Some were accompanied by rights campaigners
Up for another Moral Quandary via Twitter session?
The BBC reported yesterday on the BAFTA awards and the MeToo Time’s Up campaigns.
Guests at the Bafta Film Awards showed their support for the Time’s Up and Me Too campaigns by wearing black and sending messages from the stage.
Virtually all the stars at the London ceremony were in black and some were accompanied by rights campaigners.
One of the few in a colourful dress was best actress winner Frances McDormand – but she told the ceremony: “I stand in full solidarity with my sisters.”
It’s all a bit knife-edge, isn’t it – movie stars all dressed up protesting and standing in solidarity with their sisters and stuff. A bit cringeworthy, a bit pseuds’ corner, a bit yeah yeah yeah but what about your sisters in the chicken plants and the strawberry fields? But at the same time, the movie industry is hell on the women who work in it and insultingly bad at representing women on the god damn screen, and yes, it does need to do better.
At any rate, Tom Holland tweeted about it.
It's so moving how everyone kept the #Yazidis in their thoughts… https://t.co/59Tb104TsQ #Baftas
— Tom Holland (@holland_tom) February 19, 2018
Could anything be more expressive of the West's solipsism than that a protest against sexual harassment should seem totally to have overlooked the victims of the century's most barbaric example of rape?
— Tom Holland (@holland_tom) February 19, 2018
To the surprise of no one, a lively discussion ensued.
I think the main problem with “why not the Yazidi women?” is the problem with all forms of Dear Muslima: it’s a way of telling us (women who aren’t Yazidi or Muslim or whatever the category is that day) that we can’t ever discuss issues local to us because there are always worse issues somewhere else. I don’t think that’s what Tom Holland meant by it, but what he said fits into a pattern that we’ve become unpleasantly familiar with.
But in addition to that, what I wonder is, what if someone had mentioned the Yazidi women? How would that have gone?
My guess is that it would have gone badly; that crowds of people would have rushed to tell the glam women off for associating their minor woes with the horrors the Yazidi women lived through.
I have written about the Yazidi women and girls, and about Boko Haram, and about women in India and Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia, but I don’t do so at the same time as I write about Harvey Weinstein. I wouldn’t link them, and I wouldn’t add a “remember the women of Iraq and Pakistan and Iran” at the end of a post about Harvey Weinstein.
Anyway, that was yesterday; today Tom Holland tweeted this:
If my study of the French Revolution has taught me anything, it’s that someone even more woke than @PriyamvadaGopal will soon be accusing her of racism.
— Tom Holland (@holland_tom) February 20, 2018
I look forward to it.
But I don’t hear people telling the angry white men in the Midwest who form a large part of Trump’s base “well, what about the [fill in male equivalent of oppressed minority here]”. They keep telling us, “oh, we should listen to them, because they have been ignored!”
The real crime they committed is being women, and being women publicly, and being women that supported women. The common denominator in all these campaigns is….that wo before the word that denotes real people, important people, in charge people, who shouldn’t have to deal with the wo-men.
Damn. I like Tom Holland’s work. I thought Dear Muslims was cringeworthy and no-one else would be so stupid. Who will be next to disappoint me?
I’m a fan of Tom Holland’s too. I’m taking this as an aberration as opposed to an indicator, because (as I muttered in the post) I don’t think he intended it as a Dear Muslima.
I think his reasoning is that some of the protesters brought human rights activists as guests, so given that, someone should have remembered the Yazidi women. I think that because he said it in one of his tweets, but I don’t know if he meant that was the core of his thinking. But I choose to see it that way.
I don’t know Tom Holland from Adam. But to pull a ‘what about,’ making war crimes and religious persecution a globe away the ‘real’ issue is just catty.
Still, the opwessed cake decorators and homophobes in the U.S. might benefit from thinking about places where Xtians actually DO experience oppression. What’s the line between ‘intersection’ and changing the subject?
It also ignores the fact that these are not different issues, they are part of the same spectrum. They all have the same underpinning – disrespect for women, viewing women as something that exists for the sexual pleasure of men, viewing women as less deserving, less important, and less intelligent than men.
The problem needs to be fixed at the roots, and if you ignore these things in #MeToo, assuming they are small and trivial (but of course, forced sex and humiliation/degradation are minor issues, right?), you still have shoots that will continue to thrive and grow. We have to fix what underlies the problem, and it is the overall attitude toward women, the treatment of women that goes unpunished, that gives men tacit “permission” to commit atrocities against women in other parts of the world. Western men may find that uncomfortable to face up to, since many of their own actions are part of the cesspool, but the only way to fix things is to fix the machinery, not to put a band-aid on a gaping wound.
It is all part of the same ugly whole.
,(women who aren’t Yazidi or Muslim or whatever the category is that day) that we can’t ever discuss issues local to us because there are always worse issues somewhere else.
The BAFTAs are British. In the UK there are 1000s of cases of FGM, including an increasing number performed locally. No one, to my knowledge, has ever been charged with, let alone convicted of, performing the procedure in Britian. Similarly, Rotherham..and others..are nowhere near South Asia.
These pressing issues have been irretrievably local for some time. They’re no longer ‘somewhere else’. They’re now part and parcel of the UK’s flourishing demographic diversity and as such should have become a top priority for the UK’s feminists…years ago.
I didn’t mean “local” that literally – I didn’t mean it strictly geographically. Sexual harassment in the movie business is local to women in the movie business because it’s likely to affect them.
You conveniently ignored the “I have written about the Yazidi women and girls, and about Boko Haram, and about women in India and Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia, but I don’t do so at the same time as I write about Harvey Weinstein” part, which is pretty typical for you.
You conveniently ignored the “I have written about the Yazidi women and girls, and about Boko Haram, and about women in India and Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia,
To be completely honest, I DID acknowledge your postings on just those topics when writing my comment, but at the last minute chose to not include that acknowledgment for fear of sounding patronising.
YES, you HAVE had numerous postings on the plight of Yazidi women, women in Bangladesh, India and Saudi Arabia etc.
And those postings ARE appreciated!
The lack of FGM prosecutions in the UK (and elsewhere) is shameful. There are also plenty headlines in the media saying so.
It seems (see link below) that two cases have been bought. The first failed and the second is underway or I can’t find the concluding report.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5043941/Man-face-trial-charged-female-genital-mutilation.html
Yeah, and we have to learn about it from the Daily Mail, no less.