Author: Ophelia Benson

I’m sure you Americans in the readership have the same phenomena where you are, albeit with different tourists, most probably the English; ‘FAWCET-FAWCET-FAWCET-WELL-HOWDY-PARDNER-BATHROOM-FAWCET-MCDONALDS!’

Do you ever get sick of visitors to your country overusing your words, and using them wrong? Technically wrong; wrong connotations; wrong situation; mismatched nuance and misjudged tone?

‘G’DAY-MATE-MATE-MATE-THROWASHRIMPONTHABARBIE-BRUCE-BRUCE-BRUCE-CRIKEY-ESKY- DINGO-DRONGO-WANKER!!!’

This is what you look like when you overuse the lingo. It’s not a good look, mate.

I tried preventing this before it even had a chance to happen with CFI’s Debbie Goddard, by confounding her with complete nonsense, and I think it worked. If you ever get the chance to meet her, ask ‘why can’t Fred ride a bike?’

(Don’t ever ask me, ask her.)

I never got to PZ Myers in time though, before he’d called Chris Stedman something like a ‘fluffy feelgood wanker’ (I paraphrase). I not sure about the ‘fluffy’ or the ‘feelgood’, but he did call him a ‘wanker’ – I do remember that bit. PZ’s been using the term ‘wanker’ a lot lately, like he’s the overly proud recipient of an honorary doctorate in

Strine from Steve Irwin University, for achievement in the twin fields of ‘Crikies’ and ‘Ubeudies’.

I do agree though, at least in my understanding of the term; Chris Stedman is a wanker. I’m not sure though, if PZ wasn’t actually looking for a harsher term (it’s not entirely uncommon for some Australian parents to lovingly call their kids ‘wanker’ for being silly, so I’m a bit taken aback at how PZ’s use of the term has been seen by some as so shocking).

***

Monday morning was the beginning of a wonderful, if a little grey, Melbourne day. I had chores to do, and places to go; it was my last full day in the city of Melbourne.

As it turned out, I ended up having quite an enjoyable breakfast with Rod, one of the volunteers from the GAC (you may have seen him running around in a blue convention t-shirt). Rod was even nice enough to shout. Here’s breakfast…

[media id=47653 title=”latte” width=”120″ height=”160″ class=”aligncenter size-full wp-image-47653″ ]

Coffee, yum, etc…

Note the sepia tone, the latte, the mostly out-of-shot remnants of a vegetarian breakfast, all taken on-location in Melbourne’s inner-suburbs.

To Australians, all these factors add up to one thing…

…WANKER!

(Actually, the latte is very common in Australia, consumed by yobs, bogans and working class yahoos. Pretending the latte is wanky, technically makes you a wanker. It’s the same deal with sparkling white wine, incidentally.)

***

After talk of green energy sources with Rod, talk of the local promotion of Aboriginal cultural enterprises, talk of public housing and wrought iron fences, and talk about this-and-that inner-city topic, it was a handshake before heading off to La Trobe University to meet up with another mate. We talked about Alvin Plantinga’s argument that naturalism was self-refuting (rubbish!); talked about student publications; talked about the continental philosophers over at Australian Catholic University (rubbish!), and talked about which Greek philosopher my mate’s lecturer looked like, all while I had a vegetarian lunch.

To Australians, all these factors add up to one thing…

…WANKER!

***

Before I go any further, I must confess that I once did a bit of interfaithy professional development in values education, run by UNESCO…

…WANKER!

***

Given that discussion, at the interfaithy event of the night called The Road Less Travelled, would be based largely on anecdote, I’ll summarise my own anecdotal observations about interfaith, up-front. These are the thoughts I had on my mind, going into this thing.

There’s too great a fetish in finding shared values, to the point of fabrication – oh, we’re all believers one way or another. (I’m so grateful that Hitchens caught Mos Def out on this, the dross that it is).

There’s ecumenical hostility towards atheists in the interfaith movement, often manifesting as scapegoating for social problems, more likely caused by religion (don’t you love those ‘New Atheists’ and ‘secular fundamentalists’, with their mosque bans and their placards reading ‘go home, this is a Christian nation’? I’ve never seen such a thing, actually.)

There’s far too much tokenism, not just in the selection of tokens from minorities, and in the singling them out from the nasty remainder. There’s also the exaggeration, and fabrication of the nastiness of the ‘nasties’, often enabled by the token themselves.

Z: Y isn’t like the rest of the Xs, and even if most Xs aren’t nasty, THOSE outspoken Xs over there ARE, isn’t that right, Y? (Oh, how we’d like to be able to cooperate with the Xs, if only…*sniff*)

Y: Yes, they’re not helping. They’re making my job harder, helping you cooperate with them. If only they’d be more respectful, you could allow them to cooperate in fixing the problems they didn’t create. Then they could finally be relieved of the consequences of these problems they didn’t create, which they complain about no end, which again, isn’t helping.

Z: Don’t worry Y, we’ll shelter you from those consequences. You’re Being Helpful. You’re an equal around here.

Interfaith pats people on the back for stuff they’re supposed to do, regardless. You’re not supposed to be fighting amongst each other! Congratulate you for getting along? Next you’ll expect an award for not roasting any of your children on a spit this year. Congratulations on your low expectations!

The most useful thing interfaith does in developed countries, it seems to me, is offer an avenue for middle-class singles to hook up for hot, hot, interfaith sex. ‘You are so spirichooal!’ Wakka-chikka-wah-wah!

(Honestly, you’ve got about as much chance of convincing me a good part of middle-class interfaith isn’t about lonely horny people, as you have of convincing me that the spiritualism in Lady Chatterley’s Lover isn’t the result of DH Lawrence focusing on giving himself a solipsist reach-around.)

Interfaith appropriates acts of ecumenical cooperation through innocuous branding, advancing an increasing monopoly over such cooperation. Having a single approach, or movement, monopolising cooperation is a Bad Thing. It stunts innovation, and allows vested interests to more easily hijack or pervert initiatives (see UNESCO).

Perhaps damnably, interfaith enables homophobia, especially on an international stage – people who should never have been consulted on human rights, through interfaith approaches (and an aversion to modernist ‘imperialism’) are now able to steer human rights discussions, simply by virtue of their numbers and faith positions (aka different ways of finding meaning aka different ways of not liking gays). Homophobia is a ‘shared value’, and nothing unites the tribes like the shared loathing of another Other.

(Perhaps it’s worthy of mention at this point that almost by definition, having anything to do with interfaith makes a person a wanker – and I paid for a ticket.)

You may be forgiven for reaching the verdict that I’m a little sceptical about interfaith.

***

So, at The Road Less Travelled, PZ Myers, Chris Stedman and Leslie Cannold were moderated in discussion by Meredith Doig of The Rationalist Society of Australia (Australian free-thought gets damn good value out of this lady, incidentally), on the big question:  ‘can believers and atheists work together for the common good?’

I’m glad this specific question didn’t get much time, because while it looks good on a flyer, it goes nowhere very fast. Can believers and atheist work together for the common good? Well, yes, obviously. Can I go home now?

When I was a little boy age two, living out in the middle of rural Australia, I had a godless family, while our neighbours were Christians. We didn’t proselytise each other – we had other priorities at the time, namely food and shelter (honestly, my family lived in a corrugated iron shack). We cooperated, and even though we needed to cooperate, we did so primarily because we loved one another.

While I cherish having had this relationship, it’s a particularly unremarkable story, at least here in Australia. It happens all the time, especially amongst the working class – with the interfaith movement nowhere in sight.

So I had a question in mind, particularly for Chris Stedman, before I even rocked up to the event…

‘If atheists can get along with the religious by other means – without interfaith initiatives – what does interfaith have to offer above and beyond existing cooperation, and what would atheists be expected to bring to the table in order to make such extended cooperation possible?’

…then I rocked up.

***

Truthfully, I was more impressed with Chris Stedman than I expected to be. The fact that he too was pissed off with the shared values fetish, and that he recognised substantive difference as needing to be acknowledged before any kind of binding decision making, went a long way with me.

He was also less effulgent and far less vague than I’d expected, given what I’ve read of his online. (Is he able to be like this on a regular basis, in the US?)

I didn’t entirely buy his objection to being tokenised, though, although I guess it’s not nothing that he at least has this concern. The stoushes he’s had with ‘New Atheists’ online, and the complaining about his job being made harder, at least flirt with the prospect of his making a token of himself.

As for my question, well I didn’t need to ask as it was effectively answered as the discussion unfolded – the upshot of interfaith is getting closer to religious people on an organisational level, while the price is deference, paid in the currency of ‘respect for belief’.

***

Simon Blackburn raises the concern in ‘Religion and Respect’, published in Philosophers Without Gods (Oxford University Press), of ‘respect creep’ – how demands for ‘respect’ (a ‘tricky term’) through vague terminology, increment until the demand has become for deference.  It’s an essay that anyone treating the civility of ‘respect of religious belief’ as common sense needs to be made to read.

If you consider this ‘respect creep’ in the context of marginalised religious minorities, and empowered religious majorities, it’s not long before you realise that common sense civility in these matters means certain things. The minority will show deference to the majority, while the empowered majority will overlook reciprocity, simply because it can get away without thinking about such details. Naively playing along, in order to ‘cooperate’, in campaigns geared towards anything approaching equality, is a ludicrous strategy.

Something along these lines seemed to pan out in the discussion between PZ Myers and Leslie Cannold – although to be fair to Cannold, whether it was flippancy or Minnesotan modesty, PZ downplayed the significance of the ‘Crackergate’ affair (the point of contention), making it look like a random blasphemy stunt. PZ was told it didn’t help campaigns for separation of church and state when religious beliefs were mocked.

PZ progressed through an array of rationale; ‘bragging’; to show nothing is sacred; scientists care about the truth, and the truth is it’s just a cracker; ‘you know this used to be a ritual used to justify pogroms against the Jews?’ (I paraphrase).

PZ never mentioned there was already an angry Catholic mob campaigning against and threatening some poor sod who accidentally ‘abducted’ a communion wafer, well before the wafer desecration of ‘Crackergate’ fame. PZ never got to mention that his choice of desecration – the nail – was in response to the old anti-Semitic wood carvings depicting Jews crucifying communion wafers.

PZ never got to mention the torrent of (often anti-Semitic) hate mail and death threats he received in response to the desecration.

Obviously, the level of detail involved in ‘Crackergate’ would have taken up the whole night, and then some. I didn’t actually expect PZ to give us the whole story. I would have liked it though if he’d raised the point that he was acting in retaliation against a specific case of the demand for deference; something that goes to the heart of what the discussion was about.

How do you cooperate with a hateful, forceful, bullying and sometimes violent mob that expects deference? This is what PZ was up against in ‘Crackergate’, and it rears its head at other times as well, sometimes even with mock politeness when ecumenical cooperation is sought.

We don’t normally deal with quite this kind of thing here in Australia, and while my own behaviour and interaction with the religious is more in line with Leslie Cannold’s stated views, and while my interest in the truth comes more from a ‘need-to-know’ utilitarianism, I still view ‘Crackergate’ as both a moral, and a politically necessary victory. In this case, the mob needed standing up to and I don’t care one dot when people bemoan how decorum comes into it.

I find a lot of staged acts of blasphemy to be contrived, self-aggrandizing and clichéd attention-seeking (i.e. wanking), but not ‘Crackergate’.

***

I went away from the gathering with a better impression of Chris Stedman than I’d expected*, a more fleshed out impression of Leslie Cannold, and pretty much the same opinion of PZ Myers as I had a few weeks earlier. (Although Leslie Cannold’s polished mock-familiarity [say when pretending to whisper to the crowd] seemed better geared to larger audiences than the smaller, closer crowd we were in.)

I found the some of the crowd quite annoying (although Jason Ball, and a number of the other young rationalists were around, which was good), being seated to one fellow who just kept complaining about this, that and whatever that had happened around the traps**.

There was a young wanker in the audience, who seeing as how PZ ‘valued disrespectfulness’ (I paraphrase), and how PZ supposedly thought he was ‘better than us [religious people]’ (again, I paraphrase), decided to point out that PZ was unsuited to the role of scientist because he was fat. That was fun. After having his misconceptions and curious assumptions calmly punctured, our young wanker friend was forced to concede, ‘…then… we agree…’

If only every religionist who chimed in about how ‘New Atheists’ were trying to get Francis Collins sacked on account of being a Christian were as open-minded and as able to listen as well as our young wanker, we’d have had a more productive discussion on that front. Maybe the difference is down to the humanizing capacity of face-to-face discussion. Either that, or Miller et al. are bigger, more sanctimonious wankers than I realise.

(A defensive interjection by either a PZ fan, or a dietary science student, wasn’t needed – PZ had things well in hand).

Sadly, I didn’t get too much face-to-face myself at the after-party at Embiggen Books, owing to not going. I had to prepare for my departure from Melbourne, city of wankers, scheduled for early the next morning.

Somehow, I get this sense that discussion of serious matters would have stayed serious, while the overwrought stuff (like ‘respect for belief’) would at last have been treated with due relaxation. I get that feel about after-parties generally, and Embiggen Books specifically; not wanky.

(An exception being, I have this image in mind, of PZ waddling around Embiggen Books, trying to speak Ostrayun, while eating Vegemite smeared communion wafers – very wanky).

Shuffling back out into the dark with my thoughts and reflections, while the party went on, was how my experience of the Global Atheist Convention of 2012, ended. Thanks for having me, Victorians.

~ Bruce

* I may even be able to handle reading his book now.

** Like my GAC coverage?

London: MP Chuka Umunna, the most senior UK politician of Black African heritage, has hosted the first ever House of Commons Summit designed to end child abuse resulting from witchcraft-branding. Former Home Office Minister Meg Hillier said that the Home Secretary should consider using her power to refuse to allow faith leaders who have branded children as witches to enter the UK.

Chuka Umunna’s position as Shadow Business Secretary and the only black member of the Shadow Cabinet means that he is the most senior politician in the UK who is of African origin. The London MP hosted the Summit in conjunction with AFRUCA, Africans Unite Against Child Abuse, to bring together policymakers, charities, faith leaders and community representatives in order to examine how best to curtail child abuse resulting from accusations of witchcraft or possession by evil spirits.

The Summit followed the conviction of Eric Bikubi and Magalie Bamu for the murder of Kristy Bamu on Christmas Day 2010. The Crown Prosecution Service said that Eric Bikubi inflicted ‘violence on an unimaginable scale’ and that Magalie Bamu ‘willingly subjected her 15 year old brother to extreme violence’. The teenager was found with 130 separate injuries and died from a combination of drowning and beatings to his head, chest and limbs.

The event was held in the Grand Committee Room of the House of Commons at the Palace of Westminster on the 18^th April and, as well as Chuka Umunna and Meg Hillier, those speaking at the event included Tim Loughton MP, the Children’s Minister; Catherine McKinnell MP, the Shadow Children’s Minister; Keith Vaz MP, Chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee; and Modupe Debbie Ariyo OBE, Founder and Director of AFRUCA.

The Home Secretary has the power to refuse entry to the UK to anyone whose presence in the UK is not good for our country. She should consider using this when faith leaders who have branded children as witches seek to enter the UK.

 Safeguarding is just as important in a faith setting as in a school. Faith leaders are trusted because of their leadership in their community. Parents and carers should be able to be reassured that their trust us well placed.

The Summit featured contributions from around 50 community leaders, policy makers and other interested groups and issues raised included the content of some Christian TV channels, safeguarding practices in Churches, and possible changes to the Law which would explicitly tackle this kind of abuse.

London MP Chuka Umunna, who hosted the Summit, said:

Children branded as witches or being possessed by evil spirits can face some of the worst abuse and neglect imaginable.  As a society, we must face up to this and stop this abuse from happening.  A lot of abuse happens under the radar which makes it all the more important that we put all our energies into hunting it out and putting a stop to it.

 We must send out the strongest message possible that there can be no excuse whatsoever for treating children in this way, branding them as witches or being  possessed by evil spirits, and if you carry out these awful acts the strong arm of the law will be brought to bear on you.

I am glad that so many prominent MPs attended this event – including the Children’s Minister – and that the community, policy makers and the third sector were able to come together in this way to agree a list of actions we will all take to prevent the abuse and neglect of our children and young people.  The Summit was a good first step in bringing this issue to the attention of those in the corridors of power but it is only a first step – we need to ensure it is followed up with action.”

We are grateful to the MPs who attended and to Chuka Umunna for hosting this very important Summit. The huge turnout shows that AFRUCA clearly has the support of the African community in pushing for positive changes in the best interest of our children. It is totally incomprehensible that someone’s life can be ruined because someone thinks they are a witch. We will therefore continue to work to prevent children from being harmed as a result of witchcraft branding.

For further information please contact David Hale on 07891390988 or at david.hale@parliament.uk.

Foreign Policy has a superb series out now called The Sex Issue. In their own words, here is what it’s about:

When U.S. magazines devote special issues to sex, they are usually of the celebratory variety (see: Esquire, April 2012 edition; Cosmopolitan, every month). Suffice it to say that is not what we had in mind with Foreign Policy’s first-ever Sex Issue, which is dedicated instead to the consideration of how and why sex — in all the various meanings of the word — matters in shaping the world’s politics. Why? In Foreign Policy, the magazine and the subject, sex is too often the missing part of the equation — the part that the policymakers and journalists talk about with each other, but not with their audiences. And what’s the result? Women missing from peace talks and parliaments, sexual abuse and exploitation institutionalized and legalized in too many places on the planet, and a U.S. policy that, whether intentionally or not, all too frequently works to shore up the abusers and perpetuate the marginalization of half of humanity. Women’s bodies are the world’s battleground, the contested terrain on which politics is played out. We can keep ignoring it. For this one issue, we decided not to.

The articles’ criticisms are aimed squarely on the worst offenders in the oppression of women, such as Iran and Saudi Arabia, as well as commenting on discriminatory practices elsewhere such as sex-selective abortion in India.

An article by Egyptian-American journalist Mona Eltahawy called “Why Do They Hate Us” co-opts the question so often said to be asked by Americans, and asks it as a woman. Eltahawy is particularly forceful in her indictment of the misogyny so prevalent in the Middle East:

Name me an Arab country, and I’ll recite a litany of abuses fueled by a toxic mix of culture and religion that few seem willing or able to disentangle lest they blaspheme or offend. When more than 90 percent of ever-married women in Egypt — including my mother and all but one of her six sisters — have had their genitals cut in the name of modesty, then surely we must all blaspheme. When Egyptian women are subjected to humiliating “virginity tests” merely for speaking out, it’s no time for silence. When an article in the Egyptian criminal code says that if a woman has been beaten by her husband “with good intentions” no punitive damages can be obtained, then to hell with political correctness. And what, pray tell, are “good intentions”? They are legally deemed to include any beating that is “not severe” or “directed at the face.” What all this means is that when it comes to the status of women in the Middle East, it’s not better than you think. It’s much, much worse.

Eltahawy says not a word of a lie. She tells it like it is, merely describing practices and actions on the part of men towards women that are violent and depraved. When you read such descriptions, free of the sugarcoating so often slathered on by those who squirm at the very idea of criticizing other cultures, you realize just how rare it is to hear the devastating truth. In asking what is to be done, she warns:

First we stop pretending. Call out the hate for what it is. Resist cultural relativism and know that even in countries undergoing revolutions and uprisings, women will remain the cheapest bargaining chips. You — the outside world — will be told that it’s our “culture” and “religion” to do X, Y, or Z to women. Understand that whoever deemed it as such was never a woman.

She pre-empts all those whose defensiveness and apologism will kick in almost automatically at such a direct attack on misogyny in a specific region of the world, since it’s the fashion among university-educated elites to be respectful and polite at all cost when it comes to cultural differences, and always conscientious of the grave risk of being labeled a cultural imperialist.

And as predicted, it’s just not okay to criticize the appalling treatment of women in the Arab world, without at least an equal condemnation of, ideally, 1. the United States of America; 2. Israel, and 3. the Western world more generally, in that order.

Sherene Seikaly and Maya Mikdashi, in their response to Foreign Policy’s series, accuse Eltahawy of reviving “binaries”, and take issue on all of the predictable fronts:

its focus is almost exclusively on Iran, the Arab world, and China. Thus “the world” is reduced for the most part to Arabs, Iranians, and Chinese—not a coincidental conglomeration of the “enemy.” The current war on women in the United States is erased.

Well it is “Foreign Policy” magazine, so the lack of comment on the status of US women should not come as too big a surprise, and the focus on countries like Iran and China where the US has significant foreign policy interests (and challenges) would be expected. This is the classic relativist argument: you didn’t criticize all countries or cultures equally, so you’re mean and unfair. This argument’s fallacy lies in the reality that countries and cultures don’t all subjugate their women equally. So different doses of condemnation are quite justified.

Further, the article is about women in the Arab world, and specifically, Egypt. It’s not about American women. It’s not about Swedish women. It’s not about Bolivian women. Eltahawy knows and writes about women in the Arab world. She’s not obliged to comment on the status of women everywhere under the sun, and she’s not even obliged to add caveats, (“not withstanding that women in Country X are also demeaned, …”) in order to criticize what she sees around her, in the region she knows.

About Karim Sadjadpour’s terrific article, “The Ayatollah Under the Bed(sheets)” which points out the co-existence of a radical effort to suppress normal sexual behaviour alongside some both quirky and harmful perversions prevalent in Iran and the Muslim world at large, Seikaly and Mikdashi say:

Leaving aside his dismissal of the centuries old tradition of practicing Muslims asking and receiving advice on sexual and gender practices, the article assumes an unspoken consensus with its readers: the idea of a mullah writing about sex is amusing if a little perverted.

Again, Sadjadpour is being indicted for criticizing the obvious: a hypocrisy on the part of the Iranian clergy when it comes to human sexual activity that Iranians themselves routinely defy and poke fun at. And is this tradition of sexual advice-seeking from mullahs to be celebrated when it’s yielding such penetrating (pun intended) probing as this, a hypothetical situation deeply pondered by one Ayatollah Gilani of Iran?

Imagine you are a young man sleeping in your bedroom. In the bedroom directly below, your aunt lies asleep. Now imagine that an earthquake happens that collapses your floor, causing you to fall directly on top of her. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that you’re both nude, and you’re erect, and you land with such perfect precision on top of her that you unintentionally achieve intercourse. Is the child of such an encounter halalzadeh (legitimate) or haramzadeh (a bastard)?

Then they’re peeved with the magazine’s visuals, a series of photographs of a nude woman painted all in black except for her eyes:

She stares at us afraid and alluring. We are invited to sexualize and rescue her at once. The images reproduce what Gayatri Spivak critiqued as the masculine and imperial urge to save sexualized (and racialized) others. The photo spread is reminiscent of Theo van Gogh’s film Submission, based on Ayyan Hirsli Ali’s writings, in which a woman with verses of the Quran painted on her naked body and wearing a transparent chador writhes around a dimly lit room. Foreign Policy’s “Sex Issue” montage is inspired by the same logic that fuels Submission: we selectively highlight the plight of women in Islam using the naked female body as currency. The female body is to be consumed, not covered!

Both Foreign Policy’s photos and Hirsi Ali’s use of paint on a woman’s nude body is aimed at irony, a point lost on Seikaly and Mikdashi. The images are intent on provocation (and it certainly worked in the case of Seikaly and Mikdashi) in that they confront us not with the invitation to “consume”, but with what the mullahs try to hide: that underneath the niqab is a woman’s body. The message is that while misogynists want women to be covered up, they still sexually exploit them underneath. Covered up, they are still consumed.

The photos are somewhat less guilty of “sexualizing” women than the advice dispensed from the Ayatollahs who counsel that women have such sexual prowess that their hair alone has the power to render man forceless (and therefore must be covered up), or the snipers of the Basji in Iran who were reportedly specifically shooting beautiful women among the protesters thronging the streets of Tehran in 2009, as Sadjadpour points out. They are less guilty of sexualizing women than the men in Egypt who subjected women protestors to forced virginity tests, which Eltahawy called “rape disguised as a medical doctor inserting his fingers into their vaginal opening in search of hymens.”

This is the game of the Ayatollahs, and all the men who disguise their desire for the sexual submission of women under the veil of religion: their sexualization of women is violent and systematic, and it uses religious discourse to keep women’s bodies their unchallenged preserve. It’s easier to sexually exploit women when they are trapped in your home and under your command, uneducated, married young, with no political, social or economic rights. When women escape into the public sphere, their bodies are much less controllable, if still at risk in any society where the pulse of misogyny still beats on.

But it is here where Seikaly and Mikdashi show their true colours:

Of course, female genital mutilation and ages of consent are topics that require our careful attention. In the case of former, the reality is that women are often those that insist on the practice because of ways that gender and political economy regimes together make it a necessary rite of womanhood. In fact, critical thinkers have long argued that this practice has more to do with the lack of economic opportunity for women, the imperative to marry, and the hardening and modernization of tradition in response to colonial and neocolonial interventions (including rights frameworks) than some irrational and razor crazed “hatred.” The same insight could be extended to the question of ages of consent. A reductive framework of hatred makes these topics even more difficult to critically think about and work on.

There is the telltale euphemism: FGM requires “our careful attention”. Not our condemnation, not to be erased, not to be opposed, not to be deplored. It needs “attention”. And actually, it’s women’s choice to undergo FGM, so back off. And if it’s not that, then, well, it’s the fault of colonizers and neo-colonizers. So despite the fact that FGM has been practiced in Egypt since the time of the Pharaohs, it’s really perpetuated by some unidentified neocolonial intervention. If something bad is happening in the world, colonizers must have something to do with it.

Such dependency on the view of the world as nothing other than a post-colonial/colonial environment typically negates the internal causes and purveyors of misogyny, most of which pre-existed any experience of colonization. When the blame for all the ills of the developing world are consistently placed on “colonizers”, however many decades or centuries after de-colonization, it’s hard to get the governments and people of once-colonized lands to take responsibility for the changes that need to occur if the status of women is to be improved.

As for women’s participation in the abuses they suffer, certainly it’s true that many adult women are those holding little girls down on the table so that their genitals can be butchered in a procedure that cannot be called anything but cruel, traumatic and without reason. But they do this as part of a culture where the perimeters were laid by men long ago, men who want women and girls to know their place. It is still part of a hatred of women, even if women are participating in it.

Call it culture, call it divine, call it neo-colonialism, but the thread of hatred is always there and often shrouded in the language of God’s law. God wants you to be submissive. God wants you to give in to your husband’s sexual appetite. God wants you to endure beatings. God wants you to be punished for venturing out in public; that is why you experience sexual harassment, sexual assault, or rape. This religion-based justification is not imposed from outside powers; it comes from within, and so it’s from within that it must be destroyed.

But putting this all out on the table is unwarranted, it would seem to Seikaly and Mikdashi, or at least, the blame should be equally divided between colonized and colonizers, between men and women, between Americans and the rest of the world (and Israelis, since a photo of a Jordanian woman protesting outside the Israeli Embassy in Amman is inexplicably included with Seikaly and Mikdashi’s article). They are uncomfortable with the sexual advice doled out by Ayatollahs being mocked. Again, this reaction is anticipated by one of the Foreign Policy writers, Sadjadpour:

the sexual manias of Iran’s religious fundamentalists are worthy of greater scrutiny, all the more so because they control a state with nuclear ambitions, vast oil wealth, and a young, dynamic, stifled population. Yet for a variety of reasons — fear of becoming Salman Rushdie, of being labeled an Orientalist, of upsetting religious sensibilities — the remarkable hypocrisy of the Iranian regime is often studiously avoided.

Without voices like Eltahawy’s, those of us on the outside looking in would be able to drown ourselves in the excuse-making of cultural relativism: they like being abused, degraded, violated. Our own society isn’t perfect, so how can we criticize? At best, we might give “careful attention” to the most overt forms of misogyny, like FGM. At worst, we might just tell ourselves that the women are choosing it, so let it be.

But it’s the men who made the rules. As Eltahawy points out, “Our political revolutions will not succeed unless they are accompanied by revolutions of thought — social, sexual, and cultural revolutions that topple the Mubaraks in our minds as well as our bedrooms.”