Post from my blog (tenderhooligan/ wordpress)

(Trigger warning.)

Photo caption: “Whenever I saw him, I hid. I hated to see him,” Tahani (in pink) recalls of the early days of her marriage to Majed, when she was 6 and he was 25. The young wife posed for this portrait with former classmate Ghada, also a child bride, outside their mountain home in Hajjah.

National Geographic have compiled a series of photos about child brides. I was discussing with a colleague the other day the problem of western feminism trying to colonise the Middle East and women in that region. We western feminists often have a very set view of what is acceptable and unacceptable, what is oppressive and problematic, and what needs to change.  But those views are generally based on western experiences which are embedded in western cultural and societal norms. In short: it is very likely that these norms do not apply to non-western women. And nor should they. The most glaring example of such colonisation is the on-going discussion of the wearing of the Islamic veil. We in the west tend to disagree with the veil because we see it as a symbol of the oppression of women and evidence of their mistreatment in Islam. If we’re France we ban Muslim women from wearing the veil. That’s colonisation.

So when it comes to the discussion of child brides in non-western cultures, it’s fundamental to remove our western lens and to consider the practice within non-western culture. (Maybe it’s the case that we shouldn’t be having this discussion at all?) But that’s easier said than done, even on an abstract level. And when you see pictures such as those on the link above, it becomes harder still.

Photo caption: Kandahar policewoman Malalai Kakar arrests a man who repeatedly stabbed his wife, 15, for disobeying him. “Nothing,” Kakar said, when asked what would happen to the husband. “Men are kings here.” Kakar was later killed by the Taliban.

This is not a quandary that I can solve here and now.

From my blog (tenderhooligan/ wordpress)

I didn’t hear about this case until this morning (trigger warning for image).

In a literal application of the sharia law of an eye for an eye, Iran is ready for the first time to blind a man with acid, after he was found guilty of doing the same to a woman who refused to marry him.

Majid Movahedi, 30, is scheduled to be rendered unconscious in Tehran’s judiciary hospital at noon on Saturday while Ameneh Bahrami, his victim, drops acid in both his eyes, her lawyer said.

The first part of the story I heard was about the proposed punishment. I felt sickened upon hearing it – the barbarism of such a punishment (particularly as we know that it’s habitually used to punish Muslim women for their lack of “compliance”) could never be justified. When I heard about the rationale for the punishment a few seconds later, however, I felt conflicted. Movahedi is due to receive this punishment from his female victim, whom he blinded with acid. This decision is taking eye-for-an-eye to a whole new level.

But that’s the rub. I am vehemently opposed to the death penalty, which is arguably the most extreme eye-for-an-eye punishment that exists. Research tells us that the death penalty has neither a general nor a specific deterrent effect, and it offers little cathartic or healing effect to victims’ families. (Its system costs a fortune to run in the US but that issue is unimportant, in the scheme of things.) However, I can’t help but think that the punishment Movahedi is due to receive is warranted and deserved. Because this time, it’s personal. Women in too many places are living in fear of acid attacks for doing something as minor as being seen in public without a male chaperone. Movahedi’s victim, Ameneh Bahrami, suffered such an attack for refusing to marry him; for making a decision about her life and her future that women the world over make every day, without fear of repercussion. But not Ameneh Bahrami; she had to be punished for not doing as she was told.

I defy anyone to tell me that they’ve not had desire for retribution when they’ve been wronged – it’s as human an emotion as joy and sadness. This is retribution for a horrible, vicious, life-changing wrong, and I don’t think I’m going to bother apologising for feeling that it’s deserved. Are there lots of “what ifs”? Certainly. Will it achieve any deterrent effect? Unlikely. But will it help Ameneh Bahrami? Very probably.

That women in Iran might now be given a stronger voice, and that female victims there might be allowed a real say in the judicial process, is a whole other debate (heck, we still don’t know what we’re doing with victims in our “civilised” justice system in the west), but that’s something that won’t be clear for a while. For now, if one woman gets to throw acid in some patriarchal, violent fucker’s face, and in doing so achieves one tiny little bit of liberation for her sisters, then she can have at it as far as I’m concerned.  

Post yesterday from my blog (tenderhooligan/ wordpress).

Today’s as good a day as any to start writing about why you’re no longer Catholic, right? I think so. “Good Friday” was the day that Jesus died for our¹ sins, apparently. He rose again three days later (even though the resurrection is celebrated just two days after the crucifixion) but I can’t quite recall why that happened.²

But this is about why I lapsed from Catholicism. Context: I was raised Catholic in Ireland, and attended Catholic school for the 14 years of my life I was at school before I went to university. My family wasn’t particularly devout, and has always had a good sense of proportion and cynicism about religion, but Catholicism was always part of my home life. Going to mass on Sundays and Holy Days (e.g., Good Friday) was obligatory, and attending confession was  strongly and heavily encouraged, particularly when I was younger. Growing up Catholic in Ireland has a whole other meaning because of the Troubles, but that’s a story for another day. I started to move away from Catholicism when I was about 15 or 16, lapsed unofficially (i.e., stopped attending but didn’t tell my family) when I was about 18, and lapsed officially when I was  22 or so.

It all began when I was about 13 or 14. I embarked on a period of extreme religiosity when I actually thought for a while that I might like to become a nun. (I know!) During this time, I had started, you see, to have Impure Thoughts and I couldn’t figure out from whence they came or what I was supposed to do with them. I was tormented because, not only had I been told 1000 times (at Catholic school and at mass) that such thoughts were the devil’s own creation, I’d been led to believe that girls were especially not supposed to have them. Boys were allowed, sort of, because they probably couldn’t help themsleves and it was different for them anyway. I was never actually told what “different” meant.

But I’d similarly been led to believe that, in order to do God’s “great work of procreating”, one would have to to engage in the very act I was being told not to think about. It was all so contradictory and confusing and difficult, and, for a year or so, I invested a lot of energy in trying not to think about any of it at all. I was convinced, you see, that if I continued along the wayward path that I was clearly setting for myself, I would end up in the burning fires of hell before long. That’s what happened to girls like me. (At this point, I hadn’t so much as held hands with a boy, never mind anything else.) I prayed and I prayed and I prayed that such thoughts would go away and leave me alone but it didn’t work; they were as prevalent and disturbing as ever. It was then that I decided that I should become a nun as soon as possible. Nuns don’t ever think about those sorts of things, right? I would be saved!

Christ! (Pun intended.)

Quite organically, I reached the end of that phase, and I got very angry indeed. I really had driven myself demented trying to be A Good Girl when all along, I quickly realised, I had been doing nothing wrong. If there is a God, I concluded, why had he allowed me to put myself through such torture? I had been, very frequently, in despair during that time (and I’d been horribly unhappy) and he had allowed me to put myself there. The nasty bastard, I said to myself. Besides, I quite liked the Impure Thoughts I was having; they were fun, they were interesting, they involved boys I knew, and I flipping well wanted to have them. So I decided that if “God” didn’t like them, he could feck away off for I was going to have them anyway. And he clearly didn’t care that much about me if he allowed me to hurt myself so badly. So I carried on having them (and I haven’t stopped since).

That drew a welcome line under that time in my life. It wasn’t too long after that when everything else fell into place. More tomorrow.

——
¹ I say “our” but for whom Jesus actually died is anyone’s guess. I conjecture that it doesn’t apply to the  Jews, for example, and probably not the Buddhists, and certainly not the Muslims. It’s never sat quite comfortably with me that either he or we get to pick and choose who that might be.
² All of the above is based on the assumption that you believe that someone Very Special Indeed called “Jesus” existed, did all of these things that are still talked about 2,000 years later, and matters one way or the other. I do not.

Post from my blog (tenderhooligan/ wordpress).

Ok, yes, I possibly have been on the Interbets all week. Here’s some of what’s been happening:

• It’s quite unbelievable, still, that France passed the “Ban on the Burka” law last week, but it did. Needless to add, there was outrage. The irony of telling women that they’re not allowed to wear what a patriarchal culture tells them to wear is not lost on Sarkozy, I’m sure, even if he is brainless. You cannot beat oppression with oppression. (Though we shouldn’t fool ourselves that Sarkozy et al were thinking of the women at all here. No, this is thinly veiled - pun intended - Islamophobia at its best.) And as if it’s not offensive enough as it is, the Guardian reported that refusing to comply with the ban will result in a fine or a condition to have lessons in “French citizenship”. Arrange the following words in a sentence: off, fuck. Within hours of the ban coming into force, women were being arrested for continuing to wear the veil. Well, you would wouldn’t you! There are several excellent blog posts around the Interweb which discuss this issue in much more detail than I do here: thefword, delilah-mj, msmagazine, and lattelabour for starters.

• Budget 2011 leaves women out in the cold (fawcettsociety). The 2011 budget spells trouble for women in Britain. There’s been talk for a some time now of how the vast array of cuts introduced by the coalition government will affect women, and the picture is now becomnig clearer. First, a piece from the Guardian reveals that job losses have affected women the most and, second, a report produced in partnership with the Fawcett Society (‘The Impact on Women of the Budget 2011’) highlights the following issues. It is not looking good.

- The current economic strategy looks set to undermine gender equality in the labour market: if current trends continue, more women than men in the UK will be unemployed, for the first time since records began. - The bonfire of regulations will remove the protections that women and men with caring responsibilities need in order to be able to work. - The increase in the Personal Tax Allowance threshold will not touch the most vulnerable, and among those who will benefit, men will gain £140 million more than women. - Without action to tackle entrenched gender inequality within the apprenticeship sector, where women earn on average 21 per cent less than men, the Government’s flagship expansion in apprenticeships and training opportunities will not improve the employment opportunities young women face and do nothing for older women. - The businesses set to benefit most from new tax breaks and other incentives are typically owned and invested in by men while schemes to support women in business are scrapped.

• The Ivory Coast standoff ends, but the nightmare for women continues (msmagazine). Most mornings when I wake up, I’m inclined to be rather discontent with my lot for a few minutes before I come to (I’m tired, it’s cold, I have too much to do; that sort of thing). Reading about the women in the Ivory Coast reminds me that I don’t even know I’m born. Though the conflict in the Ivory Coast has come to an end now, women and girls there are still being persecuted (kidnapped, beaten up and raped) daily. They’ve been through all of this before in 2004 and they’re going through it all again. And we don’t know the half of it.

Pender [a gender-based violence Technical Advisor for IRC] conveyed reports from women of gang rapes, rapes of entire families and sexual slavery, as women and girls are “taken as wives” for weeks at a time. “These women have experienced things that we cannot even imagine–and many for the second time,” said Pender. The collective memory of rape and violence from the last Ivorian war, in 2004, is still fresh. In fact, the recollection of “what happened last time,” and the threat of new violence has driven many girls and women to flee.

• Finally, Americans seem to [want to] forget slavery (prospect). When a research centre asked why the American Civil War took place, a frightening number of respondents answered that they thought it was about the rights of states. The reason for the war is disputed, of course, but even I (a European) know that slavery was as central a reason as any other.

That so many young Americans believe a revisionist account of the Civil War is, if anything, another sign of our collective refusal to deal with our difficult past. Slaves built the White House and fueled Wall Street, but we want nothing more than to forget slavery and the central role it played in our nation’s history.

Couple this finding with the recent revisionist adaption of Huckleberry Finn (to remove the n-word) and one wonders if America wants to forget all about its sordid past altogether. I hope not.

Sima is 15 but looks younger. I met her in Kabul, in the female juveniles section of the Badam Bagh prison. She talks very little, but her eyes are full of grief. A defence lawyer told me it was likely she had been raped.

What is Sima’s crime? She is serving her sentence for running away from domestic violence. About half of all women in Afghan prisons are there for the same “crime”. Some of them are in prison with their babies. The youngest ones are no older than 12. Having spent time in jail, they will rarely be accepted back by their families and communities.

…

It was heartbreaking to hear their pleas for the maintenance of the shelters, as they are the only places they can go: “If this place is closed, I have no option then to kill myself”, a young women told me.

rightsandhumanity:

This quote speaks not just for the Egyptian women who were marred by hecklers and brutal attacks during the protests for International Women’s Day, but it speaks for all women across the world. Unfortunately and regrettably, women face this mentality from certain skeptics and sexists who believe that a woman’s role is to be at home cooking, cleaning and taking care of the children.This quote says it all, a woman should raise a President, not try to become one.

For decades and even centuries, women have fought for their right to vote, work, and be treated as equal to a man and although some women were given these rights, we still face the problems of unequal pay, unequal treatment in the work place and even sexual harassment. Many women even face losing an opportunity for a position in a work place, if her competition is a man. Across the globe, women have fought for things like right to vote, right to work, and right to an education and although many women have received these rights, there are many in various countries who still fight for them.

The quote above does not just hold true in Egpyt, but in all nations. There is this lingering mentality that a woman should not even think about being something a man is, despite the reality that she may do the job much better. Why shouldn’t a woman strive to be President? She is certainly capable of it and she has the will power does she not? In WWII, when the men were sent off to fight, was it not the women who were working the fields and factories? Certain skeptics tend to forget just how capable women are, yet they continue to make these demeaning and insulting remarks that we should not strive to become a President.

What is the most interesting to me is that these men who make comments such as the one above, fail to realize that a woman actually gave them life. Not a man, but a WOMAN gave them life and carried them for nine months, yet these very men doubt the capability of woman. That in itself is an insult.

My hope would be that one day, a woman will rule Egypt and every other country on this planet. Besides, in many nations women have already seized the role as president or Prime Minister. In fact, if skeptics have any doubts in regards to a women being president, just take a look at this list of women who have attained high positions in the political office. We have proven our capabilities on more then one occasion whether in the workplace, in a classroom , in a voting booth or maybe even in the streets protesting side by side men for democracy.