Author: Ophelia Benson

A few weeks ago, I sat in a meeting in Vancouver. During a boring bit, I was fooling around with Google, and I stumbled upon a paper entitled, “The (Re)production of Afghan Women” by one Melanie Butler. I recognized the name as I had been interviewed by Butler for this paper, which was published in 2008. Melanie had not really explained the actual topic of what became her graduate thesis in political science at the University of British Columbia, nor sent me a final copy of her paper, nor used any of my statements from the interview in her final paper, which might have interfered inconveniently with the narrative she was weaving. She knew what she would say before she even began to write.

Here is her paper’s abstract:

Canadian women have been at the forefront of the international movement for women’s rights in Afghanistan since the rise of the Taliban in the late 1990s. Focusing on the prominent group Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan (CW4WAfghan), this paper looks at the role its advocacy assumes in the context of the “War on Terror”. In Canada as in the United States, government agencies have justified the military invasion of Afghanistan by revitalizing the oppressed Muslim woman as a medium through which narratives of East versus West are performed. While CW4WAfghan attempt to challenge dominant narratives of Afghan women, they ultimately reinforce and naturalize the Orientalist logic on which the War on Terror operates, even helping to disseminate it through the Canadian school system. Drawing on post-colonial feminist theory, this paper highlights the implications of CW4WAfghan’s Orientalist discourse on women’s rights, and tackles the difficult question of how feminists can show solidarity with Afghan women without adhering to the oppressive narratives that permeate today’s political climate. It is only by employing alternative models that contextualize the situation of Afghan women in relation, rather than in opposition, to our own, that feminists can begin to subvert the mutually reinforcing narratives that sustain imperialist violence and women’s subordination.

You get the idea, but if you can stomach more, some of the best bits are highlighted here.

Butler contends that the organization where I work, Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan, is in fact not a network of women from all walks of life who came together, united only in the insistence that Afghan women and girls deserved the same basic human rights that we enjoy and expect for ourselves here in Canada. What we really are, she claims, are orientalists-in-disguise, who desire the imposition of our own western worldview over unwilling, innately different Muslim women. Butler vilifies the likes of Sally Armstrong, the Canadian writer and journalist who has tirelessly exposed atrocities committed against women and girls in every corner of the planet, even when no one else was paying attention. It was an article by Sally Armstrong in 1997, in Homemaker’s magazine of all places, that incited thousands of Canadian women to action, to speak up against the Taliban’s bizarre governance based on codified misogyny. Many of those women first alerted by Armstrong’s article are today the volunteers, board members, or chapter leaders with CW4WAfghan.

Butler goes on to suggest that I am a mouthpiece for Canada’s ruling conservative government (based on the evidence of a photo taken with the prime minister on International Women’s Day in 2008). She paints CW4WAfghan as a colonialist enterprise. All of her arguments drip with cultural relativism, and with a feminism that is unrecognizable to me.

While much in the paper appears to have been generated by the Random Post-Modernist Essay generator, and is frequently hilarious, the painful part is that this woman asked herself at some point, “I am going to write about Afghan women. What’s the number one most important issue therein I should research?”

Was it the fact that Afghanistan may have the highest levels of domestic violence in the world? That Afghanistan is one of the only countries in the world where the suicide rate is higher among women than among men? That barely 40% of girls are in primary school? That there is a teachers’ shortage of tens of thousands? That women in public life are sometimes murdered? That Afghan women are struggling in the uphill process of building a new legal system that will protect their rights and entrench the rule of law for all Afghans?

No, it was none of these things.

And no one articulated the upside-downness of this more than 13-year-old Alaina Podmorow, the founder of the Little Women for Little Women in Afghanistan. Podmorow waded through terms she was confronting for the first time: the idea of labeling intervention in outside tragedies “orientalism”, “colonialism” or “imperialism”. She was flummoxed, and her reaction to Butler is a raw, gut response of rage.

Not long after it was first published at B&W, Podmorow’s article had been picked up by more than 30 blogs, stretching from Canada to India. Nick Cohen wrote about her in Standpoint magazine. She was on philosophy blogs, political blogs, news blogs. One commenter suggested she run for prime minister. Many readers left comments saying that Podmorow was “smarter than a graduate student”. Over and over, readers pointed out the extraordinariness of Podmorow’s response being that such a young person had so clearly grasped the problems, and the danger, in Butler’s line of argument.

I would suggest that Podmorow’s ability to capture the issue isn’t in spite of her age, but precisely because of it.

But as we grow up, and go out into the world and make choices- about how to respond to the pain of others- we face a menu of options. We can pretend we didn’t feel anything and block it out. We can feel anger. We can respond with empathy and action. Or we can dig around for ways of justifying why this pain is acceptable to others, though not to us, and why we are not obliged to respond. Cultural relativism is this kind of response: one that is now out of control- because it has become institutionalized, embedded increasingly in academic disciplines. More and more, we see it as an acceptable response. I have found a culture of cultural relativism in Canada in our universities, public schools, and teachers’ unions. Cultural relativism has gone mainstream. It’s become so pervasive, we don’t even see it anymore. It’s simply surrounding us, and if we’re not careful, we become a part of it.

But Podmorow and other young people haven’t yet found themselves inside the bowels of institutional and political cultures that insist in their subtle whispers, it’s easier to pretend that ethnic communities outside our own are fundamentally different, and that the expectations of respect for human dignity are not equal across societies.

Children have that biological instinct for empathy, intact. It’s a precious thing, and we have much to learn from it.

But we adults sometimes relate too, despite ourselves and the cloud of relativism often fogging our thinking. You may have once seen a video smuggled out of Afghanistan during Taliban rule there, filmed from underneath a burqa, showing a woman shrouded and buried to her waist, accused of adultery or prostitution, slowly pelted with small stones until her lifeless body keels over in its hole on the grounds of Kabul’s sports stadium in front of thousands of spectators. If you saw it, you probably felt a surge of pain jolt you, and found it wasn’t easy to merely block this out or justify somehow that this atrocity had occurred.

You probably felt the pain of that stranger, just as an Afghan woman would also recognize a violation of human dignity if she saw a video of a Canadian woman being stoned to death. The Afghan viewer would likely be unconvinced by excuses of cultural diversity or a legal system based on holy writ. The capacity to feel the pain of others is part of being human and shouldn’t be suppressed. We need choose action and empathy when presented with that menu of options of how to react.

But this can be hard for grown-ups. It’s long been fashionable in the halls of western arts faculties to view all the world through the lens of post-colonialism. In undergraduate classrooms across the country, political science, anthropology, literature and students of other disciplines learn to see the developing world as unflinchingly hostile to foreign interference, as the wounds of conquest by imperial powers continue to heal. Young Canadians, as they evolve into their university lives, are taught to challenge their own western perceptions and to be culturally sensitive. Fingers point at critics of “the other” as buzzwords like “ethnocentrism” echo around the halls. All kinds of activities take on the metaphor of colonialism, from international development projects to scientific research.

There is nothing wrong with seeking intercultural competence, except when our desire to be tolerant erodes our internal instincts that tell us when something is simply wrong.

Another problem arises when a desire to preserve some exoticism in the world makes us ignore the evidence that above all else, we are human first, and most societies hold more in common with each other than they hold apart. In romanticizing societies outside our own, we can pretend that poverty, inequity and a denial of basic human rights are quaint tribal characteristics that make the world a more colourful place. Anthropologists document abusive practices against women as intriguing cultural rituals and western backpackers can frame on their walls photos of snotty-nosed, grimy kids in rags with swollen bellies, from their jaunts through places like Calcutta or Guatemala City. As we delight in the differences between them and us, we often drown out their voices that tell us, inconveniently, I want the very same things as you do.

Afghanistan is a useful example of how disabling an unhindered post-colonial lens can be to our sense of the truth when it obscures all other views.

While women in Afghanistan under the Taliban spent five years surviving (or in many cases, dying) through a hellish reality that stripped them of every basic right and attempted to beat into them the notion that they were fundamentally inferior to men, many in the West shuddered when reading the rare media account of the horror and suffering: women’s fingernails torn out for being caught with nail polish on, 8-year-old girls married to 40 year-old men, and other accounts of gruesome abuse, torture, murder and degradation. Deep down, that little instinct that lies buried within us was going off with resounding alarm when we came across these stories, that biological reaction kicked in, akin to the emotional reaction of empathy upon hearing about the suffering of other humans, because we instinctually imagine the feelings of pain inflicted on ourselves.

Then 9/11 happened, and at the end of 2001 the Taliban fell and Afghanistan was free. The International Security Assistance Force arrived and donor governments committed to stand by a country that had been forced to its knees. An enormous window swung open for women.

At that point, many of those same people who shuddered when reading individual accounts of the Taliban’s treatment of women seized up in an enveloping discomfort, over all the talk of rights for Afghan women. Journalists and academics started publishing stories of the unrealistic expectations, the danger in trying to “recreate” our own society in Afghanistan and going against nature by “imposing” human rights. Another popular criticism was that countries like the US and Canada had no right to make this “a war about women”. For example, in 2002, York University’s Krista Hunt wrote that, “the primary reason for this coverage of women in Afghanistan is that it provides further evidence that vilifies the Taliban and justifies the Bush administration’s goal of ‘hunting down the terrorists and those that harbour them’.” Or there was Katharine Viner, who wrote in The Guardian in September 2002 that feminism was being used as imperialism in Afghanistan.

It continues to this day. Human rights for Afghan women are being called cultural imperialism, and other such nonsense. Many in the far left anti-war movement want nothing more than for Afghanistan to be left to fend for itself, accepting (if not actually visualizing) that this may very well mean a Taliban return to power. Oh well, that’s the culture, the thinking goes. Afghan women probably like being oppressed!

But if you care to look, Afghan women are telling a different story. As Canadians like Jack Layton, the leader of a Canadian opposition party, the New Democrats, advocate negotiating with the Taliban, and donor governments put forward half-baked ideas like the establishment of a fund to pay off Taliban fighters, the 200 women’s organizations who came together to sign a declaration on January 25, 2010 in Kabul opened their declaration with this:

On January 28, 2010 a conference will be held in London, where a plan for negotiating with the Taliban will be discussed. We, women’s rights and Afghan civil society organizations participating in the abovementioned historic meeting, herewith declare the following:

1. Based on the persistent violation of the rights of women and men by the Taliban, whether when in power or after, objections were clearly and strongly expressed by all parties participating in this meeting regarding any negotiation with the Taliban.

2. We desire peace and stability in Afghanistan, but we reaffirm that the Afghan Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are non-negotiable (my emphasis).”

These 200 groups further oppose the program to pay off Taliban fighters, they oppose the removal of Taliban leaders from the U.N.’s blacklist, and remind the international community of their “responsibility and obligation to support and protect freedom of expression, the rights of women and men and other elements of democracy in Afghanistan. Achieving these goals can in no respect be achieved by negotiation with Taliban.”

Perhaps because statements like these do not jibe well with the western image of meek Afghan women, and well, this frankly just isn’t exotic at all, this meeting and declaration received virtually no coverage in the western media. It turns out that Afghan women expect and want, why, what most Canadians want: human rights, democracy and the protection of their basic freedoms.

While canvassing opinion across a broad spectrum of Afghan thinkers, politicians, activists and government officials for the Canada Afghanistan Solidarity Committee’s recently released report on Canada in Afghanistan post-2011, there was a striking consensus among these Afghan respondents that Canada should be interfering in their country more, not less. They pointed out that they need Canada to demand accountability from the Afghan government, to keep extremism at bay, and to insist on and support the growth of democratic institutions like elections. They told us, without mincing words, that we in the West need to get over our distress of being seen as some kind of neo-colonizers. The accusation of colonization or imperialism existed only in the political science faculties of western universities, the conversations of young white people who fancy themselves peace activists, and in the diatribes of armchair commentators safely tucked away in wealthy, democratic countries.

I have found this trend echoed again and again. When I interviewed Afghan MPs, rights activists, civil servants and others about the Shia Personal Status Law (the “rape law” dreamed up by an Iran-backed cleric in Kabul, instructing women how often they should have sex with their husbands and that they needed permission go outside, among 247 some other articles) in 2009 for research by the Afghan Research and Evaluation Unit, I found widespread fury against the UN mission, UNAMA, and the international community for their passivity in the face of human rights issues. Over and over again, Afghans pointed out to me that human rights issues are the prerogative of the international community, as the financers and co-architects of Afghanistan’s democratization effort. They asked, if the international community won’t speak up for our rights, then why are they here?

What an affront to our sensibilities! It is so much easier not to have to speak out in their defense, thinking that Afghan women are perfectly content to be bought and sold like cattle, and kept out of public life altogether; or the Taliban ideology is acceptable to them.

Confronting the idea that others also feel, innately, that they deserve the same privileges and rights we casually enjoy every day in Canada, will take courage. But the blinders must come off, now. We can duly recognize the legacy of colonialism without it disabling any kind of intervention to protect the basic human rights we are all entitled to, regardless of what kind of passport we hold. We can similarly celebrate the multitude of cultures in the world, while acknowledging that they are all united by the genetic coding all humans have to reject pain and suffering, and to mourn the pain and suffering of others (even when we deny that we do). We can also call it for what it is, when we see human beings maltreated, tortured, murdered for “honour” or subjected to other atrocities. It’s fascism, it should be long dead by 2010, and instead it flourishes. To try to soften the edges of fascism by citing cultural tradition or religious practice is a disgrace to the first cultural community to which we belong: humanity.

Crimes against human dignity have no place in any culture – they belong only to the culture of inhumanity.

When I was four, I was an angel in the school nativity play. I had wanted to be the angel Gabriel, but my teacher had gently informed me that Gabriel was a boy. Mary had already been cast, so the only parts left for other girls were generic angels. I was disappointed but then I realised, what did Mary do exactly? It seemed to my young mind that all she did was have a baby; it was the baby that everyone was interested in, and the baby was a boy. I soon learned that all the good parts to play in this story belonged to the boys, and with every passing school year and corresponding nativity play, I felt more and more put out. There were also other things about my C of E school that bothered me — when we prayed, we said ‘our father’, but there was no mention of a mother. There was a son, but no daughter. And when we learned Bible stories, female characters were almost non-existent.

I’m not sure whether that first nativity was the moment that sowed the seed for my atheism, but as I got older, and became a feminist when I was at high school, I found the existence of an all-powerful male supernatural entity impossible to believe, and I felt that those who expected me to believe it were insulting my intelligence. I had questioned the existence of God, and found no satisfactory answers; in the same sense, I had questioned patriarchy and found it similarly wanting. To me, religion and patriarchy were inextricably linked in their natures, and I decided both were a con. As an adult, I find reinforcement for this conclusion every day; however, as I’ve become more involved with feminism, I’ve seen less criticism of religion than I expected, given the wealth of evidence concerning its negative impact on women’s lives.

Should a rape victim be expected to marry her attacker, as long as he pays her father some money? According to the Old Testament’s book of Deuteronomy (Chapter 22, Verse 29), the creator of the universe thinks so. This charming verse is not an isolated piece of divinely inspired sexism; the holy books of the main monotheistic religions (Christianity, Judaism and Islam) all contain shocking misogynist material, including many verses specifically instructing violence against women for the breach of harsh rules about sexual activity.

This fact has been commented on before, and it should be well known among feminists; rather than waste space quoting verses, I will direct you to the website ‘The Sceptic’s Annotated Bible’, which contains lists of the verses relating to women in the Koran, the Bible, and the Book of Mormon. More about Islam can be found at the blog of Kafir Girl, whose article ‘Swimmin’ in Women’ is an irreverent and detailed analysis of the behaviour of Islam’s prophet Mohammed towards women and girls. While there is simply not enough space to fully analyse each religion’s treatment of women, there is some information about the inconsistency of the Hindu texts in relation to women’s rights here, an analysis of misogyny and Buddhism here, and this page shows that even the non-violent Jains apparently can’t handle a little bit of menstrual blood.

Religious ideas harm women and restrict their lives on a daily basis. The only reason that on-demand abortion is not available to women worldwide is the prevalence of religious (most notably Catholic) beliefs that a fertilised egg is a human being. The rise of unwanted pregnancies and STDs including Aids in many countries can be directly blamed on religiously-funded abstinence programmes which are based on beliefs that contraception and sex before marriage are evil. Strong beliefs about the sanctity of a girl’s virginity and the wickedness of female sexual behaviour lead to predictable, sometimes appalling and horrific results, such as girls being buried alive, lashed and stoned to death. Former Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes eloquently in her book ‘The Caged Virgin’ about how Islamic beliefs concerning sexual desire lead to women being restricted in what they wear and how much of a life they can lead outside the home, and blamed for sexual attacks (she has received death threats for her trouble). And even as women are being harmed by such religious beliefs, they are told that the originator of these ideas, God, loves them. I assume the same kind of love is behind the Church of England being exempt from the provisions of the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act, and the laws allowing faith schools to teach girls that abortion and contraception are sinful.

Feminists know all this, or at least they ought to – the surprise is that many tolerate or even seek to apologise for it. At the very least, there seems to be much less outspoken criticism of religion from feminists than one would reasonably expect. Last year, the US website Feministing asked the question: “Can you love God and feminism?” I thought it was a no-brainer, but several people commented about how their religious faith and their feminism coexist in harmony. The moderator of the site declared these confessionals “amazing”, even though she herself had admitted that she was not religious. Atheism was the minority view, and no such gushing praise was forthcoming for the unbeliever. A quick Google search reveals many websites dedicated to faith and feminism, but comparatively few taking the opposite stance.

It is as though mainstream feminism has a ‘blind spot’ when it comes to religion, but it is not alone in this. Religion has managed to carve itself a very nice niche in society whereby any questioning of religious faith is seen to be extremely bad form. Religion seems to have a monopoly on hurt feelings, entirely unfairly in my opinion. It seems to me that some feminists are afraid of a critical discussion about religious faith, because of the ever-looming label of ‘intolerant’, ‘prejudiced’, or, when it comes to any religion besides Christianity, ‘racist’. When in fact, there is a big difference between questioning an idea (in this case: faith in the existence of a specific supernatural entity in spite of a complete lack of evidence) and hating a person or group of people. Saying that critics of religion are prejudiced is as moronic as calling feminists ‘man-haters’.

I personally do not understand how anyone can be religious and a feminist; some of the verses I read in the various holy books while researching this article made me feel sick to my stomach, and I don’t know how any feminist wouldn’t want to run as fast as they could away from such hateful nonsense. But many feminists have apparently reconciled their feminism with a religious faith, and some of the arguments used to defend this decision can be roughly summarised thus: there are other verses/texts in the religion which actually promote equality and women’s rights; the holy texts have been misinterpreted by misogynists and if interpreted correctly they actually promote equality; the texts are irrelevant to the practice of the religion itself (this article is an example of some of the arguments used from a religious feminist’s perspective).

The first argument, that some verses are more egalitarian and cancel out the nasty stuff, doesn’t hold water. It means that the best you can say about the books is that they are inconsistent. Does feminism tolerate such inconsistency in other institutions? From contemporary figures and organisations? While Tory politician Theresa May champions Conservative policies as woman-friendly, the party’s voting record says otherwise, and Tory leader David Cameron was caught out this month regarding his party’s stance on women’s rights when he opined that the abortion time limit should be reduced to 20 or 22 weeks. No feminist would be taken in by this behaviour. Why can feminism see very plainly when a political party is merely paying lip service to women’s rights, but some feminists cannot see when centuries-old books are doing exactly the same thing, only not as well?

The second argument, that the holy texts have in fact been misinterpreted and so need reinterpreting, is also rather puzzling. If a person reinterprets a holy book to give it a meaning consistent with feminism, then that person is using their own sense of equality to decide on the new interpretation. They have not got their sense of equality from the book itself; if they had, they would not be able to reinterpret it. Which begs the question, what use is the book? Even if a person managed to so creatively interpret verses in the Bible (for example) that they could allow themselves to believe that when God said “If tokens of virginity [i.e. blood on the sheets] be not found for the damsel… then the men of the city shall stone her with stones that she die” (Deut 22:21), he actually meant the exact opposite, then this is indeed ingenious, but there is no way of proving which interpretation is what the writers intended in any case, as time machines have yet to be invented.

The third argument, that the texts are not necessary to practice the religion, is the most perplexing of all. I was under the impression that holy books are supposed to contain the exact words or at least the paraphrased opinions of their god – i.e. they are the product of a man or men having had a conversation with the supposed creator and writing this down as ‘proof’ for everyone else. Without the books, where are the religions? For example, Ibn Warraq, author of ‘Why I Am Not A Muslim’, writes that one of the central tenets of Islam is that the Koran is the word of Allah as dictated to Mohammed. Is he wrong?

Next usually comes the assertion that as many people derive ‘comfort’ from religion, it must therefore be a positive thing. But religion doesn’t comfort everyone. Sometimes religion offers people a confusing cocktail of comfort and harm; sometimes, it is outright damaging. Those who are comforted shouldn’t be able to silence those who are harmed. Secondly, I agree with AC Grayling when he says: “Would we tolerate the government telling us comforting lies about, say, an accident at a nuclear plant, or a spillage of deadly viruses form a laboratory? No? Then comforting lies have their limits.” I also feel that the ‘comforting’ aspects of religion are nothing more than a sweetener to keep people believing (and filling up the collection plate).

When Karl Marx called religions “the opiate of the masses” he was referring to the way a belief in an afterlife distracted the poor from their position in Earthly society and discouraged revolutionary action. The same sentiment can be applied to women (who are more likely to be poor, in any case). If religions were replaced by real opiates (whose comforting, pain-relieving qualities are not in any doubt), to encourage conformity and discourage questioning, would any feminist defend their use? Lastly, any feminist seeking to use the ‘comfort’ argument should remember that the status quo is always comforting for someone – you could argue that many people, largely men, derive much comfort from patriarchy.

Given all of the above, I anticipate in reaction: what business is it of yours what people believe? A person’s private religious faith is none of anyone’s business and you should tolerate it. You’ve got no right to tell people what to think! And so on. These are arguments atheists come across often. Indeed this seems to be the tack that many feminists take. It appears quite difficult to argue against, but here goes. First of all, as Sam Harris points out in his book ‘The End Of Faith’, belief almost always leads to action, therefore, beliefs are very rarely truly private. Believe that it’s going to rain, and you’ll take an umbrella out with you. Believe that a clump of cells is a sacred human life, and you will join a pro-life group and lobby the government to ban abortion; you may even be successful, in which case you will contribute to the suffering and even deaths of large numbers of women. As Harris says, “Some beliefs are intrinsically dangerous.” Indeed feminists do not tolerate every belief. We reject many commonly-held beliefs, most notably the belief that males are fundamentally different from, and superior to, females.

Also, people’s religious beliefs aren’t necessarily freely chosen. The vast majority of religious people are so because they have been brought up to be religious; it has been impressed upon them from an early age that there is a divine creator, and that he should be worshipped in the following ways, and so on. In this way, ‘telling people what to believe’ is really the preserve of religion. All atheists do, if anything, is ask people to question what they believe. If children were allowed to grow up without religious influence and then asked to evaluate the evidence and decide for themselves as adults if there is a god, then it would be a different matter entirely. But this doesn’t happen.

Even in the light of all of the above, there are some who will still insist that merely believing in a loving god – having ignored or ‘reinterpreted’ all the misogynist trappings of their faith – is harmless. I don’t agree. This belief is still based on blind faith, not on evidence, and such a mindset, while promoted by religions as a virtue, is in fact damaging to society.

Just think for a moment about the patriarchal society feminists, including myself, are fighting against: what is it based on? Facts? Evidence? Reason? None of the above. Rather, it relies on faith, namely, faith that there are two distinct genders, with fundamental differences between them and that the male is the superior of the two. We are expected to believe this, even though there is no evidence for it. Actual evidence shows that there are intersex, androgynous and genderqueer people, and that the differences between the sexes are very small, with huge variation within groups (this subject is covered in depth by Deborah Cameron, in her book, ‘The Myth of Mars and Venus’). And our reason tells us that out of two human beings, one cannot be automatically superior; it tells us that if female children are showing intelligence and leaving school with excellent grades, then they ought to hold 50% of the positions of power and influence in the world. It also tells us that for the same work done, the same money ought to be paid. The continuation of patriarchy depends on the suppression of this type of evidence and reasoning, and the continued mythmaking of the media and the population. Some myths, such as those surrounding rape for example, can be very dangerous.

What is the difference between a person who simply ‘feels’ that there is a god, and a person who simply ‘feels’ that males are superior to females? Answer: nothing. Both ideas are uncontaminated by evidence. But the difference, for some feminists, seems to be that the latter view is to be fought against and the former to be tolerated and even praised. But belief in a god is a tacit approval for belief without evidence, and this mindset is frequently used in justifying prejudice and discrimination, and does nothing to combat stereotyping and harmful myths. A religious feminist might want to consider the question: how can you argue against a person who has faith in patriarchy, when you yourself cannot turn a critical eye on your own faith in a supernatural creator? And from what stance can a religious feminist argue against fellow members of the faithful who insist that God made the man the head of the family (nuclear and heterosexual, of course) and that his wife should serve him? Such a discussion would end up in a futile back-and-forth about what God thinks of women and could never be resolved (seeing as presumably, God would never actually step in and settle it himself).

Conversely, feminists can use reason to great effect when fighting against patriarchy. I’ve already mentioned above how evidence and reasoning are on our side. Learning a critical attitude, from the earliest possible age, is vital. Children naturally question things, but what is saddening is that this tendency is quashed by religious instruction that insists faith is a virtue. Laws in the UK still require ‘daily worship’ to take place in all schools; this means that the vast majority of children are learning at school (if not at home too) that there is a male creator of the universe and he had a supremely virtuous male representative on Earth – doesn’t this teach young children something damaging about gender? Doesn’t it teach developing minds to associate power with maleness, and inculcate them with the supposed virtue of ‘worshipping’? At the very least, religious instruction and assertions to ‘have faith’ discourage a questioning attitude, lessening the likelihood that children will question the many levels of unfairness in our society.

Feminists can all perhaps agree on one thing: that the status quo in the majority (if not all) of the world’s societies is harmful in many ways towards women and girls. A large part of the harm is done by religion, both directly by influencing laws, attitudes and behaviour, and indirectly by promoting the idea that faith is a virtue and thus discouraging the questioning attitude that is so vital for debunking sexism and promoting equality. It is time for feminism to be brave and have a discussion about the real effects of religious faith on women’s place in societies worldwide, not placing the blame on a few extremists but critically examining the whole institution. Religious feminists ought to be able to handle this and not rely on religion’s unfair taboo status as a defence; after all, it is about criticising ideas, not hating people. When we embrace reasoning we not only use the most effective tool, we also handily explode the irritating stereotype that women are ‘irrational’ and ‘emotional’. Perhaps one day all feminists will end up at the same conclusion I came to many years ago: it is not just that the emperor has no clothes, it is that there is no emperor at all.