Author: Ophelia Benson

All this kind of thing is useful in a way. A way one wishes we didn’t need things to be useful, but useful all the same. Useful in the sense of being an extreme and conspicuous form of a pervasive bad thing that one wishes were not there at all, so not useful in any ultimate sense, not inherently desirable; quite the contrary; but useful in educational terms; useful in making clear what we’re up against. Useful, to spell it out, in making it clear how deep misogyny really does go. It goes so deep that a lot of people think women have exactly two choices: lifelong confinement to a room, or deserved rape followed by stoning to death. It goes so deep that a lot of people think that when it comes to a choice between women’s lives and the lives of their fetuses, their lives are worth precisely nothing. (Which is odd in the case of female fetuses. Highly valuable in utero, and worthless once pregnant. But then misogyny is odd.)

Under the new law, abortions will no longer be permitted for rape victims or women who risk death during childbirth. Doctors and women who try to abort for any reason will face four to eight years in jail.

But that’s not as bad as it sounds, because women who risk (or face certain) death during childbirth who try to abort and fail will often not face four to eight years in jail, because they’ll be dead. Convenient. Saves expenses.

Members of the Left-wing Sandinista party which, in the past, has campaigned to legalise abortion, joined conservatives to approve a tightening of the abortion laws to prevent rape victims and women who risk dying in childbirth from terminating pregnancies. Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista leader, was thought to have fallen into line to avoid alienating church leaders ahead of the election.

Dear church. Dear kind compassionate loving church.

Rights groups say the new law would be a death sentence for women who suffer ectopic pregnancies. In an ectopic pregnancy, a fertilised egg develops outside the uterus. “They are forcing women to die. They are not pro-life, they are pro-death,” said Xiomara Luna, a protester.

Yeah, but only pro-death for women, so that’s okay.

This is quite funny. It’s from an article on Alan Johnson’s U-turn on quotas for ‘faith’ schools.

The Guardian yesterday attempted unsuccessfully to contact Tahir Allam, an education spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain. Earlier he told Radio 4″s Today programme: “This assumption that faith schools are divisive is a false one because there is no evidence to support this.”

Actually I think that’s downright hilarious. The Guardian is so eager to check in with the MCB, and to be seen to check in with the MCB, that it even lets us know about its failed attempts. What – did it think we would be annoyed and ‘offended’ if it wrote a story on government policy on ‘faith’ schools without at least attempting to contact someone at the MCB? Does it think it is in some sense mandatory to check in with the MCB on pretty much all subjects that touch on ‘faith’?

Hey, yesterday I attempted to contact the Pope to ask him about ectopic pregnancies in Nicaragua, but, inexplicably, he ignored all my emails. Strange guy.

Sheik Hilali clarifies things.

Australia is a multicultural society. Whoever wants to, let them take their clothes off. Whoever wants to go naked, let them go naked. Whoever wants to get drunk, let them get drunk. Whoever wants to smoke hashish, let them smoke hashish. It’s a free country, it’s none of our business. But it is our right to tell our women (that they dress appropriately).

And, presumably, that they stay home and stay in their room, since that’s what he said the first time. So anyway – who’s the ‘our’ in that sentence? Who is the ‘we’ who get to tell ‘our’ women what to do? Men, of course. It always is. ‘We’ are people and ‘we’ own ‘our’ women and ‘we’ tell them what to do; women are not people, so they are not included in ‘we’ and ‘our’; women are objects that are owned, and men are people who own them and tell them what to do. And it is their right to do that. And it is, presumably, not the right of the women to refuse to obey – because they are a wholly owned subsidiary.

After learning the mufti would not be sacked, John Howard urged the Muslim community to act against Sheik Hilali or risk a backlash from mainstream Australians. “If they do not resolve this matter, it could do lasting damage to the perceptions of that community within the broader Australian community and that would be a tragedy,” the Prime Minister said.

Thus getting thoroughly entangled in the various communities, poor guy. What about the perceptions of that community within the broader Australian community within the broader international community within the broader galactic community within the broader cosmic community within the broader possible worlds community? Lotta communities to keep track of these days. Lotta communities and mainstreams and backlashes. It’s all a bit dizzying sometimes.

Caroline Overington thinks the mufti meant every word of it, and she’s not the only one.

Tanveer Ahmed is a Sydney-based psychiatrist who is writing a book about Islam in Australia. He says the great shame is that “many, many” Muslim men, young and old, regard women – particularly Western women – as “less than ideal”. “The mufti meant exactly what he said, and those views are widely held,” Dr Ahmed said…”It comes from households, where young Muslims get the message that white girls are different, and that women in general are a corrupting influence.” Dr Ahmed said it was “an opinion I’ve heard throughout my life, that women can tempt you into trouble. Even otherwise sophisticated people will say this, and slur white women.”…Dr Ahmed rejects the argument that women wear the veil because “it’s their choice”. “You see children aged five wearing it. Are we seriously arguing there is an element of choice, when you sexualise a child in that way?”

Some are, but we disagree with them.

For Karen Green, the debate over the status of women is both personal and philosophical. She has a sister who converted to Islam. Dr Green, whose Phd in philosophy is from Oxford, said she initially accepted her sister’s view, when she argued that women were liberated by the veil. But over time, Dr Green concluded that women were so sexualised within Islamic society “that it is assumed that any private encounter between a woman and a man will be sexual. Women are thus assumed to have two functions, and these are sex and child-bearing. “By submitting to headscarf, chador or burka, women allow men to divide and conquer. Women are either ‘good’ – which is to say obedient – or they are ‘bad’.”

And that’s the context in which some women ‘choose’ to wear it. Sure, it’s a free choice in a sense, but it’s made within a particular context – that’s not a free choice. That context is there, and it can’t be chosen away.

More on Michael Bérubé’s What’s Liberal and consensus, agreement, universalism, and how to think and argue about them. I basically agree with it, but there are places where I think it could use some expansion, or some further stipulation, or both. I think there are some lurking unacknowledged tensions; once they’re pointed out all will go swimmingly. Page 260:

I don’t think I’m asking for all that much in the way of intellectual conformity, consensus, or (gasp) tyranny. The version of universalism I’m proposing does suggest that it might be good and useful to say, “No matter how or what you think, you fellow human, you are entitled to food and shelter and health care and education and political representation.” You can be a Christian Scientist, a secular-humanist professor, or an avant-garde poet/sculptor/dancer, and we can let all those language games flourish. But underlying that commitment to parlogy and dissensus, let’s imagine provisional agreement about human entitlements…

Yes, let’s, but there’s a problem there, an unacknowledged tension. It’s helpful of Michael to have placed the Christian Scientist so close to health care in that passage, because that’s the tension. We can say “No matter what you think, you are entitled to health care,” because that doesn’t amount to forcing health care on the reluctant Christian Scientist. But what about the Christian Scientist’s minor daughter? That’s where the tension bites. We can tell the Christian Scientist “you are entitled to health care” without being coercive, but we can’t tell the Christian Scientist “your daughter is entitled to health care” without being at least potentially coercive. The Christian Scientist, if she is a dedicated Christian Scientist, won’t want her daughter to get health care as commonly understood – she will in fact want precisely to deny her daughter the entitlement to health care that we have in mind when we talk about entitlements to health care. And that’s a problem. That’s the problem.

Because of course it applies to a lot of cases. Not just the Christian Scientist who doesn’t want her daughter to be entitled to health care, but also the parents who don’t want their daughters to be entitled to education, the parents who don’t want their daughters to be entitled to freedom, the parents who don’t want their daughters to have the right of refusal in marriage, and so on. It also applies to men who don’t want their wives to have various entitlements; it applies to men who don’t want their wives, daughters, sisters, mothers to have any entitlements. It applies to people who have power over intimates and dependents, because such people generally do have both de facto and de jure power to deny entitlements to said intimates and dependents, a power which it can be anything from difficult to impossible to interfere with, especially without coercion – without what the people in question would indeed see as tyranny. That’s the problem. That’s the problem and it means that saying “No matter what you think, you are entitled to [various things]” won’t untie this knot between universalism and difference.

It’s a knot that keeps turning up in the newspapers day after day. It turns up in the father who wouldn’t let his daughter have surgery to drain an abscess in her head because ‘traditional healers’ advised him not to. It turns up in a new domestic violence law in India:

Every six hours, a young married woman is burned, beaten to death or driven to commit suicide, officials say. Overall, a crime against women is committed every three minutes in India, according to India’s National Crime Records Bureau. Despite the scale of the problem, there had been no specific legislation to deal with actual abuse or the threat of abuse at home.

Again, this is coercion – depending on which person we’re talking to. If we’re talking to women, we’re saying “No matter what you think, you are entitled not to be subject to violence.” But if we’re talking to men, we’re not saying anything parallel, we’re saying something opposite – we’re saying “No matter what you think, you are not entitled to subject your wife to violence.” And Michael says so very clearly on p. 254 – a student asks if we can’t just say denying education is wrong, and the answer is yes, it’s just that it’s not helpful to say it in a foundationalist way. All this boils down to, I think, is perhaps a small disagreement about how much we’re asking for in the way of intellectual conformity, consensus, or (gasp) tyranny. I don’t think we’re asking for too much, certainly, and I think we’re asking for it on good grounds, but I also think that some of the people we’re asking it of are indeed going to think it’s tyranny.

Okay so what’s the big deal. Everybody lighten up a little. So the guy compared women to uncovered meat, so what – it’s his sincere opinion, and that’s his culture, so take a chill pill. Anyway is he wrong? Is he?

If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside…without cover, and the cats come to eat it…whose fault is it, the cats’ or the uncovered meat’s? The uncovered meat is the problem. If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem would have occurred.

Obviously he’s not wrong. Come on, be honest – you know he’s not. The analogy is watertight. If you take out a piece of chicken, and put it outside stark naked with nothing on top of it, and the cats sashay over and eat it – it is of course the piece of chicken’s fault. Who would say otherwise? No one! Not the most Eurocentric Westoxic secularized modernized colonialist heretic infidel would say otherwise. There lies the piece of chicken on its plate, swaying seductively back and forth, twitching its hips, flicking its hair, pouting its lips, goggling with its eyes, rubbing its thighs together, waving its legs in the air, showing off its cleavage – doing everything it can to seduce those innocent honest godfearing hardworking cats to come over there and nibble and suck and lick and eat. That piece of chicken is a harlot, that piece of chicken is out to ensnare and deceive cats and distract them from their duty to Allah. That piece of chicken should be beaten by its brothers and then stoned to death, not pleasantly gobbled up by cats.

So, of course, it’s exactly the same with women. Identical. Because they’re like meat. Cat smells meat, cat wants to eat it; man smells woman, man wants to fuck it. It’s exactly the same. A woman outside is exactly like a plate of chicken with nothing on top of it: wide open, smellable, unprotected, rape bait. Who can deny it? No one. So if the woman is outside and some men come along and rape her, it’s her fault – because she’s not supposed to be outside any more than the meat is, is she! Meat belongs inside the house, inside the fridge, or inside the stomach of the men who have eaten it; it’s not supposed to be outside, walking up and down and doing whatever it likes. It’s only men and cats that are allowed to be outside doing what they like. Meat and women are supposed to be locked up. Got that? Of course they are. Women are supposed to be in their rooms, at home, in their hijabs, just as Sheik Hilali said. Each woman is allotted a room, in a home, where she is supposed to spend her entire life; if she comes out, she does it to entice rapists, and she deserves everything she gets. Am I right? Okay I know it’s not popular, but you know it’s true.