behaved people.
Is that RAWA page for real? I mean:
They can’t be serious, can they?
I guess they haven’t read Jeff’s post.
It’s hard to know when people are serious about this stuff, isn’t it?
Great Moment in Feminism
Let’s just start slow and take it from there, shall we?
Who knows? Maybe they’ll learn from our mistakes.
I’m sure they’ll appreciate a western man telling them what mistakes to not make. Sounds like the type of feminists they are won’t even notice that. Don’t they have quotas for women in parliament in Iraq and Iran? I think thats something that western men are giving them, no?
If you read your post back to yourself, shine, does it make sense to you?
B Moe, they’re perfectly serious.
They believe. Expect Tinkerbell to show up any moment.
Regards,
Ric
Some learn from instruction, others from examples.
But there’s no substitute for experience. Sometimes you just have to watch while they pee on the electric fence.
Regards,
Ric
Down with jingoism!
Just fucking cracks me up every time I think about it.
If it helps, I’ll write it down, and have a women repeat it to them.
I mean, if having a vagina present at the lecture somehow makes the mistakes more mistake-y to those making them—though such an argument seems to me to fly in the face of feminism and embrace identity politics.
I mean, what if the founders had made the same argument, denying women the vote because it wasn’t a woman’s place to be holding men accountable for mistakes in governing?
Oh, wait—
Thats why they won’t mind, in fact they’ll appreciate it. Because they’re the better, Islamic type of feminism. That and they’ve gotten such great ideas from western men, like quotas.
shine, would you kindly explain what you are talking about? I’m a retrograde feminist and don’t understand your point.
In order to explain it to anyone, shine would have to understand it his/herself.
Happily, that appears to a a characteristic of most women. Otherwise there’d be a lot more bachelors in the world.
I’m struck by the similarities between the modern American feminist movement, modern American progressives, and the modern American Libertarian movement. All want us to be free! Free to agree with them that is. Because no rational person, giving it any thought, could possibly disagree with their positions. Thus, if you do disagree you are a thoughtless and irrational Tool of the Machine to be dismissed out of hand. Just hate Bush and embrace the latest warm & fuzzy. Your nostrums will set you free! Saves doing all that deep thinking!
And don’t anybody point out to Shine that quotas have been considered a “good thing” when they serve the cause of affirmative action. Oddly similar to requiring a certain quota of women and of each religious/ethnic group in Iraqi government. If we didn’t do that, how many women, Sunnis & Kurds do you think would be in the Iraqi government?
Oh wait! Answering that would require actual thought and we kant have that. Must be a talking point to address that inconvenient observation. … Yes, here’s a good one! Quotas are bad because.. because they were imposed by the hated Bush administration! Case closed!! No further argument necessary or allowed!!! How dare you question our sincerity, our patriotism, our humanity? Bush lied!!!!
To a or not to a, that is the question!
Which reminds me that sex is not the answer. Sex is the question. The answer is ‘Yes, Please!’
Of course there aren’t–minority white men empowered over their poor black countrymen made for the perfect stick with which students could beat the Reagan/Bush 41 administrations. It wasn’t about race, it was about US politics.
Muslim on Muslim crime however, has nothing to do with US politics. In fact, supporting a Muslim feminist movement could possibly be construed as a tacit admission that there might have been a positive outcome to the Iraqi invasion. Can’t have that apostasy issuing forth, right?
Quotas are a good thing. The problem is that they don’t quite fit into the box some people want to put Islamic feminists in. Don’t really fit into these western “equity” or “classical liberal” feminists. Things like RAWA and quotas make it hard to use feminism in the Islamic world as a simplistic domestic cudgel.
Strike three, shine. Incoherence is hard to rebut, but that doesn’t make it a winning strategy.
What is it that you don’t get? Its quite simple. People around here have this ideal of Islamic feminists as if they vindicate one particular western view of whta feminism should be: the supposed “equity” or “classical liberal” feminist. Yet Islamic feminism (or, I should say, feminism in the islamic world) doesn’t fit into that. It doesn’t fit into that because quotas don’t fit into that. It doesn’t fit into that mold because groups like RAWA don’t fit into that mold.
Every time you post, shine, the world becomes slightly more stupid.
You’re right, shine, that quotas and the multiculti mumbojumbo coming from RAWA don’t fit into the classical liberal view of equity feminism.
At the same time, though, if ever there was a need for affirmative action by way of “quotas” it would be in the Muslim world.
In other respects, though, they very clearly are closer to those American feminists who were looking for equality before the law, equality of opportunity, and a place within what was, structurally, a good system—save for its exclusionary aspects.
RAWA has a lot on their website. I don’t see it as “multiculti.” Did you see what they say about fundamentalism? I think you’re projecting your western views (and wishes) onto them. Like you do with other feminists in islamic countries. Here:
These feminists are in deeply patriarchichal and fundamentalist societies. Changing some laws wont’ change their society. They’re not in a “structurallly good system” and they know it. Just because they have other, in some sense simpler problems to work on (like changing laws, the right to vote, et…), don’t mean that they don’t also have other problems to fight later: social, economic, fundamentalist oppression, and how patriarchy expresses itself in their culture.
They’ll find, for example, once they are legally able to divorce, that they still are in oppressive marriages because of, say, economics, or social mores, or religious oppression. And they’ll find that they need women-focused social services. They’re building them. And i doubt that their experiences with these will be “classically liberal” or “equity” feminist like we wish these american gals simply were.
Right now all you see is one part of their struggle. A part you like to see. A part you think is all you’d like to see here. And you didn’t even see the obvious: quotas. Expect more. They have a long way to go towards liberation. And need all the help they can get. I doubt, for example, you’ll turn your back on them once they have equal rights before the law.
[…] Hoff Sommers once again shows herself to be an anti-feminist — this time by failing to recognize that market economics is itself a patriarchal construct, […]