A bizarre barbaric system mixed with religion, misogyny, patriarchy practiced by millions

Khap is a powerful social institution. It exists in Jat Hindu community in some states of Northern India. Some elderly men set rules for everyone. You do not follow the rules, you get severe punishment. Khap does not allow people to marry in the same gotra or clan. It is believed that millions of people living in several neighboring villages are from the same clan and they are all brothers and sisters. So the holy fatwa is, no one is allowed to marry in their own or neighboring villages. If they want to get married, they have to choose someone from some far away lands where there is no chance to have the same clan.

It’s an ancient tradition but it still continues for people in the 21st century. It is illegal in modern independent India but it is widely practiced across some regions. Another bizarre rule that Khap makes, is child marriage. Children are forced to get married. Khap believes child marriage is a wonderful protection for boys and girls from being interested in marrying anyone in the village. But when the married children grow up, they may not get interested in marrying someone in the villages but they sometimes refuse to accept their child marriages. Santara Meena refused to accept her child marriage, but Khap wanted her dead or alive. She needed police protection.

Men and women whoever marry same clan people get thrown out of the villages or get killed. Manoj and Babli  got murdered.

It is not so shocking anymore that newlywed couples get murdered for having same clan marriage. And just recently Khap issued a fatwa against women: women below 40 are not allowed to go outside after sunset, they are also not allowed to have mobile phones and not allowed to marry the one whom they love. Khap banned jeans for girls. . Khap or Khap panchayat is loudly advocating misogyny and hateful patriarchy.

Millions of people practice whatever Khap asks them to practice. There is no reason to think that only the poor and illiterate people in the villages practice the bizarre barbaric system, the rich and literate people practice it too. No matter how many academic qualifications you have received, the truth is you get easily attracted to irrationality, superstitions, inequalities and injustices if you do not educate yourself with rationalism, humanism, secularism and feminism.

A movie was made to create social awareness against Khap but who cares!

Why I am a Feminist – Aron Ra

Warning: I’m about to voice my opinion on feminism and misogyny in the freethought community. Get out while you can. I know I should keep my mouth shut like I have done for the whole last year, but I’ve I decided not to take my own advice anymore.

When I was a little boy, (we’re talking 1971 here) my deeply religious babysitters told me that women could never fly fighter jets because of alleged differences in their depth perception, or their physical center of gravity altering their sense of balance, or the ways in which female brains reportedly processed information differently than the brain of a male.

This is just one example of sexual inequality being alleged as a biological fact. While I concede there are a few things most women can’t do as well as some men -owing to a proportion of upper body strength, that just might be the limit of justifiable reasons for gender restrictions. That is as much credence as I can give to that. So women shouldn’t be expected have fair odds against men of equal weight in a boxing ring. What about beyond that?

I knew a woman who was six feet tall and could bench 270lbs. She could be an ambulance paramedic because she could meet the criteria -where a lot of men could not. That’s what matters. Maybe that’s how my metric differs from the norm of earlier generations. Now what if the job is not physically demanding in that specific area? How could there be any difference then? I don’t think there is.

I know of one case where a female pilot killed 20 people in a helicopter crash. I doubt her gender could have played any role in that at all. If it was her fault, I would sooner blame the fact that the military put a difficult and dangerous multi-million-dollar aircraft in the hands of a teenager. Perhaps any pilot who was old enough to qualify for commercial insurance should have done better?

My wife often laughs at me for being “roaringly heterosexual”, but I am also one of those atypical freaks who finds intelligence sexy. Cute cannot compensate for dumb, and one certainly is not the other. If a woman shows that she is actually smarter than I am, oh honey! I know; there are not many other men like that.

It’s not about sex either. There are many women in the secular movement with commercial-grade comeliness, and I am proud that they count me among their peers, but that’s not the criteria by which we are associated, obviously. Some of my favorite heroes are women; Boadicca, Hypatia, Ruslana. When I say that I respect a woman for her mind, I actually mean it, and not in the same tongue-in-cheek fashion as saying that I read Playboy for the articles.

At the same time, I can’t simply turn off hard-wired hormonal responses to sexual stimuli. For example, it has often happened that I may be amongst a number of sharp-witted women intellectually analyzing subjects of scientific substance with profound perspective, and there I am, suddenly –helplessly- focused on some elegant lass who casually passed with a fabulous ass, and befuddled my brilliance, rebooting my brain in mid-debate. I don’t always possess the necessary class to conceal such embarrassing distractions discretely.

Still I won’t support or defend a policy prohibiting or inhibiting women from wearing ‘sexualized’ clothing at skeptics conferences; vendors or not, doesn’t matter. I know it’s mostly nerds at these sorts of things, but it still doesn’t take that much research for anyone to figure out how to blend in or stand out appropriately. I wouldn’t dictate how someone else dresses. Speaking personally, even having such a rule seems unnecessarily prudish.

I have even heard a suggestion that speakers in skeptical events should be prohibited from engaging in carnal liaisons with any attendees who were not also on stage. This is just absurd. The excuse is that there is supposedly some unequal power issue which leaves those in the audience being treated like doe-eyed sycophants –not by the expectedly exploitive speakers, but by the policy itself. I know from experience that occurrences of adulation are relatively rare, and typically concern only legally responsible adults. So why should there even be a rule like that one?

Mind you, while I have been on stage a few times myself, I have no bias on this point to influence my objectivity. I am married, and my wife and I prefer not to ‘swing’. Another reason I might avoid such judgments is that I have the advantage of sufficient social skills that I know there are behavioral boundaries. Even if I’ve had a few drinks, I still know there’s a line there, and I don’t always need to venture toward it. A lot of other people aren’t aware there should even be a line, and that’s only part of the problem.

Even though I’m neither popular nor important enough to be invited to TAM or Skepticon, it sometimes happens that I am asked to participate at atheist events. Once I even shared the stage with Richard Dawkins and Rebecca Watson at the same time. That was a stunning revelation. Watson was supposed to talk about ‘communicating atheism’, but instead she used her time to explain how uncomfortable feminism is in the secular movement. What was shocking about that were the comments on the video once it was uploaded to my channel. Anyone who thinks she exaggerated, or who doesn’t believe there is a problem with sexism in secularism need only read a few of those posts, especially the early ones; they vindicated all the horrible things she listed about the vile sexist threats she spoke of.

Understand that I do not say any of this to fit in or be popular. I don’t think it is possible to comment on this topic at all and still be popular in this movement anymore. But I sincerely do not understand hate, nor why other people fixate on negativity. It’s just not the way I think. There is a positive aspect to nearly all our experiences. If you can’t find something good, at least allow yourself to be impressed, because sharing the things you love is what will endear you to others. Seriously, nobody cares about what you hate, and you shouldn’t either.

So I don’t get the sort of mindset which sets any demographic as being superior or inferior to another in vague general terms. Specific arguments of that sort are at least possible, though I can’t remember ever seeing one. Being a white male from a fairly insular upbringing, I may not be very observant of that sort of thing. There were a lot of bigots in my own family once upon a time, but now my more-ethnic friends have to tell me about the prejudice they’ve encountered, or else I wouldn’t know that still goes on.

I was equally unaware of misogyny, and by that I mean REAL misogyny, not just guys being heterosexual. There has to be socially acceptable means of having a healthy sex-life, of seeking and inviting partners to pursue such basic biological drives with mutual benefits. No, a misogynist is not simply responding to his hormones; he is making a hate claim, portraying women as subordinate, subservient, insufficient, and somehow deserving of disrespect or even abuse. I honestly do not understand how even the most hateful bigots can take that stance.

The shocking part of all these recent controversies to me is not that misogyny exists outside the world and works of Martin Luther, but that it somehow thrives today, and that it still exists in the freethought community of all places. How could it? Who else has a more progressive perspective, with the most tolerant attitudes, and the most advanced ideas? How could such a despicable disposition, so repugnant, so medieval, remain at all in any group that includes so many Star Trek fans? Have we learned nothing from the next gen?

Why I am a Feminist – Marcella

For me, the roots of my feminism are intimately bound up with the roots of my atheism.
I was one of those kids who believed in ghosts, but only at night. During the day, they were an absurd idea. Invisible people? Yeah right. At night, though, I would cower under my duvet imagining I could see them. At the age of four, at Christian daycare, I was sitting on a swing next to a classmate who said, “Do you believe in god?”
He asked it in the same tone older children used when they said, “Do you believe in Santa?”
Suddenly, the correct answer occurred to me.
“No,” I said. “Do you?”
“Sometimes,” he said.
I knew exactly what he meant. During the day, god was an absurd concept, but at night, he cowered under his sheets not daring to move lest god should see him.
When I was eight, my teachers decided that I had committed too many crimes against handwriting and asked my parents to intervene. They bought rubber grips for my pencils that would force my fingers into the correct position. Then they brought out a Bible and some lined paper. Every night, I sat at the kitchen table and copied the words. The house we lived in at the time had dry-stone walls. They weren’t even plastered on the inside. There was a single window with a wooden frame and shutters on the wall over the table. A cast iron stove stood out from the far wall, a fire whistling from its belly.

I couldn’t help but read the stories as I copied them. They were terrifying. An invisible angel stopped a man in the dark, midway across a river. And the things that happened to women were even worse. A man raped his daughters and got them pregnant. God ordered a father to kill his daughter in the name of sacrifice. Another man offered to throw his daughter to an angry mob so that they would appease themselves by raping her. After a night of handwriting practice, I lay awake and listened for the sound of snoring from my parents’ room. When it came, I climbed out of bed and switched on the light. Then I read books about unicorns and fairies, anything to take my mind off the thought of invisible hands reaching for me in the dark.

For my birthday, I was given a sheet of glow-in-the-dark star stickers. I used a star chart to carefully recreate the constellations on my ceiling. For a while, I forgot about the invisible hands and the voice from the sky asking my dad to sacrifice me. I fell off to sleep thinking about what the stars would look like from the surface of the moon or from Mars. For a science project, I drew my own maps, each night walking up the hill with a flask of hot chocolate to draw constellations and note the phase of the moon. My dad found some books on mythology and explained the stories behind the constellations. For some reason, the myths were less terrifying, perhaps because nobody believed them anymore and they could be read for what they really were: stories.

One day I climbed the hill with my construction paper. The frosted branches of trees looked suspicious. There were new shadows thrown up by the moon that made it easy to imagine invisible people standing in the wood, watching me. I turned around and went home. In bed, my cowardice turned to regret. I looked up at the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling and knew that invisible people couldn’t be real. Looking back on this moment from adulthood, I realise that I had to make a choice: Either the world was governed by invisible, unknowable forces or it was possible to systematically study the world. But even though I couldn’t have articulated that at the time, that was exactly the contradiction I had to resolve in my head.

Suddenly it occurred to me that I wasn’t afraid of god at all, but of the fact that other people believed in the idea. Outside, through the woods, the neighbours would all be in bed. Mankind landed on the moon twenty years ago. Yet these people went to church. They each kept a copy of the black book with its stories of human sacrifice. What would happen when one of these neighbours became convinced that a voice in the sky wanted him to kill his daughter? No child was safe. How did these people sleep at night if they believed invisible angles could wake them at any moment for a wrestling match?

Then the revelation came. I remembered the conversation on the swings as a four year- old. The fact that the boy felt the need to ask if I believed in god said it all. If gods and ghosts and Santa were real, nobody would ask me if I believed. Nobody had ever asked me if I believed in trees or rocks or even stars. Even the man in black in the church didn’t believe. I stood in front of him and he asked me if I accepted god and Jesus. My parents waited until I was older to have me Christened because they had the idea that I should remember the event. I was too afraid of the man in black to tell the truth, because even at four, I sensed that I was required to lie.

I imagined the neighbours all snug in their beds, sleeping soundly.
“They don’t really believe,” I thought. “None of them believe.”
The weight of fear was lifted from me and I dropped off to sleep. I didn’t have the vocabulary to know that I was a feminist or an atheist until much later. Ironically, I eventually learned about the term “atheist” from church. The reverend was raging against atheists and I thought, “Hey. He’s describing me. I must be an atheist.” Even though I didn’t have the terminology and hadn’t read any feminist or atheist academics yet, I look back on that night in my childhood as the point in which I became a feminist atheist.

Why I am a Feminist – Eva

‘Growing up in Lithuania, I was completely oblivious to feminism. I had no idea something like that existed, and I was blind to the fact that I lived in an extremely misogynistic country. It all changed somewhere around four years ago, not with a direct encounter with feminism, but with a website called TV Tropes.

Since that website is mostly about taking fiction apart and charting all the recurring patterns, they do end up mentioning feminist criticisms quite a bit. The more I read that website, the more I realized how awful the treatment of women in fiction was. Once I got to the “Double Standards” page and read through all the examples, I was pretty much a feminist.

That caused me to go through such an enormous shift in perception, that there isn’t really anything I could compare it to. And as the months went on, that shift in perception made me to not only look at everything I read and watched with feminist eyes, but also to look at the world around me in a new way.

When I was little, my grandmother would often tell me of how her parents one day told her that they found a husband for her, and that she’ll have to marry him or they will throw her out of the house. So my grandmother decided to stage a protest and spent a few hours sitting out in the front yard, butt-naked, in the snow, in the middle of winter. It didn’t really work, though, and she did end up marrying my grandfather, even though he was a complete stranger to her, and nine years older than she was.

As a little girl, I always found that story really boring, and it was only after I became a feminist that I suddenly realized that my grandmother was forced into marriage, and how appalling that was. And as I kept thinking more, I remembered how my grandmother would sometimes walk around with bruises on her face, and how some kind of wall in my mind prevented me from realizing that my grandfather was beating her.

And I started to look at my parents with different eyes too. I suddenly noticed that even though my dad is unemployed, he just sits around watching TV all day, and once mom comes back from work, he starts shouting at her, and insulting her, and telling her to make him dinner. I started to see how when she returns home from working the second shift, he follows her around telling her that she’s prostitute, because only prostitutes work so late.

I’m a feminist because I want women to be free of patriarchal oppression. I don’t want women to live lives as those that my grandmother lived and my mom still has to live, but I have to admit that I don’t have much hope for the country I live in, feminism is just as non-existent around here as it ever was, and when I tried to explain feminism to my mom, she just declared “But men and women are already equal around here!”, despite the fact that there’s no “equality” in her life at all.

If the women of the world ever become liberated, it probably won’t happen in my lifetime, but I’m optimistic enough to hope that, if I ever have children, then maybe at least they will live to see it happen’.

Muslims are becoming jokers. They want Halal Meat, Halal Apple-pie. Now they want Halal Television.

Indonesian Muslim group wants halal television.

An Islamic council in Indonesia wants the country’s broadcasting commission to consider certifying TV programs as religiously acceptable.

But the country’s broadcasting commissioner has ruled out certifying TV programs based on whether they’re acceptable to Islam.

The term halal most commonly refers to foods that are permitted by Islam, but now the West Java branch of Indonesia’s Islamic Council is suggesting halal television too.

Indonesia’s Broadcast Law states that content should educate and entertain, but also implement religious values and the country’s culture.

So the Islamic Council is suggesting TV should be subject to a certification system, like foods, to show whether they’re religiously permitted, or halal.

The West Java Broadcast Commissioner, Nursyawal, says that’s not going to happen.

He says it’s up to Islamic Clerics to issue their own fatwa or religious law forbidding certain programs.

I never saw anything labeled as halal in my childhood. It is around 20 years ago I found that a word halal invaded the world. Muslims want everything halal or everything Islamic whatever they eat, or drink, or touch, or hear, or see, or smell. Muslims are now becoming more and more intolerant, ignorant and arrogant. The whole situation is so weird now that I do not need to know whether they are fundamentalists, they are Muslims or they believe in Islam–it has become a good enough reason to stay away from them.

Aren’t they becoming jokers too? Muslim women in Egypt have their Islamic TV. A bunch of faceless shameless women are placed there to humiliate human race. Now an Indonesian Muslim group demands for an halal or Islamic TV. It’s very simple. Their ancestors used swords to convert people to Islam. Today’s Muslims use hi tech media to convert people to Islam or just to brainwash millions of people everyday with misogynistic superstitions. Their aim is to occupy the world or make the world darul Islam or land of Islam. The aim has been the same, only the weapons are different.

Why I am a Feminist – Rita Banerji

“Why are you a Feminist?” is actually not a question. It is a defense that some women are now having to make to a majority of women world-wide. A majority which thinks that now that women have the vote (even if not in all countries yet) and can apply to most jobs (even if not all yet), Feminism’s time is out. All it is – is an oddball, angry outfit that makes all women look bad. Look bad to whom? To men, of course! If women want men to like them, many believe they must rid the world of Feminism. In an oddly circular way the reason they believe that is because that’s what men are telling them: Want us love you, get rid of Feminism.

So even as I will do my bit by explaining ‘why I am a feminist,’ I also need to state how strange I think it is that I (or for that matter anyone) even needs to explain. It’s not just having to explain—to women—that’s strange, but also the aversion I see in most women towards Feminism is puzzling to me!! It’s weird because it is like an African-American having to explain why they are civil rights activists to other colored people who happily use the rights the civil rights activists have fought for, but hate being identified with the anti-racism movement!!!

So here goes:

1) I am a feminist because I am an individual, who wants a gender-just society, and not just because I am a woman. Therefore, even if I was a man, I would still be a feminist, like many men are! It is not about my gender, but about my ideology as an individual. Just as the civil rights movement was supported by some white people who like the black civil rights activists wanted a racially just society.

2) I am a feminist because as a woman I want to live on and occupy this earth with the same freedom and nonchalance as men. I don’t know what planet the anti-feminist people live on, but more than 98% of the land and resources of the planet that I inhabit—called EARTH—by the U.N.’s 2012 estimate is owned and controlled by men! Women own less then 2%. For me, that is already a mind-blowing, unacceptable, and fundamental inequality. It’s the equivalent of slavery!

3) I am a feminist because women don’t have the most basic of human rights – the right to live safely, simply because they are female. By 2030, India will have systematically eliminated 20% of women from its population, annihilated both before and after birth — only because they are female. And China will have similarly eliminated 20% of its female population. Since these two countries together constitute 40% of the human population, the implication of this is global. This is a genocide – the systematic and deliberate destruction of a targeted human group—on a scale that’s historically unprecedented. Furthermore, there’s not one country in the world where women are not subjected to one or another form of violence, like rape, sex-trafficking, “domestic” violence, random femicides, lethal customs like FGM — because of their gender. Women live in fear of their safety and lives, inside and outside their homes, everywhere, all the time, in a way that men never have to. Yet, governments and international bodies don’t see this as a violation of the basic human rights of a group that constitutes one-half of the human race. They just relegate it to the ‘domestic’ bin, along with cooking, cleaning and laundry!!

4) I am a feminist because I understand that I am a part of the social momentum for a just and humane society. There are rights that I am fighting for today, like the fundamental right to life and safety for girls and women everywhere, which may not be realized in my lifetime. But this I must do for the generations of girls and women to come, just as today as a woman there are certain rights I have, only because the women (and some men) before me fought for those rights for my generation.

Sometime ago, a friend who has two daughters, one of who dreams of becoming an astronaut, was telling me about how she wants this and that for her daughters, like she would for her sons, and then shuddering, like she was shaking off some insects that had crawled on her, she said, “But I am not a feminist!”

And I replied, “That you certainly aren’t! To be a feminist you need to be fighting for girls and women to have equal rights and access to all things, to life, like boys and men. Then there is the “feminist user.” That is – people who directly or indirectly use rights that women and girls are already entitled to only because feminists have fought for these rights. “Feminist users” are important as well! For it is only when rights are used, that they are strengthened. You however fall into the category of a “shameless feminist user.” You curse the very people who fought for the rights that you use, and that you hope will help your daughters’ lives in the future!”

I think that ever man and woman, who wants all the girls and women in his/her family and community to lead a life of dignity with every right and freedom that every human being is entitled to, needs to support the feminist movement worldwide.

‘Islamism kills generation’. Protest against Olympic Committee for allowing Islamism in Olympics.

We demand justice for women in Olympics. Feminists have been demanding justice for women. But it seems no one likes to listen to them. Why does everybody forget the Olympic principles?

• Universal fundamental ethical principles, such as: ‘Any form of discrimination [including gender discrimination] is incompatible with belonging to the Olympic Movement’ (Principle 5)

• A commitment to equality: ‘implementing the principle of equality of men and women’ (Chapter 1, Rule 2.7)

• Neutrality in sport: ‘No kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted on any Olympic sites, venues or other areas’ (Chapter 5, Rule 51.3)

Feminists demanded an end to gender-based discrimination and stereotypes. The International Olympic Committee did not protest against gender-based discrimination the way they protested against race-based discrimination. South Africa was banned from the Olympics for 21 years over its policy of apartheid. The International Olympic Committee violated the Olympic principles about gender equality by allowing countries that have anti-women-sharia laws to participate in the Olympics. It has also allowed athletes to wear veils, a symbol of oppression and to observe religious fasting that may higher the risk of dehydration during Olympic Games.

Femen, a Ukrainian feminist organization demands that the International Olympic Committee condemns violence against women in the Islamist states. Femen says that with the support of the International Olympic Committee Islamist governments actually use the participation of women in the Olympic Games to legitimize the killing and torturing of women.

Topless Femen activists Perform Anti-Islamist Olympic protest in London today. Five protesters are arrested.

How long will feminists from the West have to fight for women worldwide? Time has come for sane people living in the Muslim countries to move their butts and start an uncompromising movement against Islamic oppression.

Why I am a Feminist – Skeptifem

‘My feminism really began after reading The Beauty Myth, by Naomi Wolf. The book is far from revolutionary by my standards now, but when I read it my world was changed forever. This was years after I had been involved in skepticism, and years after becoming an atheist, just barely into my twenties. The difficult questions being raised by her work felt awfully familiar to me, she sounded just like my skeptic and atheist friends who were critical of ideas that were supposedly too sacred to question.

The book didn’t just make me think, it made me angry. I had spent years suffering for ideas I found out were totally fabricated, and designed specifically to make me feel horrible about myself so someone else could profit from it. I suffered for ideas that elevated the status of men at the expense of women. I compromised my health many times to lose weight, and there was virtually never a time that I gave up constant vigilance against gaining weight. It is a pitiable, tiring way to live, and I had done it for about 7 years at that point. I didn’t suffer as badly as other women I knew, many abused themselves for weight loss but also put up with humiliating (and sometimes painful) cosmetic procedures to rid themselves of hair, wrinkles, and other normal human features. When I was a teenager my mother got acid poured on her face to sear the wrinkles off of it. A surgeon, someone who pledges to do no harm to patients, did that to her for money. It echoed so perfectly what popular culture told me about appearance and beauty that it wasn’t even remarkable to me, it was normal for women to hate their bodies and faces. It was so normal that the violence inherent in all of it was invisible. Such a hatred for my body meant seeing me, all of me, as a thing instead of a person. Other women had chipped away at their sense of self exactly as I had.

I wasn’t transformed over night, but I did change a lot about myself pretty quickly. Eating like a normal person actually resolves many psychological problems caused by starvation, so I felt much better in general. I grieved for the years I had wasted hurting myself. I grieved for women who were still hurting themselves. I began to see that I had worth as a person. I was worth listening to and nourishing. I got help from a friend in college and enrolled in some classes, something I never thought I would do. Feminism helped me feel like a real person. I thought to myself, “men get to feel this way all the time, they don’t even have to fight for it. Every woman deserves to feel like they matter.” I wanted more people to know what I knew.

The more I thought about and researched the way women suffer for beauty, and the way men gain from that, I began to see some interesting parallels with religion and scams of all sorts. I became eager to discuss feminism with people in the skeptics groups I frequented. I felt as though I had discovered some new interesting intellectual territory, and was excited to see what other people thought. So many friends had used their intellects to impress me in the past with analysis of various issues. Surely, a great discussion would ensue.

I could not have been more wrong. I was met at every turn with dismissal and embarrassingly fallacious reasoning. What had happened to the intellectual honesty, the curiousness, of the people I knew? Why was no one outraged at the poor quality of arguments being used to dismiss my findings outright? I never expected everyone to agree with me, but I expected the level of discourse afforded to creationists and homeopaths. It became apparent that most of the people in my circle were… men. They didn’t want to think about the things I brought up, and they all helped each other avoid confronting problems with sexism. I became disillusioned with these groups, even though I still strongly supported the stated principles of all of the groups. I still believe in those things, and believe feminism is inherent in critical thought about problems affecting women and girls.

It got much more troubling to me once I began to research things like rape and sexual harassment. I realized that I had either been subject to sexual harassment, witnessed it against another woman, at every job I have ever worked at. This was true of virtually every woman I knew. The ones who spoke up usually got in trouble or were ignore. I realized that sexual abuse was a common experience for women as well. I knew from personal experience how little the judicial system cares if you decide to report being raped. I reported having been raped as a teenager. I gave the police contact information for other women who I knew who had been abused by the same guy, and they never even called them to collect statements. They did question me repeatedly and gave me a card to call someone for psychological help, as if I wanted to discuss what had happened even more. That was all that ever happened. People I told outside of the police had mixed reactions, a lot of men simply thought I was a liar or a whore, and it made dealing with the aftermath of sexual abuse much more difficult. I saw these attitudes mirrored all over society. Outside of feminism there was not much concern about these issues at all.

I got more involved with feminist groups, spaces that were much safer for women, and got introduced to feminism that dealt with more than the issues affecting economically privileged white women. I became interested in how racism and colonialism functioned. I am white and didn’t want to do to people of color what men had done to me. I wanted to listen instead. I made a point of finding people with experiences very different from my own, and trying to really understand their perspective. It was amazingly difficult but it helped me develop a lot of maturity, and to also see that social justice was a struggle for the majority of people in the world. I saw how we could all support each other. This is something I still try to do, something central to my feminism today.

Eventually I wanted to write, something that was outside the realm of possibility to me just a few years before. I had come a long way from thinking I was not worth listening to. Since reading The Beauty Myth I’ve discovered some troubling things about Naomi Wolf’s beliefs, but I will always be grateful to her for writing that book. I will always be grateful to other brave women who write, like bell hooks and Andrea Dworkin, for helping to expand my understanding of the world we women live in. My life had improved so much because of individuals who had decided that it was important to spread a message of truth. They wrote despite the ridicule and insults, they wrote because it was too important to let other people stop them. I want to be that person for someone else out there.’

(Dear fellow feminists, Skeptifem has shared her story with us, why she is a feminist. You can share your stories with us too! -Taslima Nasreen)

Remembering Gore Vidal, a great humanist

“…homosexuality is a constant fact of the human condition and it is not a sickness, not a sin, not a crime . . . despite the best efforts of our puritan tribe to make it all three. Homosexuality is as natural as heterosexuality. Notice I use the word ‘natural,’ not normal.” –Gore Vidal, Esquire 1969

“The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal—God is the Omnipotent Father—hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates.” –Gore Vidal on monotheism

Gore Vidal, a great humanist died yesterday.

I am remembering those days in 1995, when Gore Vidal, some other writers and I gave lectures at Oxford university. Our lectures were published in book form. Chris Miller, a fellow of All Souls College edited the book titled ‘The dissident word’.

THE Times Higher Education wrote about Gore Vidal in 1995 before the Oxford lecture series started.

Six leading writers will speak on the subject of the Dissident Word in the fourth series of Amnesty Lectures which starts next week at the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford.

Whatever Gore Vidal has to say in the course of his Amnesty lecture, there can be little doubt that it will be said wittily and well. His calculated wit has been criticised as an ingenious means of skating over thin ice – one reviewer said he had “perfected the art of going nowhere, while being deliciously funny en route”. But few deny the man who defined a narcissist as “anyone better looking than you” and who said he was all for bringing back the birch “but only between consenting adults” his standing as a master of the epigrammatic one-liner.

For half a century he has fulfilled the dual roles of iconoclast and scion of America’s ruling classes. Like his exact contemporary and political opposite William F. Buckley – also born in 1925 and the other half of a famous televised spat in which Buckley called him a queer and Vidal labelled Buckley a Nazi – he is a critic from within, a satirist with a deadly serious purpose, chipping away at the complacency of the milieu and the nation that produced him.

Politically well-connected -his grandfather Thomas Gore was a senator from Oklahoma while vice-president Gore and ex-president Carter are relatives – he has run for office himself, losing a New York congressional race in 1960 despite outpolling presidential candidate John Kennedy, and polling half a million votes in the California Democratic Primary of 1982.

But his immense self-confidence rests on achievement as well as birth, with a formidable canon of novels, essays, journalism and scripts built up in the half-century since his first novel Williwaw was published in his teens. Most of his twenties were spent in the shadow of censorship. His third novel, The City and the Pillar, outraged conventional opinion with its portrayal of a college sportsman driven by obsessive love for another male athlete.

He found refuge in pseudonymous crime novels and scriptwriting for MGM. “Censorship was very real in the 1950s and I had a bad time after the blackout. You don’t write a movie like Ben Hur if you’re having a good time.”

He is a ferocious critic of religion as a constraining force and was denounced as an anti-Christ by television evangelist and ex-presidential candidate Pat Robertson. Along with a disdain for religion goes a fear of the over-mighty state. He contends that the postwar United States has been a “National Security State” and calls for a reorganisation along the lines of the Swiss cantons to take power away from the centre. “The rulers of any system cannot maintain their power without the constant creation of prohibitions that then give the state the power to imprison – or otherwise intimidate – anyone who violates any of the state’s often new-minted crimes,” he says.

He is perhaps an ironic choice for a lecture series held on university premises. A scourge of current fashions in English departments, he has said: “It is quite evident that, in the English departments of the United States, not only do they not understand imagination, but to the extent that it comes their way they hate it. And they have eliminated literature altogether from the English departments and replaced it with literary theory.”

‘I regret to report that Gore Vidal has died. He was one of my favorite authors, and a notable atheist and humanist.’ —PZ Myers, biologist and blogger.

“The progressive and humanist values Gore Vidal repeatedly espoused moved the culture in a positive direction. He spent his life pointing out the places in society that needed the most attention without worrying who might be embarrassed or upset by his opinions.” –David Niose, president of the American Humanist Association.

”He’s been called an iconoclast, a provocateur, and a misanthrope, and of course Gore occasionally said things that gave humanists pause. But he was forever dedicated to the cause of enlightenment and exposed injustice and hypocrisy at every turn.” —Jennifer Bardi, editor of Humanist magazine.