Thank you all for the Valentine wishes – I HOPE that everyone enjoyed themselves!
Nawzad, Lashkar Gah, Shulgareh, Kushka, Mazar-E-Shaif, Chaghcharan: My concern is always for women and especially women when it concerns their rights, or should I say lack of rights. And I am being gentle here. Perhaps I should be blunt and say that I am especially concerned for women who are treated with less respect than animals, less rights than animals, women who are abused, raped and murdered, simply because they are women.
I perused the net reading the latest articles about Egypt hopeing that I would read something that broached the subject of women and their future now that Mubarak has resigned as president. Nothing was mentioned. It’s all about the men, their quest, their needs.
It wasn’t until I googled “How will Egypt’s revolution affect women?”, that I found anything. And even then, it was slim pickings. It seems there is much talk about everything else, and very little on how women will fare in this country’s fight for democracy. Just whose fight is it?
“I’d rather have Mubarak than an Islamic government,” a woman in the street wearing a full black niqab told NOS, a Dutch news service yesterday. Seeing the fear in her eyes makes it hard for me to feel excited for the revolution. Though there has been footage of women in the streets, looking through most recent photos from Cairo, I see an ocean of men. (Read more on women in the Egyptian protests in Slate.) Women appear to be almost completely absent from any wide-angle shot you see of the protests at this point, and those I do see are often in Western clothes, speaking to the cameras with American and English accents. They are not representative of the majority of Egypt’s women, who are working class and in hijab.
Though Mubarak has been in power for too long, and violated the human rights of his people, for the average Egyptian woman, there is the potential for things to get far worse. The position of women in Egypt has already declined in the past two decades.
You could blame it on the stagnant economy, which could of course be blamed on Mubarak’s bad policies. On even a normal day, thousands of men loiter in the streets of downtown Cairo. Young and unemployed, most have never had a normal sexual partner. This kind of young, male frustration manifests itself in religious devotion, aggressive sexual harassment, or both. The Egyptian streets have become increasingly conservative, and women, in turn, have covered up.
Look at photos from 20 years ago and you’ll see women in skirts that show their calves, their hair and make-up done. These days, the women’s car (I dare you to ride in the men’s section during rush hour) on the Cairo subway smells from the sweat trapped by layers of black polyester. Subway reading material of choice is the Koran, held open and aloft by black-gloved hands, read through eye-obscuring lenses. And 85 percent of Egyptian women have had their clitorises removed, a practice that Suzanne Mubarak campaigned to end, citing its African, rather than Islamic origins.
Once Mubarak is gone, the climate of the country will still be frustrated and devout. The real will of the common Egyptian could be dangerous to women. A recent public opinion survey in Egypt showed that 80 percent of men think it is OK for a husband to beat his wife for speaking to another man, one-third of men and women believe that it is OK to resort to violence if a woman refuses sex. Acid attacks and honor killings are already far too commonplace, but they have been condemned by the current administration. A new government could turn a blind eye to domestic abuse or even worse. The new government will have to actively engage women in the political process in the increasingly hard-line country to keep their oppression from seeming democratically sanctioned. Revolutions have begun like this in other countries—Iranian women certainly thought they were getting something far different for themselves when they took to the streets to depose the corrupt Shah—only to leave women suffering and invisible behind metaphorical and literal curtains when the dust settled.
Jessica Olien is a Washington D.C. based writer.
Kushka and June: I can only imagine what happened to Lara Logan was devastating. And yet I know this is something that Muslim women deal with everyday. Thank you to the women who helped her. I too wish for a quick recovery for Lara Logan. Perhaps although her experience was incredibly horrific, she will pull out of it stronger, and something good will come from it in some manner. I wish her well.
In similar vein, I read this:
Still, in what is coming across to many as offensive, or even a sick joke, a journalist named Nir Rosen called Logan a “war monger” who would probably become a “martyr” for having been attacked.
Rosen, 33, Tweeted: “Lara Logan had to outdo Anderson [Cooper]. … Yes yes its wrong what happened to her. Of course. I don’t support that. But, it would have been funny if it happened to Anderson too.”
Although some of the comments subsequently were removed from Rosen’s Twitter page, Jeffrey Goldberg, a correspondent for The Atlantic wrote: “Rosen found humor in the fact that Logan was sexually assaulted in Cairo. Apparently, Rosen doesn’t understand much about violence against women; he also doesn’t seem to understand much about Twitter.”
Of course it is a man who finds humor in the brutal abuse of women. Sickening.
Readers: Not only are Egyptian men guilty of the above abuse, but Egypt also has a sexual harassment problem. In a 2008 study, 86 percent of women said they had been harassed on Egypt’s streets—any woman walking through a crowd of men in Egypt braces to get groped.
Men abuse women.
(Not “All” men. That’s for you men out there who are new to my blog; to my writing, and are maybe feeling a little defensive)
We see it happen. We talk about it, and hear about it, right here on my blog.
American women are not immune from the abuse. Yes, the abuse can be and is very brutal. And yes the abuse can be more subtle, more sly, more covert, than the abuse of Muslim women. But non the less, abuse is abuse in any form, and abuse is here too.
Physical abuse is obvious and hard to miss. The interesting thing is, so many American women don’t realize it, but on a daily basis we are dissed just because we are women, and men think of us not as equals. Things are said and done by men to women, that wouldn’t happen, if a man instead of a woman was in the equation. Even in humor, as I mentioned above, women are the brunt of jokes. We just have to pay attention and notice the nuance, or it will surely, slyly slip past us. And it does slip past many women.
While pondering the plight of women, while feeling once again frustrated and at a loss of what to do, I thought to myself yesterday, ”If men don’t give a shit about women here in our own country…if men don’t support and protect and honor and respect women right here in our own country, why would they ever give a damn about women half way across the world in Egypt, or Iraq, or Iran or…that they have absolutely no connection to?” You already know what the answer is.
So when we talk about men standing up in support of women….when we talk about men taking a stance and refusing to buy oil in countries such as Iraq, unless they demanded that the men treated their women as equal, we can say almost without doubt, “I’m sorry, but it’s not going to happen. I’ll say it again, ”If men don’t give a shit about women here in our own country…if men don’t support and protect and honor and respect women in our own country, why would they ever give a damn about women half way across the world in Egypt, or Iraq, or Iran or…that they have absolutely no connection to?”
So your sentiment Lashkar Gah, “…Thus muslim world women are being oppressed by Western men equally as they are by muslim men”, I’m sad to say, is right on.
Still in spite of it all, I have not lost HOPE.
Lisa: I am disgusted by how we treat animals, our meat that provides us nourishment (?) in big factory farms. And people eat way too much meat per week. If people just ate less meat per week, and purchased only good quality meat (organic/grassfed) demanding only the best quality, we could put these big farms to rest. But cheap is what people go for. You are what you eat is something that not enough people take to heart. Thanks for posting.
Doug: This was such a disappointing article to read. I signed that petition and this morning I have been reading even more about the monster Monsanto. Maz is right when he says that we shit on our own range. And we’re eating all of the shit. This won’t be the last of my writes concerning Monsanto. Thanks.
Victor: Thanks for expressing your loving words in recognizing all that your sister and women do. You are a wonderful brother.
Peace out.
Lastly, greed over a great story is surfacing from my “loyal”(?) readers. With all this back and forth about who owns what, that appears on my blog, let me reiterate that all material posted on my blog becomes the sole property of my blog. If you want to reserve any proprietary rights don’t post it to my blog. I will prominently display this caveat on my blog from now on to remind those who may have forgotten this notice.
Gratefully your blog host,
michelle
Aka BABE: We all know what this means by now :)
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