These guys ignored the events happening beneath their feet.
How strange. I was accused of neglecting an event important to feminists, the sexual assaults in Köln on New Year’s Eve. It was a peculiar concern to make, because I’m not CNN or Fox News (thank dog), I’m one guy, and I can’t write about everything. And in particular, one good outcome of these disgraceful and horrid attacks is that they have been received with universal condemnation, from the German chancellor on down — for a change, no one is saying “boys will be boys” or suggesting that the attacks weren’t actually driven by contempt for women, or arguing that all the assaillants were mentally ill loners. And I’ve actually seen quite a few feminist responses to the crimes, like this one.
The mainstream reporting has been solid in their condemnation. The government promised a strong response. There have also been feminists marching in protest. Angry feminists have proposed a curfew for men. While there was an initial effort to keep the attacks quiet by the police (if you want to blame any peculiar lack of reporting on anything, try going for the officials who wanted to hush up the magnitude of the attacks), it was the women who brought it to everyone’s attention. And then, of course, there were cries of disgust at the Köln mayor’s suggestion that it was the victim’s fault.
So if you ask me, where are the women at?
, I’ll just suggest that perhaps the problem is that you’re out of the habit of listening to them, because they’ve been talking about the Köln assaults loudly, publicly, and without reservation.
So I had to wonder where this myth is coming from…and it didn’t take long to figure it out. It’s the usual far right wing suspects who hate feminists in general. Where are these stories that feminists are turning a blind eye to a mass assault coming from? The Spectator. Right-wing blogs. Breitbart. The Daily Stormer! You read those, and you discover an alien dimension in which women of the so-called Regressive Left
are just fine with getting raped by swarthy immigrants from Africa and the Middle East. It’s total nonsense, of course. But it reveals the true motivation behind these complaints about feminists: it’s that they haven’t been complaining about the right thing. They’re supposed to suddenly decide that all immigrants are evil monsters who must be kicked out of the country immediately — that is, they’re supposed to turn into the kind of bigoted assholes who read The Daily Stormer, and it’s a failure of feminism that they don’t.
In other words, the myth of a blind benevolent Left that permits immigrants to run rampant in the country serves the interests of racists, so they’re busily making up shit about feminists being insufficiently racist to suit them. And it’s true! We tend not to be quite as racist as the general public, and not at all as racist as writers for Breitbart or neo-Nazi publications. But that doesn’t mean feminists are making excuses for the criminals who made those attacks. Jessica Abrahams puts it well, I think. It’s not a failure of feminism, it’s a failure of racism.
The Cologne attacks have unsurprisingly been set upon enthusiastically by those who wish to turn emotions against the new arrivals and have portrayed the incident as the result of an influx of immigrants who engage in crime and have little respect for women. Feminists are necessarily concerned with the protection of minorities and marginalised groups. If some of them are finding it difficult to speak up about the event because of concerns it might be used to encourage aggression against refugees, I can’t say I blame them. The fault lies not with the feminists but with those making them nervous to speak–the very same people, often, who are expressing outrage that they aren’t.
That doesn’t imply an acceptance of the crime by feminists, a desire to sweep it under the carpet or a lack of solidarity with the victims, as some internet commentators have alleged. Unlike them, feminists are generally aware that sexual assaults happen with or without immigration. At the time of writing, there has been no confirmation of the ethnic origins of those involved in the Cologne attacks, or of whether they are recent immigrants, or immigrants at all. It is those using the event to advance their own political goals who are showing a lack of respect for the victims.
But if feminists have been quiet about the attacks (and I’m not convinced they have), there’ll be another reason, too. Those of my generation have been speaking about sexual violence and street harassment for years. Our predecessors campaigned against it for decades before that. The statistics, both for Europe and for the rest of the world, are endless and horrifying. Books have been written about it; protests organised over many years and many countries; campaigns launched; reports undertaken; NGOs established; and countless, countless articles written.
It is usually the task of feminists to make enough noise about incidents of sexual assault that they can no longer be ignored; the Cologne attack was big enough that it received a huge amount of attention across Europe and further afield. We can only hope now that the police are successful in bringing those responsible to the courtroom and preventing further attacks, and that the women involved are given enough support.
So sorry, racist jerks, you’re not going to commandeer feminism into joining your crusade against the non-white people of the world.
P.S. Many black women will tell you that white feminists are implicitly racist enough. They don’t need white male right-wingers urging them to be even more neglectful of intersectional concerns.
“You call yourself a feminist, and my dishonest or otherwise flawed understanding of feminists means you should do X, which you didn’t do, therefore you are bad at your own identity!”
^ My best guess at the twisty logic they employ.
These attacks are a vindication of feminism – it’s what happens when you let rape culture run rampant.
Oh so much word. I can’t even begin to describe the weariness I feel in this regard, and it’s only been speaking out and campaigning 44 years for me. It’s been a whole lot longer for many women that I know.
Optimal Cynic @ 2:
I’m not even sure what to call this kind of blindness. If some people wake the fuck up over this mass assault, that’s good, but let’s not be pretending that rape culture hasn’t always gone hand in hand with the ever misogynistic view of women.
guess pat condell wasnt wrong after all?? eh eh?
you fucking sjw white knights have not the first fucking clue
@screwy you
Would you care to actually write something with information and eventually an argument in it?
Your irrational fear (paranoia) of Islam is showing. You can’t even come up rational an realistic scenarios of how Islam would take over the West. Only conspiracy theories without a basis in reality. *cue theme music to the Twilight Zone*
@charly & nerd
no, the situation speaks for itself.
and how do you know its an IRRATIONAL belief?, it would be irrational if i was a young lady in Koln now would it?
cue the music to “bring in the clowns”
I guess there were no assaults by white guys, ever.
So, the ass jumping on PZ about not covering this situation got their wish, and it’s been blogged about. Odd I don’t see that white knight here. Then we have another idiot from G+. How impressive.
Chigau @ 8:
No, not in all of recorded history. Not one, nope.
But you already posted, along with your misogynic Islamophobic friends.
Bye, screwy yu.
So is there anything in my post to give Pat Condell any consolation? Learn to read for comprehension, please.
/clicks on “screwy yu”‘s G+ profile
/reads “Looks like you’ve reached the end”
/thinks, “Yes. Yes, we have.”
Holms @1:
Is that a surprise? It’s how they react towards atheists, evolution, Muslims, liberals, people of non-Caucasian ethnicity, and, well, everything else they don’t like.
I’ll just do some copypasta from comments I’ve left elsewhere (so it’s not a coherent text).
Let me preface them with this: As a German woman who’s had her share of sexual violence on the street and in locations like clubs I can tell you two things:
1) The common factor uniting all the perpetrators wasn’t their ethnicity but their gender
2) If these things hadn’t happened massively at the Hauptbahnhof but individually to each one of these women at the parties afterwards, they’d be told how it was their own fault.
+++
Comment 1:
Comment 2:
Comment 3:
Oh, and the next racist misogynist liar claiming that “feminists are ignoring this because the perps are refugees” better be prepared for a massive linkdump in German.
Oh, and this is how our “quality media” is “fighting violence against women” and “totally not being racist”
Focus
Süddeutsche Zeitung
Giliell @ 15, thank you. Thank you very much. Those comments won’t make a dent in bigots, but hopefully, they will have an impact on those who don’t know much about what happened, and are ignorant of rape culture in general.
Giliell @ 16:
Oh for…
Every white supremacist group in the U.S. would be just fine with those covers. Christ, that’s shameful.
I wouldn’t mind a german linkdump, actually, especially regarding the Oktoberfest rapes and the woman who got punished for being a keg-wielding badass. I’m hearing a lot of bullshit in my corner of the world so evidence that would help calling out the bullshiters would be very welcome.
Laurentweppe
Probably tomorrow, okay?
The irony here is they believe these women, but will argue that other sexual assaults on college campuses are concocted to ruin academic careers. Sexual assault isn’t an extraordinary claim; the claim itself is quite banal in how commonly sexual assault occurs.
No problem, and thank you.
OK, maybe I do have a little time tonight and my headache eased up:
Margarete Stokowski, Spiegel Online
Von Stefanie Lohaus und Anne Wizorek, Vice
Marcus Decker, Frankfurter Rundschau
Bundesverband Frauen gegen Gewalt
Anne Wizorek again, ZDF heute
Moar links:
379 police reports, about 40% for sexual assault
Comment: the problem is and remains sexism
Interview with sbdy from a victim support organisation
Donald Trump was trumpeting about this on Twitter as well.
@15 Giliell: I have sad news. Dutch media and bloggers only want to discuss the ethnicity of the offenders. They do not want to discuss Oktoberfest – whether in München or Alkmaar, The Netherlands.
mnb0
I’m sooo surprised, who would have thought?
Can I mention how fucking angry I am? The very people who’ve been laughing (and that was the less scary ones) at us who tried to discuss sexism and sexual violence in Germany over the last years are now trying to play literally White KNight with a strong focus on White and a lot of original Knight (i.e. rightful owner of the womenfolks)
Did you know that according to German law a rape victim must demonstrate that they fought their attacker sufficiently before it counts as rape? (While of course the police tells you to keep still so you won’t be hurt) I’m wondering how the muslim asylum seekers managed that.
They made the rookie mistake of not joining a frat first.
@Giliell: WAT!? So the bier-keg lady HAD to violently fend off her assailant but /not too much/!? WTF.
Would anyone like to place bets on the likelihood that the likes of screwy yu are among the first to scream “not all men!!!” whenever some men and the backward cultural attitudes that support them are called out?
I hope this actually serves to generate a backlash against rape culture in general, but something tells me it’s more about Them raping Our women than any actual concern for women or about rape.
Screwy yu, the guy with the insulting pseudonym whose first comment was to rant about , is now whining vigorously in the spam trap:
I don’t think he knows what irony means.
I think ‘irony’ is only a tiny fraction of what screwy yu doesn’t understand.
I suspect his irony meter broke because it was actually a fake made entirely from freezed peaches.
This sums up the problem for me. Your only response to this is to defend why you haven’t blogged about it. You’re not actually covering what happened. Instead, you’re defending yourself and the rest of the far left.
Ask yourself this. If these crimes had been committed by hundreds of frat boys in a single evening, would it have taken you this long to write about it? Would the commenters be pointing out that rape happens in other cultures, too? Please answer honestly.
This isn’t about condemning all Muslims or all immigrants. It’s about not abandoning your interest in the welfare of women when faced with having to criticise people who are lower on your privilege hierarchy. It’s about acknowledging that whatever issues women in the West have, they pale in comparison to the issues of women in many Muslim majority countries. We’re talking about true patriarchal horror shows here.
You accuse people of only caring about women when an opportunity to bash Islam arises. The reason why it might seem that way is because microaggressions and offensive Halloween costumes are a non-issue in light of how women are treated elsewhere in the world. You blog about the problems of some of the most privileged people in the world ad nauseam, yet you routinely fail to shine a light on women who are truly oppressed.
This has nothing to do with people demanding that you be racist. It’s about intellectual honesty and how you prioritise what you cover. You would not respond in this fashion if this happened on a college campus, and I think you know it. Your feminism appears to end where your cultural sensitivity begins.
James McDonald
You seem to be reading other blog than the one I have been reading last eight years. And a different blog post than the one I am seeing right now.
And you are bringing veiled “dear Muslima” again. Why are you so fond of this logical fallacy? It has been explained on this blog, ad nauseam, why it is a fallacy, and extremely stupid one at that.
Face-meet-palm.
@James MacDonald 34:
Actually, PZ linked to a lot of places that are talking about this. It came up on his radar mainly because people on the right were complaining he didn’t talk about it. Well, now he’s talking about it and all you can do is complain that he’s not talking about it the right way? I don’t understand people like you that are outraged no matter what people say. PZ lives in frozen Minnesota, in a small town far away from Köln. I did not hear about what happened there until I saw this post. Whether he saw it and did not respond because it had already been done to death, or if he just did not hear about it immediately, it’s his choice what to write here about.
Look above. Giliell actually lives in Germany and is informing all of us about what is actually happening there, which is much better than PZ can do from the US. In the same vein, I would expect PZ to talk about things that happen on a US college campus because he teaches at one. Giliell would have less to say because she is not entrenched in that culture.
Yes, things are bad in other parts of the world. We already had “Dear Muslima”. So go blow smoke up someone else’s ass.
F.O.
Well, you must understand, at the Oktoberfest boys will be boys and look at your Dirndl. I guess that may have something to do with who hangs out at the Oktoberfest and who can get drunk on those prices…
+++
James McDonald
Stop that shit.
Now.
Because I’m really fucking annoyed.
As a German woman who has been sexually assaulted on German streets I deny you the right to use my victimisation and my life as a gotcha argument for you own agenda.
+++
And here’s Richard Dawkins
The question is, is he:
a) ignorant
b) lying
c) does it matter?
And Another German text. With links…
B) lying
C) only so much as people treat him as an authority figure… which is the real problem we face as a culture and society anyway – always has been wayyyy to much deference to authority in our societies, and it gets us in trouble over and over and over again.
It’s past time Richard Retire from public life… but then I’ve been saying this for over 8 years now.
…even in science, Richard was always good at explaining OTHER people’s ideas, complete crap defending his own… mostly because it’s hard to defend crap to begin with.
which, of course, is why he is a failed scientist.
and THAT’S something I have been saying since 1989.
James MacDonald @ 34
sorry, but you do not get to make a judgment call like that for someone else. You can only say that the microagressions that you are subject to are a non-issue for you.
If you are truly concerned about women who have it a lot worse, what have you done about it? Because I see that it is, after all, feminists who are doing something, so instead of telling others what to do why don’t you show how it’s done effectively or perhaps support other feminists so they will be stronger (t.ex. by decreasing microagressions) and so able to do more?
Ah the Dawk, repeating the lie that feminists aren’t talking about the Köln attacks. And he quotes this from the Spectator, the propaganda arm of the Tories.
Also, what Ichthyic said.
Also, of course, this “elsewhere” is Cologne, Germany*
And no, it’S not an “immigrant men from muslim backgrounds” problem. And yes, quite often the microaggressions are just the initial stage of the macroaggressions.
Commenting on my tits and ass in public is only marginally less threatening than directly grabbing them.
*Incidentially, the last time I was in Cologne I had lunch with PZ in a Tunesian restaurant. The food was delicious.
What about the people protesting in Germany? Do you deny their right? You do not get to shutdown discourse in that fashion.
Spare me. It’s a criticism of your priorities and your intellectual honesty. I’ve seen enough sarcastic cries of “what about the menz?!” on here to point out the hypocrisy of calling my post a “Dear Muslima”. No one who frequents this network would respond in the same fashion if this had happened on a college campus. Is that really in dispute?
I also don’t buy the claim that PZ focuses more on college campuses because the issue is local. We’re increasingly living in a global society, so that isn’t an excuse. There are countless examples of PZ covering stories from other parts of the world, most of which are not nearly as serious as what happened in Germany. It is inexcusable to not cover the story, and then only blog about it to explain why you hadn’t already blogged about it.
I just want to be clear here. Do you think Western culture is as misogynistic and patriarchal as cultures in many Muslim majority countries? You do not know why those rapes occurred, and nor do I. However, you cannot dismiss the possibility that those cultures were a factor. We’re talking about men coming from cultures that have very little respect for women’s rights, and who are used to seeing women covered from head to toe.
See? PROOF that PZ Myers is an accomplice of the Devious Arabic Conspiracy to Subvert Western Society through Yummy Food
/snark
Thanks Giliell for your informative and intelligent posts!
As a German I was pulled into several discussions on the topic on- and offline during the last few days. The attitudes I encounter especially among my coworkers are disgustingly racist. I really need another job…
Something I encountered online was an alleged (unsourced) quote from a refugee who expressed astonishment that here in Europe he cannot force his wife to have sex with him whenever he wants – at which point I remembered that I actually witnessed the discussion about the legal status of marital rape, and I only recently passed 40!
I had to look up the actual date though and was shocked to find that my memory was wrong. The legal definition of rape in Germany as something outside of marriage was not, as I thought, changed in the late 80s but in 1997! And yet people use the attitude of some (okay, probably to many) Muslims as proof that our culture has always been the better one.
Of course it was the Christian conservatives who fought the change in the legal definition of rape back than, destruction of the family and all that…
Indeed. You’re spot on. There’s obviously no real difference between the cultures of Germany and, for example, Syria. All cultures are totally the same and should be respected.
Nope. I can’t sustain the sarcasm. It blows my mind that any rational person would suggest that Germany is no better than a country like Syria. What planet are you living on? Are you so eager to appear tolerant and culturally sensitive that you are actually going to trivialize the plight of women, homosexuals, and freethinkers in many Muslim majority countries?
Some cultures are better than others. If that rather obvious statement of fact makes you wince, you really need to reassess your worldview.
Well James, if you can stop straw-manning other peoples positions and lying about the actual words they said, you might be ready to sit at the adult’s table and have a constructive conversation. That day is not now.
James MacDonald, your Islamaphobia is showing. Do you really think you can casually dismiss the real concerns of women in Western cultures about sexual harassment that easily? How twisted your worldview is.
/clicks on “James MacDonald”‘s G+ profile
/reads “Looks like you’ve reached the end”
/thinks, “Yes. Yes, we have.”
@James McDonald
Yeah. Because “culture” is only defined by your passport and/or an ignorantly generally defined religious category. There is no socio-economic background, there is no education, there is no urban versus rural, there is no family, etc. When social scientists control for this kind of thing they are just wasting there time. They could just use a political world map.
It is not a useful concept except if you want to make sweeping generalizations.
James McDonald @ 47 –
What’s the point of saying: “Generally, the plight of women is worse in muslim majority countries than in Germany?”
It doesn’t help women in any country nor does it help solve any one issue.
That and the fact that you did not answer my questions earlier leads me to the conclusion that you don’t care about the wellbeing of muslim women; you are just using this incident to make light of western womens inequality and also to feel superior because ‘culture.’
James McDonald
Which ones? The feminists? Us who’ve been talking about sexism and sexual violence for years? We’ve been doing this shit for a long time, we keep doing it because contrary to the legends, we don’t give a fuck about who the perpetrator was.
The Pegida fascists* and conservatives who only care about these issues when they can be used to stereotype and stigmatise refugees? No, they don’t get to use and further abuse us.
Horst Seehofer and Erika Steinbach, who voted against making rape within marriage a crime don’t get to talk about sexism.
Birgit Kelle, whose famous response to sexual harassment and violence was “just button up you blouse” doesn’t get to act like she gives a fuck about victims of sexual assault.
*If you look at their protests you will notice something: They’re 90+ % male.
No, I don’t believe that Germany is as bad as Saudi Arabia. But what does it matter? Winter in Berlin isn’t as cold as winter in Minnesota, it doesn’t mean you cannot freeze to death.
Also, we’re talking about Germany here, so Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and Morocco are irrelevant. Sexism, sexual assault and rape culture are alive and kicking in Germany, in all communities, all groups. Actually, those who are howling now about those “foreign cultures” are also those with the most regressive gender ideas and gender politics. They are those against LGBTQ rights and gender mainstreaming.
Which cultures? Those arrested so far come from a wide range of countries and cultures, including Germans and a US American.
Like Germany and the USA? Again, those arrested so far come from many places, many of them have been living here for some while. Also, why do you believe that men cannot control themselves once they see some naked skin?
Besides, if you’D read what I’ve written you’d know that many of these assaults are down to a criminal strategy where the sexual assault is used to cover up the theft of phones and purses. It’s not “these women aren’t wearing a hijab, therefore I get to grab them.” It’s “those women have smartphones and if one gropes them the other one can take the phone. She probably won’t even report.” As stated above, the majority of the reports are for theft.
Facts, you really hate them.
Fact: Rape within marriage was a man’s right until 1997 in Germany
Fact: Many of those who voted against it are still in Parliament, including members of the government.
Fact: The majority of rapes is not reported, the majority of those reported is not being prosecuted.
Fact: A victim has to prove that they were either threatened enough or that they fought enough for it to count as rape.
Fact: There are about 200 rapes each Oktoberfest and none those howling now gives a shit.
I have no intimate knowledge of Syrian culture. The few Syrians I know are quite decent people. I have intimate knowledge of German culture which is equally racist and sexist and where violence against women only gets condemned if the alleged perpetrator is a man of colour and the victim is white.
Textbook “Dear Muslima”. Tell me again, which country are we talking about? Syria (Cologne is neither in Syria nor France) or Germany? And when’s the last time you lived in either one?
James McDonald
As I’ve nowhere claimed anything like that your post makes you only look like a racist asshole.
Congrats if that was the desired effect!
@James McDonald:
Are you you even aware of the problems with the ‘Dear Muslima’ screed? The answer, going by your responses, would seem to be ‘no’, as you seem to be responding in a way that totally underlines and emphasises those problems. So I am going to educate you.
The ‘Dear Muslima’ screed can basically be summarised as Dawkins saying ‘women in Muslim countries face a higher degree of misogyny than women in western countries, so you women of western countries shouldn’t complain’. There are three main problems with this:
1) If X is worse than Y, this does not mean that Y is not wrong. This means that if Muslim women face a greater degree of misogyny than women in the west do, that does not mean that the western level/type of misogyny is perfectly A-OK.
2) If X is worse than Y, trying to fix Y does not preclude trying to fix X as well, and may even help. This means that just because people are protesting, complaining and trying to fix the problem of women facing misogyny in the west, this does not stop them doing the same for women facing misogyny in Muslim countries, and may even help show that a greater degree of equality between the genders is not only possible, but desirable.
3) This might be triggering for some. Misogyny often involves acts that are very difficult to classify as better or worse compared with each other, such as various acts of sexual violation/assault. For example, suppose you had a drunken party where some guy whose had a bit too much to drink puts his hand into a woman’s underwear. The responses he might get are a vast array along a whole spectrum from her turning around and responding in kind or simply laughing it off to that woman being highly traumatised and regarding that as basically rape, or the next thing to it. And none of those responses are actually wrong or incorrect in any way. So how do you compare a woman that’s heavily traumatised by a completely unwanted groping in a drunken party in New York, say, with a Muslim woman who has just performed her ‘wifely duty’ of sex with her husband, even though she didn’t really want to, in Islamabad? Can you really tell the woman in New York she’s got nothing to complain about?
Apparently, if we believe some people, we need someone to make a master list of oppressions, and then rank each country for its supposed level of each oppression. Then, we can only deal with those problems in the countries that have the highest level of that problem. Anyone who wants to deal with those problems elsewhere has to shut up until their country reaches the worst place on the list. So, hey, Canadian indigenous people? You can’t talk about systemic racism towards you, because someone is murdering indigenous people in country X to take their lands. African Americans? Stop complaining about cops shooting too many of you, there are openly sanctioned death squads shooting minorities in country Y. North Korean refugees? You can’t complain about the totalitarian rulers in your country, and the continued problems of starvation, because there isn’t an all out civil war going on there, like in Syria.
Hmmm, I guess that means that Americans can deal with the problem of sexual assault by frat members, since their country is the one where frats have the largest number of members, and frats have the most power and influence.
And here’s Laurrie Penny, explaining things in English so you don’t have to learn German. Trigger warning for description of threats she gets.
James McDonald, just out of curiosity, are you the same Jim McDonald who posted here as clydey2times, and had a chat with me on my blog back in ‘013?
Thank you very much for featuring my video in this story.
@ James MacDonald 34
I don’t even need to look at your following comments, this one kills your honesty and reasonableness all by itself.
Just like you are here attacking PZ, because deep down you also know that criticizing the manipulation of reality by one’s political opponents is just as valid as talking about the reality they are manipulating.
Hypocrite.
As this very piece points out there are people blogging about and covering what happened and PZ chose to cover the ones lying about that coverage. You are simply interested in preventing people like PZ from pointing out the dishonest manipulation. Defending against political attack is just as valid as propagating news about an event relevant to one’s interests. In fact one can choose to specialize in pointing out the dishonesty in one’s political opponents. Just to make it clear if you have problems reading between the lines by choosing to attack people dishonestly manipulating the reality of what feminists we decrease the signal of obfuscation that is distorting what feminists are actually doing so the signal that others are sending will propagate more efficiently.
Learn to reality of social conflict.
The analogical version of reality would be PZ showing the dishonest political manipulation by people ignoring what feminists were saying about the frat boys and pretending that they were saying nothing. This is not hard if one is not using the parts of one’s brain devoted to group-think associated motivated reasoning.
You accuse people of only caring about women when an opportunity to bash Islam arises. The reason why it might seem that way is because microaggressions and offensive Halloween costumes are a non-issue in light of how women are treated elsewhere in the world. You blog about the problems of some of the most privileged people in the world ad nauseam, yet you routinely fail to shine a light on women who are truly oppressed.
1) Who the fuck are you talking about? Are you suggesting that the people PZ is criticizing are lower on the totem pole?
2) This is a “Dear Muslima”, but since that seems to psychologically trigger you I’ll just link to the “fallacy of relative privation”
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Not_as_bad_as
You are just one more person trying to convince us that we can’t do more than one thing as a society you lazy ignoramus. If PZ wants to specialize in pointing out the political dishonesty in people attacking and opposing feminism and it’s cultural goals that is just fine.
We get to care about microaggressions, halloween costumes and dishonest political manipulation. The last one as I just mentioned is a valid and necessary part of a social conflict, a conflict I wish we did not have but exists on a de facto level and must be responded to. (I feel the need to mention it more than once because I suspect you will utterly ignore it otherwise).
Did you even read what PZ wrote? Where are demands that people be racist?
As I pointed out above if you switched groups out it’s reasonable to think that PZ would be pointing out dishonesty by those who would twist what feminists are really saying.
Giliell, that was a good explanation by Penny.
It’s actually the same mechanism from long ago when – if a black man raped a white women then he was sentenced to death, but when a white man raped a black woman, then he could be chosen for government, no problem. Racial opression and preserving the status quo; it’s not caring about womens’ lives.
Caring about preventing assault like that in Cologne would be thinking of steps that can be taken, and asking questions such as:
Why did the police not get there quicker or why didn’t they know about it quicker?
Why do many women hesitate to report and what can be done to change that?
Why is the information the police have about sexual assaults so far off from reality?
With today’s technology they should be able to know right away, but the procedures are clearly not conductive to like sending an sms with the location and type of problem without negative consequences for the one reporting.
@James McDonald — so Syria is part of North Africa now? That Continental Drift is somethin’ else, man, somethin’ else!
Oh, and I’d like certain people to explain to me how these are the fault of young muslim refugees:
Tequila add: “can opener” (cans being women, of course
Colour my tits, a colouring book for men
“filled to burst”
Giliell @ 63:
Gad, we’ve come such a long way, haven’t we?
#58: Interesting.
1. The same obnoxious habit of telling everyone what their motives are and openly misinterpreting other’s words.
2. Same obsession with pointing out the inferiority of non-western cultures.
3. Different IP address…but still from exactly the same location in the UK. Seems to be a part of the world infested with supercilious assholes.
4. Not very bright. Using the same photo in JamesMcDonald’s phony G+ profile as Clydey2Times used elsewhere? Tsk. The trolls are getting lazy.
Banned, obviously.
PZ @ 65:
Yeah. I figured the ban had never been lifted. I confess, I’m rather amazed that Jim has not changed his thinking one iota for years now. If that was me, I’d be concerned, to say the least.
@Giliell #63
Here you can find a whole collection of such sexist ads in German (the ones you have linked are part of the list). Just if someone had a doubt that we are so much more advanced as a civilization when it comes to women’s rights. Not like these barbarians.
zoonpolitikon
I know, I know.
It’s not like I have only started paying attention now…
Good blog post, btw
Gawd… Dear Muslima….
“There are a lot more places that are far more violent then the West, so why do you complain about murders?”
F.O.
Bizarrly this has been combined with “why aren’t you talking about Germany”? (While of course telling us that Germany is so much better than Syria*)
*I’ve also recently noticed the lack of a civil war
Raw Story carries some material from Newsweek. They posted a piece this afternoon that I’m sure will not amuse many of you.
http://www.rawstory.com/2016/01/cologne-attacks-are-a-reminder-that-hatred-of-women-drives-jihadists-fervor/
@James MacDonald
So what you’re saying is that we should ignore every single thing that is not the worst thing?
Women in one part of the world are routinely belittled and made to feel unsafe and insecure in ways that, when taken on a case by case basis seem fairly trivial, while in another part of the world they’re forced into extremely restrictive roles and threatened with beatings or death if they ever try to step outside of them, so we should completely ignore the lesser issue, and leave it to stagnate?
Does that apply universally, or only to this issue? Should we allow people to get away with the murder of a rival, bearing in mind that, somewhere in the world, huge numbers of people are being massacred? The one is a non-issue in light of the severity of the other, surely? Or is it possible that we might care about both issues and try to address them both?
There is always something that’s worse than the thing you’re talking about by some measure, so how do we decide which one, solitary issue we can give a damn about, bearing in mind that the other issues are non-issues in light of it? And why is it that when it seems as if you can solve the problem by shrieking “burn the muzzies!!!!!!!” you pricks suddenly lose all skepticism over the issue? Women lie, dontchaknow? All the time. I mean, something like 9000% of all rape accusations are false, according to these totally legit statistics I found on ReturnofKings, so surely none of it’s real anyway? Hmm?
Sorry, this probably isn’t very coherent. I just get a little pissy when fucking vultures, like your delightful self, decide that issues that are normally “non-issues” start to matter as soon as they can start freaking out about how all of those scary heathens are out to get us. Could you not try to be consistent and oppose rape all the time, rather than just when it’s an excuse to play neo-nazi and beat a few Sikhs half to death for looking like Muslims?
Damn it, I need to stop responding to people who’ve been banned.
Athywren
Oh well,
still a good comment.
@chigau
I am always at my best when commenting in grumpy mode at 4am with a toothache! :D
@Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk-
(temporarily de-lurking).
Thank-you for all of this. I’m a foreigner temporarily living in Köln, My German-language skills are quite poor, so I have been wondering about the real feeling by German women. I have actually had difficulty finding opinions from average women besides those I know through work, while drowning in the sea of crap from those with direct lines to the media.
Thank-you for providing your prospective.
Yep, again the problem of sexual assault is just one of those muslim men.
Also full points for being completely ahistorical: the rise of Islam as identity (in all forms) is a quite recent phenomenon among 2nd or 3rd generation youth.
Jim Stewart
Thanks. But don’t make me the spokeswoman of Germany. I’m totally convinced that a huge number of German women is singing the song about those evil brown men as well right now because unfortunately, racism isn’t an all male phenomenon either…
@77
I promise I won’t use you as the spokeswoman. I was thanking you for the diversity of opinions in the links on the topic.
I need to believe that some people are seeing things in perspective, especially as the reprisal attacks are starting…
@Giliell – Your posts make me sad. I used to think that Germany was at least a little bit more civilized than many other countries (including The Netherlands where I live). The burst of the bubble is painful. Nevertheless thanks for the ammunition to shoot at the racists.
Pakistanis attacked by gangs of men in Germany
These must be the good non-radical feminists that MRA bros hint about so often. Brown skins touching their white women is just crossing the line!
Saad
I’m not even posting all the attacks on refugees, muslims and their homes.
Where can we deport all those Germans to? Texas?
BTW, once there will be trials, there will be a great shock, because they courts will tell that actually, unless you’re using force, just putting your hands on unwilling women’s tits and arses, it’s not illegal.
By now I’m glad I din’t react in time when the guy* grabbed my ass while passing me on his bike. I’d probably have ended up in prison…
*very blond, no helmet
Argentina? Chile?
The attacks in Cologne reminded me too much of the 2000 sexual assaults right after the NYC Puerto Rican Day Parade in 2000. The attacks themselves were bad enough, but the lackluster response by the cops was a disgrace. I always wonder at people who want to single out Muslim men as uber-misogynists.
Also, @James MacDonald #34:
https://medium.com/@NoorjahanAkbar/dear-american-misogynists-afghan-women-are-not-oppressed-for-you-42721d792286#.bz71nsnzo
I’m halfway through the comments and it’s clearly obvious that white Western liberals here are just reaching for straws and that James is right. Nobody would over this issue this way if it were white men assaulting women en masse.
As a middle-eastern man, it boggles my mind that Western educated liberals cannot stand up for liberal values when it comes to other cultures.
Traditional Islamic middle-eastern culture (and the surrounding areas) is venomously patriarchal far beyond anything you Western white liberals know and have experienced. This is not about condemning all muslims or middle-eastern because after all not everyone is affected by the culture in the same way, not everyone adopts the culture the same way, the availability of internet and social media allows opportunity for men to break out of their patriarchal culture and so on
But you cannot have an honest intellectual debate if you just want to run away from the facts: traditional Islamic cultural practices in the middle-eastern region is completely dysfunctional when it comes to interactions between men and women and it always puts men at the position of privilege over women.
Ah, another “dear muslima” apologist. Been there, heard that, not impressed. It doesn’t address the real concern, which is Trumpfart’s emulation of Nazism. Which you didn’t address at all.
Hi not white not western liberal here.
As a middle-eastern agender person, I’m goggling at your ability to unfailingly show up and condemn middle-eastern countries for a thing literally every country everywhere does to this day.
How did you manage to manage to convince yourself that western culture isn’t smotheringly oppressive and patriarchal?
That there exist worse examples in some of said countries doesn’t excuse letting white countries off the hook and holding them up as shining cities on the hill. Not while innocent muslim women get harassed by trump fans just for existing, sikhs get shot and beat up for “looking too muslim”, and serious presidential contenders promise to deprive huge amounts of americans their civil liberties.
Call me back when my family doesn’t get profiled by racist cops and TSA agents.
lotharloo @85:
Ok, so how would standing up for liberal values look like, according to you?
Fixing the laws regarding sexual assault and changing police work and sentencing procedures?
Banning entry into western countries to anyone from a muslim country?
What should be done and how should we go about it?
Indeed: WHEN white men assault women en masse -which is all the fucking time- the media stay mostly silent, the racists pricks don’t whine about “feminists not doing their job” (they whine about other stuff) and as a result no blog posts commenting about the racists pricks whining about “feminists not doing their job” is produced.
BTW, did you know that in Cologne dialect there exists a word for a guy who “likes butts so much he often touches them, especially during carnival”?
That’s clearly the influence of muslim migrants, right?
Or that the majority of the attacks in Cologne don’t even count as a crime or delinquency or misdemeanour?
How did those muslims manage to write those German laws?
Last night I was at a show. At one point of the show a guy sends off a female character by patting her butt and telling her to shoosh. The audience laughed. I didn’t see many “North African or Arab looking men” in the audience.
Oh, here’s the MRAs cheering on rape, whishing “they could get away with it”
And something good: There’s now the initiative “ausnahmslos” (without exception), against sexual violence AND racism.
If you like your feminism intersectional
And, if you look at the hashtag #ausnahmslos you will also see many that have a second one #falschesgrau, which is the misogynists posting sexualised images of women. Which is somehow totally OK and not a sign of problematic behaviour, because reasons
@Giliell #92
I would like to add that it is very telling if you contrast the two hashtags created as a reaction to discussions about sexualized violence: #NotAllMen and #ausnahmslos . It shows who actually cares about the victims and the problem itself.
But then you can also just look at the vitriol that immediately followed the creation of the hashtag with angry (almost only male) tweeters insulting and yelling at the feminists who started it.
zoonpolitikon
Well, their care for (German) women does not extend to treating us with some dignity once we disagree with them.
Giliell,
Datum: When I was a young lad in Spain (1960s. Madrid.), it was a cultural thing that men could pinch the bums of unaccompanied women without expecting consequence (it was seen as a compliment to the woman).
(Even then I thought it was weird, and there probably was a term for it I have forgotten)
You have no idea what i and others have experienced.
By the way, who says that ALL refugees or immigrants come from a traditional islamic middle-eastern culture? And what do you imagine people would be doing if the attackers had all been white, that would somehow be different? Are you arguing that if they had all been white, we should be turning against all white men by association and not waste time grasping at straws about how doing so would be fucked up, immoral and prejudiced?
@96 John Morales
Yeah, it’s called “being a man”, because that’s what red-blooded men do, because manly men are manly and femenine women ought to not just be grateful, but turned on by such manly, alpha displays of manly behaviour. Manly.
You are supossed to pinch women’s butts, and oggle at them, and talk about how hot they are and how hard they make you, loud enough just so that not only the other men around can hear you, but she can as well. And if you don’t, there’s something wrong with you, but hey, ph*gs are cool, just don’t tell real men how to be men.
Giliell & zoonpolitikon –
It’s because – according to the supremacist white dudes – these are their women and abusing their stuff is disrespectful to them; it is also completely up to them how they use their own women and what they do to “keep them in line.”
lotharloo, #85
It’s a difference of degree, not kind.
And I second what L. Minnik said at post #88.
What should these white Western liberals do about Islamic misogyny in Middle Eastern cultures?
Saad @100,
an honest answer would probably be something like:
“The women should cry out for protection by white dude heroes!!!”
“Assert your race priviledge!!!”
@87, Vivec:
Hi not white not western liberal here.
Good, I’m tired of arguing with clueless Westerners. So what’s your background?
I lived the first 23 years of my life in Iran, then the past 11 years in
Canada and Europe.
How did you manage to manage to convince yourself that western culture isn’t smotheringly oppressive and patriarchal?
And where did I say that the western culture is perfect? I have no respect
for conservative “family values” types of Western culture, but the liberal
Western culture is definitely something worthwhile.
@88 Minnik:
Ok, so how would standing up for liberal values look like, according to you?
Eduction seems to be the pretty obvious starting point. While I lived back home,
I was taught 0 sex education, 0 about consent, 0 about how to pursue meaningful
relationships with the opposite sex and so on. My first interaction with concepts
such as sexual harassment was when I was entered the university as a PhD student
and had to sit through some introductory orientation events (that were optional)
and most of the information about sexual harassment just went over my head because
I was just not familiar at all with anything.
And the first time I started to understand Canadian culture was when in an
English course that I took in Canada the teacher asked each student to do a
presentation about either their own culture, country and maybe differences
with Canada.
@Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk-
Again, you seem to think that I believe Western culture is perfect and free
of sexism. I’m not a dummy and I know that is not true and it is not what I
am saying.
I don’t know how things are done in Germany but I believe every country should
start by teaching kids and teenagers the basics about consent, sexual harassment
and related topics. But even if that happens, it does not change that fact that
immigrants from other countries also need to be educated.
Here is what most people seem to be missing.
Middle-eastern muslim men are the most privileged people within their own countries. My own country is explicitly and legally sexist with respect to almost all aspects of a woman’s life; Brown-skinned muslim men are the dominant group, enjoying a much wider income gap, enjoying a dominant position on all aspects of the society, from leadership and government, to private companies, to sports and TV. And for many of them, this position of superiority to women is the norm.
However, middle-eastern muslims men are under-privileged in Western countries and to make things worse for them, since women have a much more equal status in Western countries compared to what they have been used to back, white women are actually over-privileged over these men (regardless of the status of the white women with respect to white men).
So, here is the question: what happens when the most privileged group in a country, settles in an another country where the roles are completely reversed? And do you think that this problem of great culture shock just to be ignored and swept under the rug?
Who the fuck has ever said anything of the kind?
This is an issue that needs to be addressed, but you know how it shouldn’t be addressed? By assuming all refugees and immigrants are rapists or terrorists, shunnin them, banning them, beating them, killing them, etc…
If you agree that there is a problem with sexism in western cultures as well and, i’m assuming, that not every refugee/immigrant is a rapist/terrorist….what are these straws you claim people are grabbing at?
I admit, I’m shocked. I had assumed that in any western European country, at least, that would be sexual assault.
lotharloo,
I completely agree with you that making education for people who are newcomers in a country is crucial; this goes not only for the above issues but also other aspects of the law, customs, economics, ect. so that people can thrive. That and educating schoolchildren would be a very good response to this situation.
I’m convinced that many liberals actually endorse such changes; are you critisizing people for not prioritizing and advocating for this enough?
James wrote:
So there is not enough being done about issues of cultural differences and how that impacts human rights issues? That’s a very favourable reading, because I can’t condone the dismissal of women’s issues in the west.
May I then suggest that next time, instead of bashing liberals striving for change -who may really get enough bashing as it is – you just say exactly what it is that should be done and help to do it. Share your unique knowledge and ideas. Wouldn’t that be more effective?
lotharloo, #102
But sex education and sexual harassment and consent is needed for western people too. Why is that a special requirement for Muslims who immigrate to the West?
And you’re generalizing way too much. My siblings and I come from a very patriarchal and sexist Muslim country. We have never even thought that touching or harassing a girl/woman is okay (without receiving education or training about it). This type of stuff depends on the individual as well as the culture they’re brought up in.
lotharloo
No shit, eh. You know what us very same feminists have been fighting for since the mass immigration of refugees in summer? Safe spaces for refugee women and children. A possibility to get them into women’s shelters if they are abused. Nobody here believes that all immigrants who arrive here perfect feminists.
You know who’s trying to teach them that hey, this is Germany, gay people exist openly on the streets and yes, people will eat in cafés regardless of Ramadan? The central council of muslims.
Who said so?
Nobody I know believes that the integration of 1 million people from very diverse backgrounds is something that just happens, which was something people believed in the past and which led to many of the problems the third generation of immigrant kids now has.
Poverty and social exclusion are big issues and yes, when they occur in men they tend to focus more on being “men”. It’s a phenomenon you get among socially maginalised groups and of course this interacts with their previous cultural ideas.
This whole “reversed” idea is at the bottom of this whole discussion: Those men attacked somebody who is a rung higher on the ladder than they are. Had the attackers been white, i.e. higher on the ladder than the women, or the women been brown, i.e. still lower on the ladder, nobody would have kicked up a fuss.
I’ve been discussing the #Aufschrei initiative back in 2013. When women shared their experiences with that very type of sexual violence we were laughed at, told to “button up”, told we were liars plus the usual rape and death threats.
@103
1/4th-1/3rd of every year for the last 21 years in Turkey, plus time in Mexico and the US.
Literally every time you come to quibble about how patriarchal and sexist you make a big point of how the middle-east as a whole is far and beyond the west in terms of sexism and patriarchal values, and I’m just not seeing it.
The US is astoundingly sexist. It just puts a more friendly face on it. Fact of the matter is that women in the US face an astounding amount of prejudice and violence, and that’s before we even get into how trans and not-straight people like myself get treated.
While, sure, the US isn’t as bad in terms of De Jure sexism/homophobia/racism/etc as some Middle-Eastern countries, I’d argue the De Facto oppression is of a comparable degree. Women get assaulted after dark, ethnic minorities face huge amounts of prejudice, and not-straight/cis people like me have to wonder if that late-night walk home will be the last one we ever make.
I do not feel safer or less oppressed in the US by any degree.
Focusing on the middle-east in particular the way you do implicitly lets the west off the hook, and frankly, doesn’t jive with my experiences at all. Turkey more or less feels like southern california but with more mosques. Aside from that, I don’t experience a significant difference in oppression.
Sure, there are places that are worse than the US, but I disagree that the degree of difference is large at all. It’s just codified into law in said places.
But if i don’t treat all of those foreigners like dirty, uncivilized barbarians, how am i supossed to feel superior to them?
lotharloo, #102
So is your point that everyone, regardless of immigration or religion status, be educated on the basics?
Or that immigrants from those Muslim countries receive extra education?
If the latter, how do you suggest the West implement this? If the former, why make that point at all in a discussion about Muslims?
Vivec
As Laurrie Penny put it so nicely: The world cannot be categorised into “things totally the same” and “things totally the opposite”.
lotharloo #103:
There might be a difference in degree and blatancy, but male dominance is also the norm in many western societies. And I say this as a member of about the most privileged group there is in my part of the world – a cisgendered straight white male.
What do I think should happen? If the Köln attacks are, indeed, a result of such ‘culture shock’, the men concerned should be taught that such actions are unacceptable by being held legally responsible for their actions. And then, perhaps, parallels should be pointed out between the treatment of women in these attacks and the normal treatment of women in Köln, or, indeed, elsewhere in the west, and this incident used to make people think and reflect on whether this treatment should happen. A bit like what is happening in this comment thread. However, what I don’t think should happen is that people should assume that all Muslims/brown-skinned people are rapists. I also don’t think that the discrimination of women in the west should be seen as perfectly fine because women elsewhere are discriminated against more.
Which, as already mentioned, will probably NOT happen because German law does NOT consider it a crime to simply grab a woman’s tits or arse. Only when additional violence happened.
@114
B-b-but it’s an elightened western power! Totally better than those rape-happy brown cultures!!11!
Vivec
Yep. Western sexism is much more covert. Hey, we may not have “four male witnesses” on the books, but from the reality of what happens we know that it could as well be.
Fathers may not kill their daughters for “dishonouring” them, but your ex partner totally will.
Also, I remember the two Italian girls in my school. One was living in a youth group because her father had become violent when she had a boyfriend, the other one carefully extended her stay in school so she would be 18 by the time she finished with the approved degree so she could not be shipped back to Sicily to get married. You may guess their religion…
@Giliell
This occurred to me recently as well. It’s not in law in the west but the functional reality of how the culture works is that that there is a bias against women who say they were harassed or raped. Most of the time when anything friendly to holding abusers and rapists accountable is discussed, or when examples of harassment, abuse and rape is discussed (in specifics or abstract) the groups of doubters, nit-pickers, and criticizers show up. They feel this obligation or need to suppress or contradict things that need to be addressed to be solved.
It’s a form of motivated reasoning among non-abusers, harassers and rapists that pisses me off more and more since the social context clearly shows that the social predators need to be directly addressed and people need to be able to talk about the harassment, abuse and rape without opposition. Some of them are definitely the people doing the harm knowingly and they set a social tone, but the rest of them choose to take this de facto stance against reducing suffering. It’s thousands of reasons with the effect of removing focus from victims or suppressing what they are trying to communicate. The reasons don’t even matter to me anymore beyond occasionally mentioning them to make a person more receptive to information about the damage they are doing.
I’m not sure how to do it best yet but there has to be a way to directly addressing the presence of these social predators in online environments (even the ones that unconsciously fear they may be predators). The social context alone makes it reasonable to think they are present in any place with 50 or more people so actively looking for the patterns of their presence is rational.
Yesterday I linked to the “#ausnahmslos”
Here’s the first men whining.
Mild side-order of conspiracy theory (how could they organise this in a week?) and “making sexual harassment a crime will only let bitches take revenge on poor men”.
@lotharloo
There are issues that you appear to be missing.
Firstly, the primary point of the article is the accusation that feminists are ignoring the assaults in Köln. This accusation is a false one. At best, this means those propagating the claim are simply ignorant and intellectually lazy, at worst it means that they’re consciously lying about it for whatever reason.
The second thing is exactly who it is that is both seizing upon this issue and accusing us of not doing so. There are questions you need to ask yourself about them. Are they ordinarily promoters of sexual equality and anti-rape campaigners? Do they, after every single instance of large scale sexual aggression, come out and take a stance against it? Or are they conspicuously silent or vocal in opposition to those who take a stance against it when the perpetrators are white and native to the region?
Another issue is what always happens after events like these. There is a reason that the example of Sikhs being assaulted in the wake of attacks by Islamic groups has come up more than once in this thread. It is a common occurrence in recent history for people who look vaguely like an ignorant bigot’s conception of a Muslim to be assaulted or killed in the wake of events like this one, and I’m sorry if that’s your idea of what standing up for liberal values looks like, but if that’s the case then I’m pleased to boggle your mind.
This is not a matter of failing to stand up for liberal values – it’s a matter of refusing to sacrifice the value of not being a racist on the altar of not being a sexist, just as we refuse the sacrifice in the opposite direction.
If it’s not about condemning all Muslims or middle-eastern culture, don’t tell us that refusing to condemn all Muslims or middle-eastern culture is refusing to stand up for our values, because that’s all we’re doing – have you seen anyone here suggest that it’s alright for them to have acted in this way simply because of their religion or cultural background? Even one person? Here, I’ll make it clear; it is not acceptable, whatever your skin colour, whatever your religion, whatever your cultural background, to commit sexual assault or rape. Clear enough? Or do I have to murder the next person I see who looks suspiciously Arabic in order for you to believe that I’m truly committed to my liberal values?
We know that traditional Islamic cultural practices are dysfunctional when it comes to interactions between men and women. Not just between the sexes, frankly, there are a large number where traditional Islamic practices are dysfunctional. This isn’t something we’re running away from or refusing to acknowledge, but that’s not unique to Islam in type or in scale, and it is not enough, nor is it in any way helpful or true to act as if there is something magically sinister about sexual assault and rape committed by apparently Arabic men that puts it in a category beyond the mundane stuff that happens all the fucking time. Maybe if we’d somehow solved the issue here in the liberal west we’d have the luxury of acting as if it was a problem caused by foreign animals invading our pristine lands, but we haven’t and we don’t, so pretty much the usual, every day condemnation of rape and sexual assault really should be sufficient without whipping up more mindless racial hatred that’ll only lead to yet more innocent people being assaulted for no reason beyond looking like a Muslim. The only reason it isn’t enough is because the people who’re demanding more don’t actually give a fuck about ending rape or sexual assault and actually oppose our attempts to do so every single other week of the year. We’re not going to especially go after Muslims, because we don’t want to end Muslim rape, we want to end rape. All of it. If you actually do want us to support the whipping up of hatred against people who look like you to do so, maybe try making an argument about how it’ll actually help reach that goal? You never know, you might convince us. If not, maybe try making sure you understand what we’re doing before criticising us for it.
Seriously?
What’s the term? (I’m so going to use it next time some hypocrite pull some “Only Arabs do that kind of thing” bullshit)
When you think about it, western cultures haven’t evolved that much since Voltaire penned his “Droit de Cuissage” in the Dictionnaire Philosophique
And let’s not forget: when a brown-skinned man murders his spouse or daughter, it’s a case of honor killing and the sign that there’s something intrinsically wrong with his culture of origine.
When a white guy do the same, on the other hand, it’s a crime of passion and we are supposed to pity the poor guy who snapped.
[[Franklin-Quote-Butchering]]
Those who give up anti-racism to purchase a pretense of support from false feminists will deservedly end up subjugated by both racists and sexists
[[/Franklin-Quote-Butchering]]
I’m convinced that many liberals actually endorse such changes; are you critisizing people for not prioritizing and advocating for this enough?
Except that it is considered “forced cultural assimiliation” and so it is not universally accepted by liberals.
Why is that a special requirement for Muslims who immigrate to the West?
Make it mandatory for anyone who is planning to stay in the country for extended periods of time.
And you’re generalizing way too much. My siblings and I come from a very patriarchal and sexist Muslim country. We have never even thought that touching or harassing a girl/woman is okay (without receiving education or training about it). This type of stuff depends on the individual as well as the culture they’re brought up in.
Nobody is being taught that touching women is okay. What is taught is that “Hijab” and veiling protects women from unwanted looks/touches and therefore women who were touched must have had deviated from proper hijab. Also, by the same non-logic, it is assumed (by conservative assholes) that western women who do not cover up property are “sluts” who sleep around with just about anyone and like to be touched and so on (as I said, the concept of consent is not really considered at all). Essentially, touching them is okay because either they like it anyways or they are “sluts” and they are going to burn in hell anyways. You can see these types of reasoning often in truly conservative ones (for example, the assholes who interrogate various journalists, such as Maziar Bahari).
You know who’s trying to teach them that hey, this is Germany, gay people exist openly on the streets and yes, people will eat in cafés regardless of Ramadan? The central council of muslims.
That goes in line with what I am saying. Decent muslims realize the kind of culture they are potentially working with. You can dress up nicely in words, e.g., by saying that they are “helping them to adjust” or directly by saying that “their culture must change”. It does not change the fact that those traditional muslim values have no place in a civilized society. Again, we are not talking about people, we are talking about cultures and ideas.
Nobody I know believes that the integration of 1 million people from very diverse backgrounds is something that just happens, which was something people believed in the past and which led to many of the problems the third generation of immigrant kids now has.
That’s good if it is the case. So what sort of plans the German goverment has in this line?
This whole “reversed” idea is at the bottom of this whole discussion: Those men attacked somebody who is a rung higher on the ladder than they are. Had the attackers been white, i.e. higher on the ladder than the women, or the women been brown, i.e. still lower on the ladder, nobody would have kicked up a fuss.
Yes, so something is going to change and things will be shaken up.
1/4th-1/3rd of every year for the last 21 years in Turkey, plus time in Mexico and the US.
Literally every time you come to quibble about how patriarchal and sexist you make a big point of how the middle-east as a whole is far and beyond the west in terms of sexism and patriarchal values, and I’m just not seeing it.
Okay, great. I speak Azeri. But what to what you said, while Turkey is definitely one of the nicest Muslim countries, my main point is the traditional values. And here’s a question for you: Do you consider Gorusculuk part of the culture or not? Do you think something like that is also part of the culture of US or Mexico?
The US is astoundingly sexist.
In some parts, I would believe you. As a whole, I am not sure how to even define an American culture so that we can compare it to more uniform cultural practices in Middle-east.
Focusing on the middle-east in particular the way you do implicitly lets the west off the hook,
I am not sure why do you say that. First of all, US is certainly the most religious and the most conserative country among Western countries so you are comparing one of the best Muslim countries to one of the worst Western countries. So I am not sure that makes for a valid comparison.
And thus the backpedaling begins.
and you’d be unlikely to encounter any info about sexual harassment much earlier in germany, either. or in the US. Legally speaking, german law cares about sexual harassment only in the workplace and other power-difference situations (tho in practice, some such relationships are still exempt, as evidenced by the lack of convictions of RCC priests). otherwise, sexual harassment and assault rank below being flipped off in terms of legally pursuable offenses; even rape itself isn’t technically pursuable legally, because what gets you convicted is not the raping, but rather using (the immediate, direct threat of) physical violence to break a victims defense, and also raping people who are physically incapable of defending themselves.
raping someone who’s scared shitless because of past history of violence? not gonna get you convicted. it’s not even technically illegal in germany.
and then add to that the ubiquitous penalty-free groping during carnival, octoberfest, etc. and quite frankly, I don’t know from whom all these immigrant men are supposed to learn that groping women is not ok. because it’s certainly not from observing ur-german men, or from learning about german laws.
maybe from feminists, but those feminists would have to teach everyone, not just immigrants.
also notable: the german politician currently most loudly claiming that it’s time to strengthen german rape law was, just a few months ago, in opposition to that change as unnecessary. so, i don’t believe that this is his honest opinion.
the proposed change, incidentally, will do nothing to make groping illegal. so i don’t believe it’s about preventing what happened in cologne.
the proposed change will also not grant women bodily autonomy; it’ll still be about preventing women from defending themselves, rather than about not committing sexual acts without permission. so i don’t believe this is about women’s rights, either.
yeahno. “their culture must change” is what gets us residential schools, or shit like bans on polish language, history, and literature during the time that chunks of poland belonged to the russian empire.
“helping adjust” is more realistic; even “help understand multiculturalism” or even, if you must, “excise some norms from their culture”; but there’s actually no reason for attempting whole scale, assimilation and one-way acculturation into some pre-defined german default.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAOHGOD. 300 mil usamericans, citizens of the same country, have less in common culturally than roughly the same number of people, in some 20 different countries!?!?!?!?!
the US is not actually more conservative than euro countries. US sexual assault laws for example are better than german ones; not to mention the many euro countries in which gay marriage is still not a thing and abortion is illegal.
Um, okay. I guess all of Europe, then, is one big slab of cultural sameness, since they’re all christian countries (and pagan before that – more of the sameness!). I mean, countries built on christian values. I mean, secular but with christian roots. … They’re all the same, anyway!
(It’s that sort of thinking that leads to the term ‘Africa’ being thought of as a country, not a continent.)
laurentweppe
Apparently the term is “Föttchesföhler” (Föttche being the but and Föhler the person who touches it). Here’s my source, the paper being this year’s edition…
lotharloo
For very good reasons. There’s a difference between saying “ok, these are our rules of living together and they apply to everybody” and saying “this is a very narrow limit within which we’ll find your behaviour acceptable while we will accept much broader behaviour from ethnic Germans.”
BTW, I’d say getting drunk and ignoring all social limits is a time honoured western tradition. Pumpkinfest anybody?
I hope that applies to Schmidt, Meyer, Müller and Schulz as well, right?
FIFY
In my experience, the proper skirt length is whatever you were wearing plus 5 cm. Western men want to have it all: Ogling at sexily dressed women PLUS blaming them for their own assault. Have you missed discussions about dresscodes which usually humiliate and punish girls, with the reasoning that their bodies distract the male students? We’re not talking about fundamentally different mindsets here, just about the amount of fabric.
Saying “you have to accept this” is not the same as saying “you have to change”. And believe me, as somebody who moved from one western country to another I can tell you that such “adjustment” can be hard, simply because things you were never consciously aware of are suddenly different.
Of course I want people to become more tolerant, to drop homophobic attitudes. But I’m actually convinced enough of my values that I think they will prevail. I also have enough faith in people who come here to believe them to be able to change. Of course telling them “you must now think the same as I do or else” will not yield the desired results.I’m liberal enough to defend the right of people to be assholes. Doesn’t mean I’ll give them a free pass.
And finally, you can find many of those mindsets in conservative ethnic Germans as well. What about them? Will somebody force all the catholic bishops to change? What sort of forced catching up to the 21st century do you propose their? Or are they allowed to have a reactionary mindset as a legitimate opinion on account of their ethnic and cultural origin but immigrants don’t?
Language classes, mainly. There’s not near enough. What would be needed is a fast response, getting people out of the overcrowded shelters etc.
Jadehawk
QFFT
Also yes, you’re right, the proposed changes will NOT define rape based on somebody’s consent. I’m not even talking about “yes means yes”, we will not even catch up to “no means no”.
Oh, and one of the best texts about the whole dishonesty I’ve read about this so far in German
Apart from the mischaracterisation of the law situation…
A few days ago, some ethnic Germans in Köln got together and went around beating up every Syrian or other foreigner they could find. Should we then assume that all Germans are xenophobic crazies? Should we demand an apology and condemnation from every German? If not, why should anyone expect completely unrelated Syrians to apologize for the drunk idiots in Köln on New Year’s?
dianne
Well, I just mentioned on a German forum, how come that Germans still insist to be judged as individuals and not as members of a xenophobic arsonist culture?
The reply I got was “shut up, bitch!”
Yep, totally no sexism here, move on folks…
I thought this was an atheist blog. Instead it seems that it has turned into another one of these “Muslims are the greatest victims ever”-blogs. I used to read pharyngula a great deal up to around 2010 when I became a mother the first time, then I got other priorities and took a long break. Since then I’ve been reading the blog periodically, each time hoping that it would come back to what it once was, but apparently not. Now I’m giving up. I cannot stand anymore to see people, who call themselves atheist, making one excuse after another for the outrageous sexism, homophobia and racism exerted by certain religious groups, who they happen to personally favor.
I do understand that some people have some “needs” to show the world that they are certainly not racists, but I don’t understand how this can be equated to being tolerant toward discrimination from religious groups. Of course religious groups here equates to Muslims, if any of these events had been arranged by Christians, Jews, Buddhist, Hindus or what ever, then the reaction would have been completely different.
So far this blog post has 131 comments, of which 29 (22%) comes from Giliell. This person claims to be a woman, I doubt it very much, otherwise he would have experienced himself the extreme sexism shown by the religious group, who he is defending so strongly.
As a woman living in a North-European country, then I’ll give you some brief examples of what exactly is going on here:
1994: I’m 14 years old and taking the bus alone to visit my mother. My parents are divorced and I live with my dad. A man from Turkey come and take the seat next to me, even though there are many others vacant. He talks to me about his home country, while he first grabs me on my thigh and then starts to put his hands down my pants. I’m too scared to say anything.
1996: I’m in high school. A Turkish boy from my class asks if I’ll help him with his math? I agree, I have the best grades in math in the class and I’m only happy to help. Except that he wasn’t interested in math at all. In stead he was constantly calling me and asking if I would have sex with him.
1999: I go home from a night out with the bus. The ride is more than 2 hours, and I’m sleepy, so I put an alarm on my cell phone and rests. But I wake up before I reach my destination, because a man from Somalia has taken the seat next to me, and now he is trying to pull of my clothes, while he’s saying that he wants ‘sex’. No one else in the bus reacts, and I tell him to go away. He reacts by saying that he is a guest in my land from Somalia, and that all women here are whores. And then he tells me that I am racist, because I don’t want to have sex with a random stranger on the bus..
2002: I took a job in a pharmaceutical company with packing medicine to save some money for studies. A work colleague of mine is a woman from Pakistan. She suddenly starts crying at work. She tells, that she was forced to marry a man 4 years ago by her parents. She works two full-time jobs to support them, as he doesn’t want to work. He has just removed their two year old daughter from daycare in order to save money. But his way of taking care of their child while mommy works two jobs is just to lock her inside a room. With no food, water or diaper change. I tell her to leave him. She replies, that he has sworn to kill her and their daughter if she leaves him. And if he doesn’t get to her, then her own father and brothers, who arranged the marriage, will. Then a 19 year old Turkish girl at the job tells, that she actually divorced her violent husband, who she was forced to marry at 18. It cost her all contact with her family, but she is happy. Now she is working to save up money to get teeth implants to replace those he knocked out..
But another Turkish girl working there explains that not all Muslim parents are evil. Hers are good. They told her that she could freely choose her own husband. Of course they demanded that he should be from Turkey, Kurdish like them, a Muslim and she should be married before reaching 21. Both otherwise she could choose freely. The other two Muslim girls agreed. She was very lucky.
That made me consider exactly how lucky I was that I could choose completely freely: whether I wanted a boyfriend or a girlfriend or to be married or not..
2004: While studying I volunteered to help in a support organization for ‘ethnic’ girls (mostly Muslim). I was studying science, so I was helping them with their homework. But multiple times their fathers came and complained about it. They didn’t want their daughters to get any education or any stupid ‘western’ ideas. Then I found out that the most of the girls aged 11-13 years were getting engaged to men two or three times their age. And they had an internal competition going on about who had the highest ‘price’, which was the amount of money, the parents had received from the suitors family. Apparently the girls were proud about that their parents had sold them, if only the price was high enough!
2006: I took a train together with a fellow student, a Chinese girl. There were many vacant seats, but a man of middle eastern descent came in and sat right next to her. He started moving closer and said “how much?” while mentioning various forms of intercourse. She moved away from him and asked him to get lost. Then he yelled at her, that she was a ‘skewed eye whore’ and finished with calling her a racist. Afterwards I excused to her, I didn’t like a guest in my country being treated like this. She told me, that it wasn’t the first time, that things like this had happened. She had multiple times been harassed by men, always of middle eastern descent and always with focus on her own origin. She knew other Chinese girls here, who had similar problems.
2008: We had a new intern at my job who came from Nigeria, he was a devout catholic. One day he comes to work severely beaten. We are all shocked, and he explains that a group of men had chased him calling him the N-word and making monkey-sounds and finally beating him. One of my male very-left-wing colleagues tells him to contact the police. Then the intern tells, that the men were ‘Arab’, and my colleague completely changes his mind. Now the attack should absolutely not be reported and he even accuses the intern of being ‘provoking’ by walking out alone in the evening with his skin-color in such a neighborhood?!? So apparently racism is perfectly fine as long as the aggressors are Muslim..
2010: I sit in the bus, and behind me sits some Turkish(?) boys, who are trying to teach a new-comer some phrases in my native language. Nice right? Except that the second word that they teaches him is ‘whore’, which is apparently a very important word to know as a newly arrived immigrant..
2013: My son (3 years old) plays a lot with a girl in his daycare, her parents are from Pakistan. One day he’s very sad, and tells that they are not allowed to play anymore. Her parents have asked the staff to keep them separated because they think it’s bad for her reputation to play that much with a boy. She was also 3 years old. Now, at 5 years, she has started wearing headscarf, so she is probably not far away from getting engaged..
These are only a few of many ‘encounters’ that I’ve had with Islam and its followers. The most people I know here can tell similar stories. Yes, I’ve also experienced sexism from ‘white’ men, but no way as often and as extreme as the one from Muslim men. And if we take into account that they only make up around 6% of the population here, then it gets even more crazy.
I think the only way you can avoid seeing experiencing this is if you either live in some very remote area with no foreigners. Or alternative if you live a very privileged life: never gone to public school, had to commute with public transportation, always been living in nice expensive neighborhoods and never worked a job with non-educated colleagues. But please get out of your glass palace, and see how life is for regular people.
Ask PZ, he met me in Cologne last year.
And yes, she has experienced sexism, both by men who were of a muslim background and by men who weren’t. You seem to have counted all my comments, but forgotten to read them.
fejl40
You can fuck right off with that bullshit. Giliell has often several times mentioned her own experiences with sexism and sexual harrassment, and she doesn’t need to list them in order in every thread remotely related to the topic. And it is not your place to doubt someone’s identity online, especially as you apparently haven’t been reading the blog long enough (or often enough) to recognize that Giliell is exactly who she says she is.
I’m sorry you have had such terrible experiences in northern Europe. However, your ‘exactly what is going on here’ is a list of highly personal events that have occurred over the course of years is a ‘exactly what is going on here with me‘ – it is not a wide-ranging overview of the political and social situation in your country re: immigrants, refugees, people of colour. It is not how life is for regular people, it is how life is for a regular person (you). So on that note, thank you for sharing your personal experiences.
Besides, I could probably match your stories about “those men” with my own. And then add a few more about “those other men”, i.e. the white ones. And then I could tell some more stories. About schools, about parents, about teachers. And yes, as mentioned before, the misogyny in the migrant communities often more overt.
And now would you be so kind to show exactly where somebody is making excuses for what those men did? Oh, and post your birth certificate so I can verify your gender…
Another very good German article: Die Angst des weißen Mannes (white man’s fear)
lotharloo, #121
Interesting.
Should it be mandatory for people born in America?
And do you have any evidence whatsoever that people who immigrate to the West do more sexual harassment and rape than people native to the West?
#132: Can you show me where someone has said or implied that “Muslims are the greatest victims ever”?
Can you show me where someone is “making one excuse after another for the outrageous sexism, homophobia and racism exerted by certain religious groups”?
Can you show me where anyone here “personally favor”s Islam?
I have personally met Giliell. She is also a “woman living in a North-European country”.
As mentioned earlier, my experiences absolutely do not jive with @132’s. I feel just as safe in happy liberal California as I do in Istanbul.
As in, not remotely safe. Only an idiot or a very determined bigot could convince themselves that sexism or homophobia or rape is a thing only those evil syrians, somalians, and turks do.
Even if they commit these acts at significantly higher per-capita rates, the fact that they are a small minority of the population means that natives are almost inevitably going to dominate in terms of the absolute number of offences committed. Therefore, if you want to reduce the number of offences, concentrating on immigrants looks like the wrong thing to do, just on the basis of simple arithmetic.
If you’re worred about man-eating tigers, you don’t focus on man-eating Siberian tigers, even if Siberian tigers are more likely to be man-eaters than other tigers, simply because there are very few Siberian tigers.
[aside]
Germany is now a North-European country? Where am I, then, the Arctic??? :)
[/aside]
Where am I, then, the Arctic??? :)
Yes. Yes, you are, potato lady.
fejl40,
I’m sorry you had to endure such awful things. However, other people have similar stories involving european men. For example, the following was something shared publically by a woman from Antwerp, belgium. You can find the original text, in dutch, here (https://www.facebook.com/notes/annemie-verbeiren/waar-ik-zelden-over-praat-/10153538833129864/). I’ve attempted to translate part of it:
So, what now?
fejl40:
I’ll just bet you think you’re a prime example of how a liberal, rational atheist ought to be thinking, too. You’re absolutely wrong, on all counts. You can fuck right off with your “Giliell is a he” bullshit. I know Giliell, I’ve known her for years, I know what she looks like, and she is a woman. A woman who has often recounted her experiences with sexism, and a damn scary experience of near escape.
Your problem is that Giliell is pointing to the actual case, and the reality of toxic, systemic sexism as it stands right now in Germany, just as those of us in the States and Canada do the same for those particular places. And we have people from all over the world who do the same for where they live. All you’re looking to do is a variety of “filthy muslims, it’s all them!”, when the situation is one hell of a lot more complex. You want to ignore the culture of sexism which is all around, and in everything, in favour of saying “if it weren’t for Muslims, there wouldn’t be this sexism”. You can fuck right off with that, too.
I had something much like this happen to me once. Except the guy was a white British tourist in Chicago and the insults he used when I told him to go away were different. Clearly that means that all British tourists are sexist perverts.
fejl40 #132
Here is a link to an acticle you need to read.
This is the English version but the side-bar has many links to Northern European Languages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
haaaa.
for the entire time i lived in germany, i lived in neighborhoods with large “foreigner’ populations (which, by german standards, also included my family despite our german citizenship); none of them ever did me any harm. My elementary school was about half “foreigner”, tho mostly that was polish and russian; but the person i had to be weary of was the ur-german gym teacher. My high-school was about half “foreigner”, but the guy who groped and unhooked bras during recess was an ur-german (and never got punished for it, either). The one job i had in germany before leaving was at McD, with an ur-german manager and otherwise mostly tunisian workers; but the creeptastic sexual innuendo and other harassment came from the manager. i’ve also been using public transport go get to and from school since i was in 3rd grade, and generally either took public transport to/from sports events, clubs etc. when i wasn’t straight up just walking across town (because there was no lightrail at 4am on a saturday); and the only time that was legit threatening was when ending up on the same light rail to the soccer game as the neo-nazis. and lastly, i’ve been going to clubs since i was 14 (to the kind of clubs that won’t card girls, of course), and the few men i actually caught grabbing my butt were also ur-german or ur-austrian (but hey, maybe them furriners are just sneakier, amirite)
but yeah, clearly i am just too class privileged to know anything about foreigners.
that one’s my “favorite” part of that, since mostly it shows compete and utter ignorance about what sort of words young men want to know in any language. i speak 3 languages fluently and lived in multiple countries, and dudebros everywhere always harassed me for the meaning of sexually explicit phrases or racist/sexist/etc insults.
@dianne
well , mostly the white sex tourists let their gross rapeyness hang out where their compatriots can’t see it, so that makes it so much more civilized than solicitation in the white sex tourists’ own countries. don’t these uncouth furriners not understand which countries are for asking random strangers for sex, and which are not?
Jadehawk
Well, but those men are NOT a product of their culture, nono, they’re just individuals. Not to mention all those white dudes who buy a nice submissive wife from a catalogue.
BTW, I once lived at the end of a street in the red light district, so my way home usually led past the brothels where the predominantly foreign women offered their services. Being female, dark haired and there meant that men would happily and aggressively proposition me for sex. What else was I there fore?
@fejl40, 132
Could you please quote two excuses that have been made for any religious group of any kind here? Particularly excuses for Muslims if you can manage it, but I’d accept them for, say, Buddhists, or whatever other group you can find people making excuses for. Normally I’d just ask for one, but you claim we’ve made one after another, so we’ll need a second. Three would be absolutely marvellous, if you can manage that many.
What you appear to have been reading (but which is not present in this thread) is the regulars here claiming that sexism comes from everyone except Muslims. Meanwhile your stance appears to be (although I’m willing to accept that I’m wrong in this assumption since it’s based on only one data point, albeit a very long one) that sexism comes from nobody except [people who look like] Muslims. Now… this might seem like a non sequitur, but I’d like you to answer a question for me about this picture – is it black or white?
It’s about cultural determinism: those who adhere to this fallacy often claim that rejecting it, that proclaiming -for instance- that merely being Muslim doesn’t magically turn one into a raging misogynist is tantamount to being an apologist.
***
It’s green! It’s green!
laurentweppe @ 153:
Black background, white-bordered red square in the middle.
white and gold
Gotta say, reading over @132’s experiences, they seem awfully convenient. Not that I’m saying they never happened, but it’s a common anti-SJW adage to make up script-flipped stories to prove how the SJWs are actually the evil ones.
Like, idk “Me and my cis friend were walking along when a bunch of trans people jumped out of a bus and hit us with baseball bats.”
dunno, vivec, street harassment & groping is extremely common, if @132 cherry picked only the non-white encounters it would amount to about what she described. but i admit she knows an unusually large number of arrange-marriaged turkish women, when half my volleyball team was turkish-german and neither they nor their friends were being married off… but it’s at least theoretically possible, i guess…?
Well yeah, but like theres this common theme of like “The muslim guy called the asian woman a racist (see! you anti-racists defend sexist muslims!)” or “when they found out the hecklers were muslim, they were urged not to report (see! you anti-islamiphobes support racist muslims!)”
oh, yeah, those bits sound a bit… special
Caine:
Not on a monochrome display, it’s not.
Or: it depends. Which I imagine was Athywren’s point.
(laurentweppe is correct, if it is viewed on a monochrome green display)
tho i admit that in some cases finding out someone who’d done something bad was black would make me change my mind over whether police should get involved. cuz, being in the USA, involving the cops might mean someone is about to die and i’d have to carefully evaluate whether whatever happened was worth the risk of that. i want harassers and thieves arrested, i don’t want them shot.
Sure, but the specific quibble was the “very liberal coworker” deciding not to report and completely changing his tune to victim-blaming the second he found out that the attackers were muslim. I’m sure that’s possible, but that reads like “one time a gay attacked me and the judge threw out the case bc gays are nice”
yeah
um. thanks comment box, i did not actually mean to leave a one word reply.
yeah. plus, she mentions actual physical assault, which is a different kettle of fish altogether. i wasn’t saying that that bit of story was very realistic, just that in certain circumstances it’s not some ebil liberal fear of looking racist; sometimes you do want to reconsider if cops are a safe option.
Sadly enough, I find the assault cases much more credible, probably with a bit of embellishing post-scriptum, turning everything into one neat narrative.
And yeah, I know cases where parents are against their daughters getting too much eduction. There was a girl in my class who needed to carefully time her stay in school so the leaving certificate* she was supposed to get and her 18th birthday would be close together so she wouldn’t be sent back home to get married.
Did I mention that “home” was Italy?
There are also cases of muslim parents who don’t let their daughters go on class trips, who don’t let their daughters participate in sports (and no, you don’t automatically get to opt out just because you’re muslim). And they’re a minority among the many many muslims.
The sexism among ur-German parents manifests differently, often in a simple lack of interest in their daughters and of course in the ever returning excuses for the bad behaviour, sexism and violence their sons commit.
And I have not even started with the teachers…
*Germany has a very stratified school system with different certificates
You know, this could all work out really well, actually. In order to really deal with the problems of sexism and harassment among the asylum seekers, Germany will have to carefully examine its own cultural assumptions and sexism because otherwise they won’t be able to send a clear signal of what is and is not appropriate to those they are trying to teach feminist cultural values to. So the country should be in for a deep and constructive period of self-evaluation and come out with a positive way of improving both its own cultural values and helping those who wish to enter to country integrate.
HAHAHAHAHA! Okay, so that was too much over the top optimism for even a US-American to get through with a straight face. It’s still what SHOULD happen. Germany (and the US and France and any other country wishing to claim moral superiority based on not being sexist) is going to have to actually be, you know, not sexist, not just half a sigma less sexist than Saudi Arabia if it really wants to be able to teach immigrants how to not be sexist and in order to do that, it has to examine and correct its own assumptions. But somehow I doubt it will be that easy…
fejl40, #132
White/non-Muslim people do all those things to. Regularly.
@Athywren
Yes, that accusation is false. The accusation that I am making is that they treat incidents where the assailant is brown or Muslim differently than when he is white. This is either because of some subconscious mental break to not appear racist, or because they are more familiar with white sexism or for whatever reason, the observation that I can make is that the incidents are treated differently. For example, I lost count how many times people have argued “this does not mean all refugees/brown people/Muslims are rapist/sexist” either as a side remark, or as response to me, even though I have never argued for such thing and I was careful to mention “traditional Islamic culture”. How many times people have argued the same for whites? In fact, if a white dude shows up here and asks if you think all white men are rapists etc. probably he will not be treated very gently. I understand that Muslims and brown-skinned people are under-privileged and under attack in many of the Western countries so part of the discrepancy can be explained by this. But I don’t think it explains all of it. For example, people are afraid of talking about cultural practices in countries where the brown-skinned Muslim men are the dominant and privileged group and enjoy far greater privileged than white men do in Western countries.
To clarify, the comparison between a white rapist and a brown-skinned rapist is not to say that people should be softer on white sexism or white patriarchy. It is to say the opposite that the cultures that are objectively more sexist should be dealt at least as harshly.
I exactly know what you are talking about and that is another problem: yes, the ringwing assholes do it very loudly and they have lots of platforms available to them. And it also means that to condemn Islamic sexism, violence, or brutality, first you have clarify that you are not a rightwing asshole; almost every goddamned liberal assumes it and it has happened multiple time to me, even when expressing mild objections such as “Reza Aslan’s statements about female Muslim leaders is misleading”.
Cultures are very different than race and cultures can change pretty quickly, just look at how the acceptance of gay marriage has increased, proving that lots of people have changed their position and thus habits (and thus culture). Criticism of cultures or cultural practices thus has nothing to do with racism.
Okay, but here’s the rebuttal. There are a lot of people who in response to “Black lives matter” shout “all lives matter”. They all say that “all murders are bad and everytime an innocent is killed it is a tragedy” and on the face of it they are correct and they are puzzled when they are criticized for saying “all lives matter”. What they are doing is that they take an issue (here black people being targetted by police and government’s inaction), make it generic and thus erase the issue. You are doing the same thing here. We would like to talk about specific cultural pratices, men who uphold it and what to do about it. By turning it into a generic statement of “rape is bad” you are erasing the problem.
Yes in general liberals run away. In general liberals are only familiar with the tip of the ice berg: with forced marriages, with faces burned by acid, with women killed by their own father or brothers but they are missing the network of patriarchal system (that is different from Western patriarchal system) that leads to those incidents. Below the tip, there are all those non-newsworthy incidents that form the general culture.
BTW, I just found out that the totally not misogynists of a totally not hate forum are wishing me to be raped by “1000 goat fuckers”.
Clearly, it must be their atheism, right?
Citation fucking needed.
As GIliell mentioned in @116, the west and east just use different mechanisms to come to the same sexist end. I’d argue that the sum total of sexism is fairly fucking equal.
@Vivec
Whatever. You displayed your middle-eastern credentials so I wanted to have a debate with a deeper look into things. But you’ve decided to ignore my question regarding “Görücülük”.
@Jadehawk:
The point is that in Iran I would have never heard about it, ever. Well, that is not exactly true, because in high school and through peers I heard that “vagina is the property of the man so he can enter anytime in wants but for anal sex the woman should agree”.
Yes, part of the loud reaction, as discussed previously, is because these men assaulted white women.
“Their culture must change” is the goal and obviously should be not done in a dumb way.
We are talking about traditional islamic culture, not liberal muslims, or less devout muslims. And when talking about that, yes, Americans have less in common.
@Giliell:
I see your “Föttchesföhler” and raise you “Gheyrat” , a word with no direct English translation and it means to “control women (through explicit or implicit threats of physical and verbal violence) and keep them away from sexual attention, consensual or not”. It is considered a greatly positive cultural trait and its use is wide-spread. It is also used in compound forms with derived meaning, e.g., “a ba-gheyrat soldier” would mean a soldier who valiantly defends the country, or “a ba-gheyrat business man” would mean “an honest business man”. The opposite “bi-gheyrat” (without “gheyrat”) is an insult and nobody wants to be called that way.
Except that summers in Tehran can get to 40 degrees and then it makes a big difference whether you have to be veiled or can wear a T-shirt (actually, many governmental agencies have a policy for *black* veils).
@Vivec:
Look up “forced marriages” for a start.
@171
Ah yes. As we all know, the best outfit for hot arid climates are t-shirts and shorts, right? Someone should run and tell those Bedouins, asap!
Oh wait no, that’s bunk and you’re an idiot.
Form-covering, loose-fitting, black-colored garments in particular are ideal for regions that are hot, sunny, and arid. Covering up prevents sunburn and skin damage from direct sunlight.
Black garments absorb both external (ie from the sun) heat, and internal (ie from you) heat, allowing it to be convected away by the wind.
In addition, said loose-fitting robes allow convection to circulate hot air out from the robe and bring in cooler air. There’s a reason why so many regions with similar climates tend to have such similar garb.
@172
Ah yes, such things never happened in western culture.
Oh wait, it totally fucking did. Both European culture and non-islamic Eastern cultures engaged in political/economic arranged marriages all the time.
And if you think non-islamic parents are incapable of playing matchmaker for their children and making their life absolutely fucking horrible if they contradict their parent’s wishes, you’re either an idiot or intellectually dishonest.
@lotharloo
Ok… so here’s the problem. We are responding to people who are genuinely claiming “this means all refugees/brown people/Muslims are rapist/sexist,” and then you turn up and tell us that we’re clutching at straws, and the people we’re responding to are right. You can try to be as clear as you like, but your first statement in this thread was, essentially, “yes, this means all refugees/brown people/Muslims are rapist/sexist, and you’re grasping at straws to believe otherwise,” and that, combined with the fact that you’re criticising us for going soft on Muslims when we are absolutely not going soft on them is going to lead us to believe that this is the stance you’re taking. If you’re trying to present a reasonable stance and don’t want people to think that it’s an extreme one, don’t criticise them for going soft on others when they’re taking up the exact position that you’re trying to present. It’s all well and good getting frustrated that we’re not listening to what you’re trying to say, but you obviously made no attempt to understand what we were saying before telling us that we’re wrong.
If you are legitimately confused why siding with James @34 in your first comment might lead us to believe that you’re calling for us to take up a right wing extremist position, you might want to read this.
Every single time the issue of rape comes up without the perpetrator being a racial minority. Seriously, go have a look. Every single time. The main difference there, of course, is that nobody is arguing that all white men are rapists, while there are people who are more than happy to argue that this event is proof positive of the universally inhuman nature of the Muslim. As I said in my earlier comment, those who are demanding that the feminists rouse themselves and speak out against this outrage, ignoring the fact that they already have been doing so, are in active opposition to our speaking out against sexual assault at any other point if the person in question is white.
Those are totally different situations. One is a dismissal of victims who lack privilege. The other is an explicit statement that we should not be nor are we giving a pass to perpetrators because they lack privilege, and a statement that was only made because you were implying that we are giving them a pass. And if I wasn’t actively giving you the benefit of the doubt, I’d say that it’s deeply dishonest to portray a direct counter to your accusation as proof that your accusation was correct… but I am, so I’ll just assume that you didn’t really pick up on what I was saying or responding to.
And while we may not have a word for it, and it may not be explicitly celebrated in most western cultures, “control women (through explicit or implicit threats of physical and verbal violence) and keep them away from sexual attention, consensual or not” is very much a thing in the west.
There are wide Swathes of the US where that is the norm, including areas you’d think would be extremely liberal.
Lotharloo – going all the way back to Sciborg, I don’t recall you as having been stupid. What happened?
@Vivec:
Someone should tell this to all the Iranian women, because according to Vivec they are too stupid to realize this great wisdom that the government is forcing upon them.
You are still evading discussing my particular question regarding Turkish culture. Do you really live there? Do you actually know any Turkish?
@Athywren:
Except that it wasn’t and I explicitly said so too. Any misunderstanding can only be due to lack of reading comprehension.
I thought it was clear from the context but I guess not. What I meant was this: “How many times this is brought up by people claiming to be feminists?” Very rarely. Because it is perfectly understood that talking about “white rape culture” does not mean that “all white men are rapists” but somehow when as ex-muslim discusses “brown rape culture” everyone jumps to the conclusion that “he/she must mean all brown people are rapists”.
I’m not saying that you are giving a pass. What I am saying is that it is at least uncomfortable for a lot of liberals to discuss and condemn cultural practices that do not belong to their culture. The example of “black lives matter” was to show that how making a general condemnation is not always helpful, and nothing beyond that.
I know it exists, American and Middle-easterns are both homo sapiens and Islam and Christianity are both Abrahamic religions. Still it does not change the fact that “gheyrat” has become a such a useful word and with a very positive meaning in Iran (again, not among all Iranians, liberal Iranians and some moderates hate the concept). I might be wrong, but I don’t think calling someone “a man who controls/keeps away his sisters or mother from any sexual attention” is such a compliment in US or Germany.
Sorry, when you imply that the ideal outfit in a desert is a t-shirt you are officially too stupid to worth debating.
@180, Vivec:
Tehran is not a desert, basic geography lesson for the local “middle-eastern” person.
Sorry, ~hot arid climate~.
Point still stands. T-shirts in that climate is a fast track to skin cancer and heat stroke, and you’re too stupid to waste any more time of my life on.
Fine by me. It doesn’t look like you know anything about Turkish culture anyways.
lotharloo
See, this is why I don’t believe you’re arguing in good faith. My argument was that the principle of controlling women’s bodies is the same, but that the amount of fabric is different. Yes, western women get more choices. They still get controlled. Ever heard about school dresscodes that explicitly tell girls that they cannot wear hotpants or short skirts or tank tops or coloured bras under white shirts because they distract the boys and the male staff?
As for controlling women and female sexuality: I have two daughters, both quite pretty by conventional western standards. I lost count how many times people told my husband that he’d “have to lock them up” “fence them in” or “get a shotgun”. Did I mention they’re both under 10? Not only have people been sexualising them from a very early age on, they also believe that their father needs to control their sexuality.
That’s extremely shitty.
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
hmmmm… what could possibly be the reason to treat an incident differently in about which all the media write and exaggerate horribly vs. ones the media ignore and trivialize; what could possibly be the reso for a different focus in writing and discussion about incidents where victims are belived and supported, vs. ones where they’re silenced or called liars or even arrested themselves. IT’S A MYSTERY.
you probably didn’t mean to write it like that, because it’s obvious that anyone who sez “do you think all X are Y?” is gonna get their ass handed to them for such simplistic fuckery, regardless of whether it’s an accusation or their belief, regardless of whether we’re talking about a dominant class or an oppressed one.
raging nonsense. people can’t stop talking about that, even liberal feminists can’t stop talking about that, often being quite patronizing to the women activists in those countries in the process.
Me, I prefer to not talk about shit that muslim feminists, ex-muslim activists, human rights advocates from those countries, etc. can explain way better than I can; when possible, I opt for amplifying their voices over gratuitously spilling my whiteness all over the topic.
it’s hilarious how this implies race doesn’t change quickly.
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.
i’ll keep that in mind next time someone goes on a rant about spicy indian food or rap music.
which specific cultural practice is it that makes thieves decide to use a non-illegal form of sexual assault to make robbery easier?
also, bonus points for inverting both power gradients of blacklivesmatter/alllivesmatter vis a vis all rapists/middle eastern rapists.
i hugely enjoy seeing feminists being accused of not seeing or understanding patriarchy and microaggressions. hilarious. :-D :-D
not really. it needs to have its patriarchal aspects ripped out, same as various western cultures. the goal is to make the culture function within the legal framework of the country they are immigrating to.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
“well i’m talking only about this one small part of the cultural diversity of these nations; that is totally different than all of america, because i don’t wanna compare similar things, like for example fundie christian cultures in america”
you’re right, chivalry is a concept utterly foreign to western culture.
@vivec
yeah i mean not like we discussed an example of that in this very thread or anything.
anyway: coming into a thread whining about the “western liberal” discussion where said western liberal discussion is about how
a)ppl are trying to block all asylum seekers from coming into their countries/kick out all other foreigners and foreign-looking residents of the country; and
b)happily ignore the very same violence from themselves/their ethnic fellows
is totally not at all looking like agreement with those two points.
especially when i’m told i’m supposed to treat the middle east as a culturally uniform mass of fundamentalism, but not america.
and if your first comment is “i agree with the guy who dear muslima’d the thread”, you’ve only got yourself to blame when following responses actually treat you as if you agreed with the guy who dear muslima’d the thread.
Um…really? Haven’t you ever seen the “jokes” about “I have a gun and an alibi, think about that when you date my daughter/sister”? It’s true, you don’t see it so much with mothers, but that’s only because in the US women who have grown children are not supposed to have sex at all and the thought that one’s mother might have sexual thoughts/be of sexual interest to men is too horrifying for the average US-American male to have. OTOH, controlling your mother or, especially, mother-in-law, is certainly seen as a good and manly thing to do.
<blockquote.but somehow when as ex-muslim discusses “brown rape culture” everyone jumps to the conclusion that “he/she must mean all brown people are rapists”more like: when an ex-muslim jumps into a discussion about refuting/exposing and fighting back against people who want to deport ALL refugees and kick out ALL foreigners and blame ALL of them because of their culture, and complains about the horrible western liberals and their horrible opinions in regard to that, and agrees with someone else who also doesn’t like that refutation of rampant racists, and wants me to see the middle east as a uniformly fundamentalist whole, then that ex-muslim will appear to share or defend that position that it’s all the refugees/foreigners’ fault.
the one time i don’t preview.
more like: when an ex-muslim jumps into a discussion about refuting/exposing and fighting back against people who want to deport ALL refugees and kick out ALL foreigners and blame ALL of them because of their culture, and complains about the horrible western liberals and their horrible opinions in regard to that, and agrees with someone else who also doesn’t like that refutation of rampant racists, and wants me to see the middle east as a uniformly fundamentalist whole, then that ex-muslim will appear to share or defend that position that it’s all the refugees/foreigners’ fault.
you would indeed be wrong. especially about the US, where fathers pride themselves on threatening the lives of potential suitors with shotguns
i mean, i mentioned the concept of chivalry for a reason. it’s considered noble and knightly to abuse and threaten men interested in one’s female relations in the name of defending her honor.
Yeah, when my ex’s niece was less than a year old, her dad and granddad were making ‘jokes’ about controlling her future sexuality – not letting her have a boyfriend til she’s thirty and that sort of thing. This from non-religious white Brits.
Ever heard of the phrase “shotgun marriage”?
i missed a couple more
it should be uncomfortable. by definition, one will have less familiarity and no lived experience with a culture one has not lived with, and as such discussion and condemnation will be shallow. which you’re not even disagreeing with, given the rant about liberals who don’t understand non-western patriarchy and microaggressions. a much more useful action is to amplify voices of those who HAVE the situated knowledge about oppressions in a particular culture.
when liberals don’t feel uncomfortable criticizing cultures not their own, we get shit like sex workers who get “rescued” against their will, have their livelihood destroyed, and end up forced in actual forced labor for western consumption. or we get bans on hijab, which is actually deeply illiberal, and denies muslim women their agency. etc.
that is really not gonna work like that. it’s true that patriarchal theocratic-ish states give men-qua-men more privilege than democratic-ish patriarchal states do, but then you decided to contrast “brown-skinned muslim” with “white men” and that’ll be much harder to argue. you’d have to show that such brown-skinned muslims actually got granted more privilege than whiteness grants, and that might not be possible; not in a global white supremacy, not when brown and muslim are the only identifiers you mention (I am certain there’s groups with significant racial privilege vis a vis minorities, but they didn’t get mentioned)
who’d like to explain the FLDS to lotharoo? an anyway, “courting” in fundie christian circles is fast approaching arranged marriage territory again, as well
I have a hard time taking lotharoo’s commitment to women’s lib seriously when he’s still not caught on to the fact that the basic problem is the forcing, not the length or type of clothing being forced.
and another concept that’s all about “protecting” one’s “own” women from other men’s sexuality, about acting because of injured pride, to play strong hero, etc.: machismo
Another interesting point is that when people want to discuss the social background of the men, they only ever want to discuss ONE social aspect and that is their origin. Things they never want to discuss: consumerism, toxic masculinity in mainstream culture, social disenfranchisement.
The loud and open sexism is heavily correlated with class in Germany. Go to a German middle school, the one the “loser kids” go to. The boys are all also raised in the toxic masculinity soup of mainstream culture*. A culture that defines masculinity by consumerism (cars, tech gadgets) and access to pretty women. It raises them with entitlement to women’s bodies. At the same time it tells those kids that they have been permanently relegated to the sidelines of society. Even if they get a permanent job it won’t be one that pays for an Audi or BMW. Can this interact with religious ideas about gender? With other ideas of toxic masculinity at home? Sure yes. The point is: Raising a boy with heavy ideas about the roles of men, women and the rights of men to access female bodies isn’t raising them against the grain of mainstream culture. And lashing out against “stuck up bitches” because they won’t give your loser ass what you think is your due is hardly a phenomenon restricted to immigrant men. But they are disproportionally affected by social disenfranchisement and additionally affected by racist discrimination.
And before some idiot starts: No, that doesn’t excuse what they’re doing. Yet when you’re talking about “changing the culture” so those men won’t assault women, you could start working on that part of culture that affects all men and that you’Re part of as well.
*Try raising a kid against the grain of mainstream culture. Feminists like me can sing a long and sad song about this.
Jadehawk
Funny story: I was once on the way to the first of May demonstration with my father. What is left of his hair used to be black. Me with my dark curls and dark eyes next to him. I heard more than one person observe that “the Kurds were coming”.
@198 Jadehawk
I kid you not, i’ve actually heard someone claim that we got “machismo” from the moors.
Another interesting point is that when people want to discuss the social background of the men, they only ever want to discuss ONE social aspect and that is their origin. Things they never want to discuss: consumerism, toxic masculinity in mainstream culture, social disenfranchisement.
The loud and open sexism is heavily correlated with class in Germany. Go to a German middle school, the one the “loser kids” go to. The boys are all also raised in the toxic masculinity soup of mainstream culture*. A culture that defines masculinity by consumerism (cars, tech gadgets) and access to pretty women. It raises them with entitlement to women’s bodies. At the same time it tells those kids that they have been permanently relegated to the sidelines of society. Even if they get a permanent job it won’t be one that pays for an Audi or BMW. Can this interact with religious ideas about gender? With other ideas of toxic masculinity at home? Sure yes. The point is: Raising a boy with heavy ideas about the roles of men, women and the rights of men to access female bodies isn’t raising them against the grain of mainstream culture. And lashing out against “stuck up bitches” because they won’t give your loser ass what you think is your due is hardly a phenomenon restricted to immigrant men. But they are disproportionally affected by social disenfranchisement and additionally affected by racist discrimination.
And before some idiot starts: No, that doesn’t excuse what they’re doing. Yet when you’re talking about “changing the culture” so those men won’t assault women, you could start working on that part of culture that affects all men and that you’Re part of as well.
*Try raising a kid against the grain of mainstream culture. Feminists like me can sing a long and sad song about this.
Jadehawk
Funny story: I was once on the way to the first of May demonstration with my father. What is left of his hair used to be black. Me with my dark curls and dark eyes next to him. I heard more than one person observe that “the Kurds were coming”.
Another interesting point is that when people want to discuss the social background of the men, they only ever want to discuss ONE social aspect and that is their origin. Things they never want to discuss: consumerism, toxic masculinity in mainstream culture, social disenfranchisement.
The loud and open sexism is heavily correlated with class in Germany. Go to a German middle school, the one the “loser kids” go to. The boys are all also raised in the toxic masculinity soup of mainstream culture*. A culture that defines masculinity by consumerism (cars, tech gadgets) and access to pretty women. It raises them with entitlement to women’s bodies. At the same time it tells those kids that they have been permanently relegated to the sidelines of society. Even if they get a permanent job it won’t be one that pays for an Audi or BMW. Can this interact with religious ideas about gender? With other ideas of toxic masculinity at home? Sure yes. The point is: Raising a boy with heavy ideas about the roles of men, women and the rights of men to access female bodies isn’t raising them against the grain of mainstream culture. And lashing out against “stuck up b*tches” because they won’t give your loser ass what you think is your due is hardly a phenomenon restricted to immigrant men. But they are disproportionally affected by social disenfranchisement and additionally affected by racist discrimination.
And before some idiot starts: No, that doesn’t excuse what they’re doing. Yet when you’re talking about “changing the culture” so those men won’t assault women, you could start working on that part of culture that affects all men and that you’Re part of as well.
*Try raising a kid against the grain of mainstream culture. Feminists like me can sing a long and sad song about this.
Jadehawk
Funny story: I was once on the way to the first of May demonstration with my father. What is left of his hair used to be black. Me with my dark curls and dark eyes next to him. I heard more than one person observe that “the Kurds were coming”.
That’s the problem: Western laws are more often than not undoubtedly better than Muslim-majority countries laws, but when it comes to Western customs and mores, when it comes to the things people do behind closed doors, we’re a lot less advanced than we like to pretend.
***
I don’t know what to say, apart eeeeeeewwwwwwwwwwwww
***
I’ve heard that one as well: the (laughable) “reasoning” works as follow; machismo comes from the spanish language; Spain was once part of the Umayyad empire, therefore machismo must be a purely arabic concept.
People who follow that line of thought tend to view themselves as powerful intellects.
***
Not always: I’ve seen white people being very comfortable about discussing the social background of white sexual predators….
They were upper-class people discussing the background of blue-collar predators.
lotharloo,
Even if a never-Muslim western progressive issues the appropriate disclaimers to distance themselves from the bigots and criticizes traditional Islamic practices that occur in a foreign country, what would that do?
Not to mention that being a never-Muslim outsider, they wouldn’t even be able to talk about it in any significant detail other than stating the obvious like “forced marriage, enforcing the hijab, etc is wrong”. What would that accomplish thousands of miles away? Imagine a Muslim misogynist reading a post or watching a YouTube video of a white never-Muslim criticizing his religious way of life… that would have no effect. The message would be seen as an attack and met with resistance. Change in those countries will come from liberal Muslim activism there. Suppose there’s a large population in China which is very bigoted in a particular way. How would European liberal people vaguely and generically criticizing the bigotry from thousands of miles away cause any change?
It’s something White Feminists™ seem to be perpetually unable to understand: Oppression runs on more than one axis. They are forever surprised that a WoC might not see them as a fellow oppressed woman, but as a member of the oppressive colonialist or aggressor. And frankly, given how many of them whitesplain their lives and oppression to them, telling them what exactly their headdress or garb or jewelry means, you really can’t blame them…
Giliell, #203
Yeah, it is quite similar to that.
Another way of looking at it is that Mike Huckabee’s homophobic views would not change one bit if liberal bloggers in South Korea start criticizing him.
incidentally… why did we ever get on the topic of specifically islamic fundamentalist culture specifically in the middle east, when the actual topic of the thread was something that happened in germany by completely drunk men from a variety of countries in and outside of the middle east?
i’m especially intrigued, in fat, bout the connection between drunkenness and islamism. it eludes me.
Apparently because us “white liberals” miss the point and dear muslima or something.