Author: Ophelia Benson

The theocratic group Sharia4Belgium responded to Sophie Peeters’s documentary about street harassment by remarking that she dresses like a whore.

In Thursday’s video message Sharia4Belgium said of Ms Peeters that “She walks the streets half-naked and dresses like a cheap prostitute. She has painted her face like a clown. She has done all this to attract the attention of men.”

The fundamentalist group believes that Ms Peeters provoked the men in the film.

“Why do you think that women go about scantily-clad and with painted faces? It’s to get reactions from men.”

Asks the blogger at Above the Field. He can and he should, he answers himself.

Yesterday I read of a sexual assault in Washington DC that occurred not long ago. A bicyclist cruised up to a woman and stuck his hand up her skirt, violating her very being before riding away laughing. It would be easy to pass this off as an isolated incident of some pervert getting his kicks, except that this particular woman victim (Liz Gorman) wrote a blog about it, and hundreds responded with their own stories of similar experiences and worse.

Thank goodness this woman and others like her are speaking out instead of staying silent. Thank goodness they’re upsetting the status quo. Thank goodness they’re waking people like me up to what is going on around us every day.

Not “playing the victim.” Not whining, not making a big fuss about nothing, not refusing to do anything for ourselves, but just speaking out instead of staying silent about microaggressions, and upsetting the status quo that tells us to ignore sexist bullshit and Just Get On With It.

I fear for our future when I see adolescent and college-age guys being spoon-fed rapacious porn and jocular yet overtly sexist advertising that just feed into their levels of testosterone at that age. Couple this with how we continue to muffle women’s voices about sexual needs and desires, and we are raising another generation of coarse, close-minded men who rally around Daniel Tosh and don’t think twice about their sense of privilege or entitlement.  Basically: bad lovers, bad fathers, absentee husbands. I grew up knowing the experience of having an adulterous, alcoholic father, and far too often I was an absentee husband in my own failed marriage, far more focused on career than relationship. That cycle needs to stop.

I fear for the daughters of men like that. I really, really, really do. I fear for the daughters of men who have contempt for them because they’re not boys.

The stereotypical male is a sexist pig. He sees women as merchandise to be gazed at, and groped at. He sees himself as the master of his domain, and sex as HIS enjoyment, or even as his conquest. He may know of boundaries, but often feels they don’t apply to him. He laughs at sexist jokes, he gawks at pretty ladies like a slobbering schoolboy, and he is enabled and empowered by an advertising industry that gears its print and television ads at him – because, after all, the stereotypical male is the head of household, the breadwinner, and the decision maker.

I know this firsthand. I ran numerous websites and published a sexy cheerleaders calendar years ago that pandered to this demographic, and did it well. I gave no consideration to the fact that I was feeding the sexism machine, subjugating and objectifying women in the interest of making a buck. After all, the models I worked with were professionals who were thrilled to be on the sites or in the calendars, and my target demographic was those stereotypical white males who buy the merchandise.

It’s time for feminism to be mainstream. It’s time for open-minded, forward-thinking men to realize that equality means embracing feminism. Feminism isn’t a bad word. It’s simply a cry for fairness in an unfair world dominated for far too long by a small segment of white males who have convinced too many of us that speaking out is wrong, that having a voice is a privilege rather than a right, and that somehow they know what’s best for all of us.

Welcome aboard, comrade.

Seen on Twitter.

Dissing FtB is no more naughty than dissing HuffPo. It’s obviously a reaction to aspects, not every square inch. Ob-vi-ous-ly.

No. That’s completely wrong. Clearly lots of people are thinking something like that, but it’s wrong. The Huffington Post has editors. It’s like a magazine. Magazines have editors. They have a style, and a policy, and criteria; they have a lot of elements that make them a unified entity. It makes sense to generalize about The New Yorker or The Atlantic or The New Statesman – or the Huffington Post.

Freethought blogs is a network of blogs. There is no editor of all the blogs. There is no directive, there is no style, there is no policy. Once you’ve joined there are no criteria. It’s up to the individual blogger what she writes. There are no leaders. Just yesterday I saw somebody talking nonsense about not reading “FTB” until there was a change in “the leadership.” There is no leadership.

There is initial compatibility, yes; people are invited to join for reasons. But that’s it. It’s not comparable to the Huffington Post. And it is not the least bit obvious that endless sniping at “FTB” does no harm to, say, Dana Hunter or Mano Singham or Hank Fox. Yes, no doubt I’m a horrible person and deserve to be set on fire, but not everyone at “FTB” is a horrible person. Boooooooo on people making excuses for the “FTB” nonsense.

They’re talking about the “don’t mention the religion” problem at the Freethinker, too. Barry Duke Mentioned in the last paragraph of the post.

Last year, the British government’s Forced Marriage Unit investigated more than 1,400 cases of forced marriages, most of which occur in Muslim communities. Britain is home to more than 1.8 million Muslims, most from Pakistani roots.

But that’s the Freethinker, not the BBC or the Guardian.

The parents of Shafilea Ahmed have been convicted of her murder. There is much admirable refusal to excuse them because that’s “their culture.” All very well, but something is missing. Their “culture” is condemned; tradition and values and traditional values are declared non-exempt from competing values and from the law…but something is missing.

Consider what the judge said, according to the BBC.

On sentencing, Mr Justice Evans told the couple: “A desire that she understood and appreciated the cultural heritage from which she came is perfectly understandable, but an expectation that she live in a sealed cultural environment separate from the culture of the country in which she lived was unrealistic, destructive and cruel.”

Consider what the Guardian editorial said.

The police wisely refused to call Shafilea’s murder an “honour” killing. There can be no exonerating circumstance, no licence granted to those who claim cultural protection for brutality. Domestic violence and child sex abuse happen across cultures and ethnicities. But that only makes it all the more important that those charged with spotting it, supporting its victims and tackling its perpetrators, have the ability to understand what they are seeing and how to respond to it, wherever it is found.

Cultural heritage, cultural environment, culture of the country. Cultural protection, cultures and ethnicities.

It’s all culture. Not a word about religion. It’s as if the two were completely distinct, and as if religion had no influence on culture, nor any power to amplify and entrench and protect it from criticism.

Here’s a news flash for the Beeb and the Graun: culture without religion is a lot easier to shed and adapt and improve than culture with religion. “Culture” that’s indistinguishable from religion is a whole lot more difficult to escape. That’s just all the more true when organs of “culture” such as the BBC and the Guardian pretend it’s out of the picture altogether.

Sexual harassment? What sexual harassment?

When Sofie Peeters moved to Brussels for a film degree, she found herself confronted with a depressing problem almost every time she left her front door. Walking around her local neighbourhood, the mixed, working-class district of Anneessens, at any time of day she would be greeted with cat-calls, wolf-whistles and jeers of “slag” and “how much do you cost?”

Sick of wondering whether it was her fault for wearing particular clothes, she made her end of year film on the topic, armed with a hidden camera to record the street harassment.

You can see a short clip which shows how bad it is.

The student film, Femme de la Rue, a shocking account of everyday sexist insults in the street, is now at the centre of a political and social storm in Belgium and across its borders. After it was shown on TV and at a screening last week it has become an internet success and triggered a public debate.

Belgian politicians say they were already planning legislation to crack down on sexist insults and harassment, promising fines for offenders. French feminist groups seized on the film to highlight similar problems in France and break the taboo surrounding street harassment.

There’s a taboo? What the hell? A taboo not on doing it but on talking about it?

In the film, she walks round her neighbourhood wearing jeans and a cardigan and then a knee-length summer dress and flat boots. A hidden camera shows that both times, men – from youths to groups of older men on cafe terraces – leer, cat-call and proposition her. She is called “whore”, “slut”, “bitch” and told that she looks up for sex. One man follows her saying she should come to his house or a hotel room. She says she gets this kind of comment eight to 10 times a day.

Going outside while female. Not allowed, apparently.

The French feminist group Osez Le Feminisme, which praised the film for triggering debate on the issue, linked to its comic film-clip on role-reversal of women jeering men in the street.

French feminists said the film showed how street harassment was a universal issue for women.

Tut. They’re just playing victim. They should pull their socks up and get on with it.

So there was this girl of 13 in Pakistan. Her parents took her to a pir to evict some djinns that had possessed her. Well any parent would. A relative had recommended the pir.

 “He told me that the pir was an expert in evicting djinns and did not charge anything for his services,” [her father Manzoor Hussain] said.

What could possibly go wrong?

Hussain said the girl was tied to a charpoy and burned with a heated iron rod. He said the pir had poured red chilli powder on parts of the girl’s body before burning them with the rod. He said the parents were made to leave the room after midnight. “He told us to wait outside. He said it was not safe in the room,” he added.

In short, she was tortured to death.

The report of an autopsy performed on Salma, 13, stated that she had died from suffocation. It said the girl’s breathing was hampered by blocking her nostrils with cotton buds and holding her mouth shut.

The autopsy, carried out at Cheechwatni tehsil headquarters (THQ) hospital, confirmed that her skin was burnt with a hot iron rod. The report said there were bruises on the girl’s arms, face and chest.

Where the djinns are now is unknown.

Soraya Chemaly on girls turning anger into depression.

To become a woman, especially a woman of color, in our culture is cognitively dissonant, and girls respond differently to that experience. Girls, like boys, feel fully human, but culture tells them that they are not. Even the most privileged girls, those that can afford doctors, psychologists, good schools excellent teams, etc. etc. get this message. Sometimes they rebel, sometimes they compartmentalize, sometimes they agitate for change, sometimes they bury their heads in the sand, sometimes they conform, sometimes they get angry. Sometimes their anger is pathologized instead of given free expression because we’d rather call it anything but anger.

I think it took me an exceptionally long time to notice that. I think it wasn’t until I started getting pissed off about my older sister’s weirdly minimal life that I noticed it. That wasn’t until I was 18 or so. Then I started getting pissed off about all the mouthy SDS men and their silent passive girl friends at my university, and I was launched. But until then – I didn’t get the message. Probably because I went to a girls’ school.

You know what else happens in the buildup to puberty besides the “hormonal problems” that beset girls? Girls have to come to terms with a broad assault on their sense of self. They face a daily virtual avalanche of micro-aggressions whose messages would anger and sadden any thoughtful, sane adult. Think about what girls experience as young children and they enter puberty:

• Seeing virtually no valued stories told about you or the women around you in the world. We are nowhere near gender balanced in our storytelling – not in books, not in movies,theatre, history lessons, bylines or TV– and girls and boys see this. (Even among those that are told on TV and the theatre, most fail the Bechdel Test)

• Repeatedly processing the information that our culture thinks being you or like you. (a) Is the ultimate insult. What girl hasn’t heard “cry like a girl,” “throw like a girl” or “scream like a girl?” and (b) Means you’re untrustworthy, catfighting and backstabbing (ie. Pretty Little Liars, Gossip Girl, Don’t Trust the Bitch…all of reality TV)

Yes, yes, yes, yes. All of that. The “like a girl” thing is starting to truly eat at me, because of what it must do to all the actual girls. All those men who think it’s hilarious to “insult” each other that way? They need to stop doing that right now.

• Having your ideas and interests, abilities and hard work take back seat to your sexualization (Note: NOT your sexuality). Girls are repeatedly told through media messages that their “hotness” is paramount, regardless of anything they say, do or aspire to. There is a reason that, “by the age of 14, girls drop out of sports at twice the rate that boys do.”
• Intuiting and experiencing the worlds’ relentless desire to cut you in to bits and pieces while retaining the wholeness of your male counterparts. Girls feel like human individuals, but eventually see themselves in culture, their sisters and mothers and friends portrayed and spoken about as animals, objects, commodities. (Gee, just around the age of puberty. Huh. What a coincidence.) All for the pleasure or use of others.

Boys get all kinds of cultural crap too, but on the whole it’s better crap. It’s less belittling crap.

Iiiiiiiiiit’s Brendan! Pissing on Caitlin Moran this time, but recycling his stupid trope about how contemporary feminists are just like Victorian women passing out on the drawing room floor.

Remember when feminism was about The Sisterhood? About women clubbing together to stick it to The Man, patriarchy or whatever they were calling the system that kept them in a state of social subjugation?

Those days are gone. Today, if Caitlin Moran’s wildly successful feminist tract How To Be A Woman is anything to go by, feminism is less a universal club and more a bitchy sorority, made up of well-connected women like Moran who consider themselves better, more spiritual and more “real”, than other women, than lesser women, than what the Victorians might have called “fallen women”.

Cute how he gets the word “bitchy” in there, innit. The whole thing is fantastic – feminism is bitchy, and upper class, and Victorian. And what a ridiculous claim, too, when any kind of reform is based on thinking that X is better than Y. O’Neill considers himself better than Moran, doesn’t he, or else he wouldn’t have written all that nonsense. Then there’s the fact that Moran is the oldest of eight children who were raised on the dole, so how O’Neill gets to pretend she’s a toff looking down her nose is beyond me – except that he’s notoriously shameless.

Moran is a columnist for The Times, Britain’s newspaper of record, where she is paid a fortune to titillate that paper’s largely Tory readership with tales of her countercultural antics.

Says Brendan O’Neill, who is a columnist for The Telegraph.

…in essence, How To Be A Woman is one long countercultural boast, one big fat advert for the author’s superior tuned-in outlook on life and culture in contrast with the outlook of “yobs”. So where, for example, most men and women are obsessed with keeping themselves fit, plucked and preened, Moran says she prefers to be chilled out, to live “like it’s 1969 all over again and my entire life is made of cheesecloth, sitars and hash”. The book is full of such contradictorily ostentatious claims to coolness.

Says Brendan O’Neill, who makes almost no claims that aren’t contradictorily ostentatious.

Moran’s chief contribution to feminist thinking is to argue that porn brainwashes women as well as men. Where 1980s feminists fretted like latter-day Victorian chaperones over the power of porn to turn men into rapacious beasts, Moran panics over its transformation of women into slavishly hair-free freaks.

Says Brendan O’Neill, panicking over all the things he dislikes about Caitlin Moran and contemporary feminism.

Does Moran think she’s being radical when she says women are driving themselves nuts keeping themselves hair-free and dolled up and when she depicts working-class women’s sexuality as something peculiar, possibly even dangerous? If so, she couldn’t be more wrong. Because both of those ideas are carbon copies of the sort of waffle promoted by respectable lady writers in the Victorian era.

Those long-dead snobs also fretted over women’s obsession with prettification. The 1857 book Etiquette for Ladies said: “It is not too much to say that women in general, from a dread of falling into coarseness, neglect a good deal the care of their health.” Today it is rad feminists like Moran who fight the “dread of falling into coarseness”.

Also, just like Moran, decent Victorian ladies looked upon working-class women’s sexuality as more animalistic than their own. As Elizabeth Langland put it in her book Nobody’s Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture, in the Victorian era “women of the working class became vested with a dangerous sexuality, and middle-class women… became the guardians of spirituality”. Moran, with her practiced rock-chick style and her constant railing against saucy mass culture, very clearly sees herself as a modern-day “guardian of spirituality”.

Now we can see where the title How To Be A Woman comes from: Moran’s book is, at root, a new etiquette manual for ladies, an instruction from on high, from far outside the Sea of Bullshit, about how women should speak, live, shave and fuck. Moran’s treatise confirms the unstoppable backward march of feminism into the snobbery, sexlessness and censoriousness of the Victorian era.

Says Brendan O’Neill, doing his usual showily “contrarian” act by straining a ludicrous comparison past the breaking point. His rant confirms his unstoppable march into complete systematic shameless bullshit.

There’s a Catholic archbishop in Germany who’s fed up and not going to take it any more. He wants a blasphemy law, and hurry up about it.

“Those who injure the souls of believers with scorn and derision must be put in their place and in some cases also punished,” said Bamberg Archbishop Ludwig Schick on Wednesday.

He said there should be a “Law against the derision of religious values and feelings,” the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported.

And men in purple beanies. A law against the derision of that is seriously urgent.

Caitlin Moran’s book sounds like a good read.

There are lots of things to love about Caitlin Moran’s “How to Be a Woman,” an invective against backsliding attitudes toward feminism that, this time last year, every woman in Britain seemed to be reading. There is the stand it takes against bikini waxes. There is its protest against the pornography and stripping industries. Above all there is its deployment of sweary British slang to remind us, in this era of manufactured outrage, what a truly great rant should look like: rude, energetic and spinning off now and then into jubilant absurdity.

Well that’s certainly always been my view of the matter!

Ms. Moran, who is 37, has two young daughters, and the book is, in part, a protective reflex against them growing up to idolize Kim Kardashian and spend half their disposable income on depilation. It also springs from her horror at the shuffling unwillingness of many women to claim a use for feminism.

…

“Why,” she writes in a section about the agony of walking in stilettos, “do we believe that wearing heels is an intrinsic part of being a woman, despite knowing it doesn’t work?” She blasts the ironic reclamation of strip clubs as somehow empowering to women and slams actresses and models as women whose careers are built on pandering to sexist stereotypes.

That sounds radical. Watch out!

A Twitter discussion of skeptical feminism caused me to go look at one of the first things I wrote for the ur-B&W, the website not the blog. It’s an “In Focus” article on “difference feminism” with a collection of resources at the end.

I started with a defense of a certain kind of radical feminism (which is not to be confused with the term ”radical feminism” as currently used by the troll-crowd, who don’t know what they’re talking about).

Second wave feminism has always had a radical strand. It has always been about more than equal pay. It was also, for instance, about exposing and then discarding banal conventional unreflective ideas that led to banal conventional unreflective behaviour. Ideas about cooking and cleaning being somehow naturally women’s work, for example, which led to men cheerfully lounging about while women put in what Arlie Hochschild calls a second shift. And even more than that, unexamined ideas about what women are like, what they want, what they should be and do. David Lodge once remarked that women became much more interesting after feminism, and his own novels bear this out, as do those of Michael Frayn and other male novelists who started writing in the ’50s or ’60s. The pre-1970 female characters are non-entities, the post-1970 ones–Robyn Penrose in Nice Work, Kate in Headlong–take up a lot of space. The very way women are perceived and noticed and thought about changed with feminism, and that would not have happened if mere institutional reform had been the only goal.

The way women are perceived and noticed and thought about changed with feminism, and that’s a good thing. It’s not better to have half of humanity perceived as just a little cleverer than the family dog.

But there are radical ideas and then there are radical ideas. One of the less helpful ones was difference feminism. The foundations of this shaky edifice were laid in the ’70s, when a popular rhetorical move was to label many usually well-thought-of attributes and tools–reason, logic, science, “linear” thinking, abstract ideas, analysis, objectivity, argument–as male, and dub their opposite female. So by a contortion that defies “male” logic, it somehow became feminist to confine women all over again to intuition, guesswork, instinct, feelings, subjectivity, and arm-waving.

If you’re going to rant and rave about feminism gone wrong, rant and rave about that. Don’t rant and rave about women refusing to be treated as inferiors; that’s the wrong thing to object to.