Author: Ophelia Benson

And speaking of Wonkers, Ian B sent me a lovely little piece from the Wall Street Journal the other day, that’s more of the same kind of bowl of warm spit. Written by one Charlotte Hays – which sounds like a woman’s name to me. Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend. Does Charlotte Hays think she’d be writing for the WSJ without feminism? Hmm?

Perhaps the nicest thing about attending the National Organization for Women’s 40th birthday event last weekend was that I didn’t have to pack a lot of fancy party clothes – the dress code was strictly old feminist. The mindset was of the same vintage. Though there was a “summit” for young feminists on Friday before the conference got under way in earnest (and I do mean earnest), most of the 700 women in attendance were no spring chickens. They were joined at the Crowne Plaza by a handful of hen-pecked, middle-age men, always touchingly eager to demonstrate their ardent sympathy.

There’s lots more of the same kind of thing. Old, boring, old, boring, old, not hip, old, not as hip as I am, old, we’ve heard that before, yes that Equal Rights Amendment, yawn, 1982, yawn, old, I chose to get a bite to eat at Quizno’s instead. Stupid stuff. And the Wonkette shall inherit the earth.

I wonder if Katherine Rake has been reading Wonkette.

Roll up, roll up, for a spot of that old favourite, feminist-bashing. Anyone can have a go, it’s easy. Trot out that readymade mythological figure of the dungaree-clad, scary, hairy and humourless feminist.

Don’t forget ‘fixated’ and ‘so angry’ – they go with the humourless bit. And as for rolling up – the comments are depressing. Actually they’re more like disgusting. And that’s at the Guardian! So men in the rest of the world are even more misogynist and contempt-filled – how encouraging.

And we now also have to contend with the hypersexualisation of our culture, a phenomenon that has developed and snowballed with hardly a murmur of dissent. Against a backdrop of ubiquitous images of women’s bodies as sex objects, rates of self-harm among young women are spiralling, eating disorders are on the rise, and plastic surgery is booming.

Well there’ve been quite a few murmurs of dissent from me, but I do my murmuring in such a quiet, genteel, whispery, mousy way that no one hears me, what with all that panting and grunting going on. I suppose it’s my karma.

I think there’s some tension there though, and I think it’s a tension you find in a lot of feminists. A bit of eating cake and having.

The stereotype of the mythological feminist, while ridiculous, is dangerous in that it gives the impression that feminism is first and foremost about how women should dress or whether they should wear make-up…Against a backdrop of ubiquitous images of women’s bodies as sex objects…

Well, which is it? It’s no good disavowing concern with how women should dress in one breath and then expressing concern with ubiquitous images of their bodies as sex objects with the other. The two are, unfortunately, linked. I myself have a Talibanish tendency to flinch when I see women ambling around the supermarket with their stomachs or buttocks or tits poking out, for precisely that kind of reason, a tendency which always causes me to ask despairingly why women can’t just wear clothes instead of either tents or bathing suits. I ask that question for feminist reasons, because I think it makes a difference to how everyone thinks of women – so I don’t think it’s much good pretending feminism isn’t concerned with that subject, even to suck up to the Wonkette crowd.

Any Buddhists out there? I have a question. Or not so much a question as something I don’t get. (I know of at least one Buddhist out there. Maybe I’ll email her, or maybe she’ll say something here before I get around to it.) This morning I was reading a book about feminism and world religions – called Feminism and World Religions – and in the essay on Buddhism Rita Gross tells us that many Buddhists explain male dominance as a result of karma: everyone’s ‘current position’ is a result of karma from the past, so women’s inferiority results from ‘negative karma’ so they have to bear it gracefully, which will probably lead to the good karma of rebirth as a man. (She then says what’s wrong with that view – you don’t get to say ‘it’s your karma to be oppressed by me’ because that’s bad or ‘negative’ karma for you.) But on the next page she talks about egolessness and the non-existence of the ego, the self, the identity. That’s fine, I have no problem with that, it just sounds like dear Hume to me; but what I don’t get is how those two things can possibly make sense in combination. If the self doesn’t exist in this life, what sense can it possibly make to say that what we did in a past life belongs to us in this one? Accepting the (absurd, but never mind) idea of rebirth just for the moment for the sake of argument – what is it that is reborn if there is no self? I want to know. What is it that is reborn, and what is its relationship to its ‘karma’? It’s presumably not anything material; it’s not meant to be the same atoms or anything; but it’s also not the same person, because personhood is an illusion. So what is it?

This is a blindingly obvious problem, so surely it must have been discussed to within an inch of its life, but I seem to have slept through that class. Answers on a postcard please.

Just a little update on community. Because I know we’re all slightly worried that the idea of community is so out of fashion and that people don’t get reminded often enough that we all live in A Community and we are all members of A Community (just one though – mind now) and we must all respect other people’s Communities as they must respect ours. So it is good to see that in some few corners of the media, respect for The Community is not quite dead yet.

For instance there is this nice little BBC article which uses the word no fewer than twelve times. Not bad for such a short piece! I feel all cuddly as I read it. Stifled, but cuddly.

Some 120 members of the Bangladeshi community from London and beyond marched in protest against the forthcoming film adaptation of Monica Ali’s novel, Brick Lane…This community first complained vehemently when the novel was first released in 2003 to much critical acclaim…Soon chants began, and slogans such as “Community, community, Bangladeshi community” and “Monica’s book, full of lies” repeatedly rang out…Dr Husain delivered a short speech in which he explained how the Bangladeshi community felt about Ms Ali’s novel. “A book has been written, that has greatly offended the hard-working, industrious Bangladeshi community,” he said. “This hard-working community has been offended by lies, slander and cynicism. There should be a limit to what you can write or say.”…It was quite noticeable that there were almost no women directly involved in the march. One of the two who did march was Salina Akhtar, 41, who lives not far from Brick Lane. She said she didn’t know why women were not at the protest, but said the female members of the Bangladeshi community were upset by Ms Ali’s novel.

Isn’t it interesting the way they all feel entitled to speak for ‘the community’? How do they get that way? How do they know that every single ‘member’ or ‘female member’ of ‘the community’ agrees with them? They don’t, of course, they just like to claim they do or pretend they do. Thus coercive groupthink and conformist pressure get a foothold, and the BBC helps out.

Tom Morris makes the same point:

The Guardian has a sensible enough piece saying on the Brick Lane issue. But what they fail to understand is that by even using the word “community” (something that Natasha Walter does twenty times in this article), they give support to the very problem they are highlighting. It’s individuals we are talking about, not communities. It’s a flawed and useless way of talking about what is a matter of individuals. Some people think the book is treacherous/blasphemous/nasty-nasty, and some people don’t. To use the word “community” automatically gives these busybodies the very credibility that they are trying to achieve.

Which could be why one of the favoured slogans was ‘Community, community, Bangladeshi community’. No flies on them.

And one more that caught my attention yesterday:

Peter Tatchell, of OutRage!, the gay rights group said: I wrote to him about lyrics that incite murder of gays and lesbians by some black singers and suggested that the CRE co-ordinate a round table meeting with the black and gay communities to have come to an agreement about challenging racism and homophobia.

Eh? A meeting with the black and gay communities? That would be kind of a large meeting, wouldn’t it? You’d have to hold it in Richmond Park, and then nobody would be able to hear. What is it with this synechdoche thing where a few people talking somehow is everyone who fits the description ‘member of the ___ community’? If some woman or some American or some atheist went to a meeting somewhere would I consider her to be representing the women’s or Americans’ or atheists’ community and therefore representing me? Just automatically, because of her ‘identity’? No. No, I’ve actually met a few women I don’t agree with about much of anything, and much the same can be said of my experience of meeting Americans. Is it different with gays and blacks (and Bangladeshis) because they’re all so oppressed that they all think alike? No, because that’s not how that works. There are lots of women who think women ought to be subordinate to men; I’m not part of their community. Same thing with any community. Bangladeshi, gay, dust-collecting; all of them. Humans don’t share one big brain, no matter how communitarian they are, and it’s not possible to turn all those billions of brains into one big collective shared brain simply by dint of endless repetition of the word ‘community.’ And a good thing too. I like to keep my brain to myself, thank you.

I spent most of the past three days working on a sudden rush job. Now I’m all speeded up like something in a cartoon. Hurry hurry hurry, do it as fast as possible. I should do some big long-delayed project like, um, tidying my desk; I’d probably get it done in two minutes. But…nah. I’m not in the mood. All rushed out.

Well, Ash Kotak talks good sense, at least.

As for the “Brick Lane community” response, Greer is assuming a community speaks with one voice; it is patronising and arrogant. Any community is made up of a group of individuals. However a community together tries to protect and uphold common values, not everyone will support them all the time. This Brick Lane media-generated controversy has reinforced the truth that a community which has little voice – and some of those within it who have no voice – will continue to remain invisible.

Eg-zacktly. And the dang Guardian and the dang BBC don’t help by calling twenty people ‘the community’ all the time. Which surely they must be beginning dimly to realize, since people keep telling them and telling them and telling them – you think some day they’ll stop?

For some people living within such communities, that place is their entire world. There is little reason to “escape”, especially when you consider the outside, alien world to be hostile – examples of which are keenly sought by the protectors/oppressors within. Even though the protesters, generally, have been marginalised, a few self-appointed community leaders have perpetuated the stereotypical belief of the limited and inward thinking by “them” in the minds of the British public. To publicise their views is the same as giving one of the self-appointed Sikh community leaders a platform on Bezhti, the play that prematurely closed in Birmingham, and representing it as the voice of the community.

Isn’t it just. Ash Kotak, you rock.

Read the whole letter; it’s spot on.

They’re ba-ack. The dear Department for the Promotion of Virtue and the Discouragement of Vice is making a comeback. Nostalgic, innit.

Behind a desk in a spartan government office, a bearded official says he is swamped with job applicants for a proposed department to promote virtue and discourage vice, which would send out religious monitors to uncover and correct un-Islamic behavior in the populace.

I bet. I bet he’s swamped with applicants who want to go out to uncover and correct things that other people are doing – laughing, singing, talking to friends, going outside; sinister stuff like that. Uncover it and correct it, quick, before everything goes to hell.

The cabinet also approved reviving the Department for the Promotion of Virtue and the Discouragement of Vice…It became notoriously punitive under Taliban rule, from 1996 to 2001, when turbaned enforcers whipped women if their veils slipped and arrested men for wearing too-short beards or playing chess…”We would be as different from the Taliban as earth and sky,” said Sulieman Hamid, an official of the Ministry of Hajj and Religious Affairs who would oversee the virtue and vice monitors. “They used Islam for political purposes. We only want to stop people from committing bad acts and help maintain the honor of Islam.”

Ohhhh, well then – nothing to worry about. Yes indeed. I know if I learned that the government was going to set up a Department for the Promotion of Virtue and the Discouragement of Vice and it assured us that it only wanted to stop people from committing bad acts and help maintain the honor of Christianity, I wouldn’t be worried at all that it might be ever so slightly intrusive and coercive and that its ideas of ‘bad acts’ and ‘honor’ might be different from mine. Nope, that wouldn’t be an issue. Everything would be fine.

“We would not beat people or force women to wear scarves. But we have to do something to protect society, to tell people they should not drink alcohol or smoke hashish or kill their Muslim brothers.”

Tell people? Just, gently, softly, in a nice voice, tell them? Or…something a little firmer than that? And then – drinking alcohol and killing are the same kind of thing? ‘Dear sister, you should not drink that vodka martini, it is un-Islamic. Dear brother, you should not kill that Muslim brother, it is a bad act.’ And then – it’s only Muslim brothers people will be told not to kill? So it’s okay to kill women and it’s okay to kill infidels? And then – isn’t killing people against the law anyway, so isn’t a Virtue Committee to amble out and whisper to people that they ought not to, a bit superfluous? Or could it be that the final item was thrown in to make up the numbers, so that the alcohol and hashish ones wouldn’t look quite so footling? Hey, all we’re going to do is tell women they shouldn’t let their faces stick out and they shouldn’t murder people – is that so harsh?

If the parliament takes up the issue, it is likely to pit factions led by Islamic clerics and former militia leaders against others composed of professionals, women and Western-educated figures. These groups represent major competing strains in Afghan society as it charts a path between traditional Islamic values and modern democratic norms.

That’s a rather stupid and confused opposition, the one between traditional Islamic values and modern democratic norms – because traditional Islamic values can perfectly well be democratic: as long as a majority prefers them, that’s what they are. What the writer probably means is ‘modern secular norms’ – but that’s not really an acceptable thing to say in US mass media. It might be okay in The Nation or Mother Jones, but not a big newspaper; so journalists say ‘democratic’ instead, even though it makes the argument a little meaningless. But it’s interesting that (if I’m right) ‘secular’ is not an acceptable word here – interesting and somewhat alarming.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown reviews Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism in the Indy.

Cosmopolitanism, in its reconstructed meaning, says Appiah, provokes attacks from the left for whom it is dilettante and elitist. The right despises it because cosmopolitans make bad nationalists and patriots. All authoritarians detest the internationalist spirit. Hitler and Stalin launched regular invectives against “rootless cosmopolitans”.

Yeah. And identitarians hate it, which is one reason it is worth trying to dispute identitarianism, especially of the solitarist variety, John Gray notwithstanding. Cosmopolitanism is a good thing. Cosmopolitanism is Sarajevo before everything went to hell.

The Professor of Philosophy at the Centre for Human Values, Princeton no less, is not as bold as he could have been. A crucial treatise is rendered impotent by neat self censorship and a surfeit of facts. He elegantly turns away from the implications of his advocacy, in particular for the US…This volume ends up being a nice book for good people. He confesses: “This book is not a contribution to the debates about the true face of globalisation. I’m a philosopher by trade and philosophers rarely write useful books.” And that’s the pity of it all.

Well I don’t agree with him about that, actually, I think Cosmopolitanism is a useful book. I admire useful books. Jerry and I are working on a book that we think could be useful. We’re not philosophers, so we plan to be as bold as we can be.