A Kurdish or Iranian girl was stoned to death for falling in love with someone who doesn’t belong to the same sect.
A girl was whipped in Sudan for wearing trousers.
A 17-year-old girl was flogged in Pakistan.
A 17-year-old girl was molested in India.
Girls around the world get molested, harassed, raped, gang-raped, trafficked, tortured, flogged, murdered everyday. Their only crime is they are girls. Shame on men!
I am ashamed of my gender sometimes, which is probably why it hurts bad, really bad, when you lump all men in with the scumbags you highlight on your website (what should be “shame on the really bad and evil men” becomes “shame on [all] you men”). Continue to report on the evil men among us, but realize that all men are not against you and other women. It only hurts men like me, but to lump all men in with those men who commit dastardly deeds just empowers the bad men. You might say, “I don’t mean all men,” but that is not the way you are perceived.
Barbarians.
You mean, shame on the psychopathic, cowardly, religiofascist men who do things like this, or just men generally?
August 4–14, New York City
TAKE PATRIARCHY BY STORM!
If you hate the way that women are not only raped but then blamed and shamed for being raped…
If your blood boils at the knowledge of millions of women bought and sold and abused and degraded in the global sex industry…
If you want to puke when you hear Christian fascists moralizing that women should “keep their legs closed” and you want to scream when you hear of another abortion clinic being attacked, another doctor being stalked, another law restricting women’s right to birth control or abortion being passed…
If you are infuriated by how pornography has become more violent, more degrading, more cruel, and more humiliating towards women even as it has become more and more mainstream…
If you are sick of the way women have been trained to hold their tongues, suppress their rage, and remain silent in the face of this all-out war against their lives and their humanity…
You need to be part of the August 4–14 intensive effort to TAKE PATRIARCHY BY STORM.
For ten days in New York volunteers from around the country and all over the city will work closely together to launch an all-out counteroffensive against patriarchy and to strategize together to figure out how we are going to go forward to win.
get updates and more info at: stoppatriarchy.tumblr.com
Taslima Nasrin always tries to be as shocking and controversial as possible, as each of her posts here indicates.
Of course she means “all men” – for her, there’s an endless war of all men against all women. If some men are good, this is a strange accident.
It doesn’t fit into her narrative to be precise or clear about what she writes. By being deliberately vague and extreme, she can backpedal if caught – “But you should know I don’t mean all men”, while she’s still getting away with claiming that all men are basically dangerous and hurt women.
In her posts, clearly anything remotely touching on sexuality suffers from the idea that female involvement in any way with men = dangerous and evil contamination. I’m not the onyl one to have noticed, nor are most of the ones who’ve noticed men. Straight women notice right away. There’s a “Nanny” tone to everything she writes, with more than a shade of prude.
She writes like this on purpose, so that she can say the extreme things she wants to, but can then turn around and blame critics for “misinterpreting” her.
It’s a pretty standard tactic on the radical left, where emotion, perception and solidarity count for far more than cold, hard precision or reason.
Despite her admiration for figures like Richard Dawkins, she doesn’t seem to want to replicate his mode of thought – which is really what Dawkins should be admired for.
On another note, I’d point out that all of the countries she singles out here are in South Asia, Africa or are Muslim. While these incidents happen among Western peoples, they’re vanishingly rare by comparison.
Lumping in all men from all cultures together is as bad as conflating all issues affecting women in Iceland and saying that these are identical to all issues facing each and every woman in, say, South Africa.
Nuance… not really Taslima’s strong point.
In other words, …
All of Taslima’s posts are designed to offend and exaggerate as much as possible. She has a political point to make, and actual nuance and careful presentatoin of information isn’t really her thing.
It appears to be more about attempting to score points.
That there’s no actual war of all men against all women is an inconvenient fact that she’d rather not focus on. I mean, she does have a de-facto quasi-religious belief system or ideology she needs to present; as a religious method of thinking, it doesn’t need to take into account anything more than what’s necessary to concoct slogans.
if this hasn’t become obvious to you yet, I’d be surprised.
This is almost certainly one of the reasons her rhetoric hasn’t won any deep followers in the West, even among feminists. There’s very little to no original thought, very little understanding of cultural variation or expression, no appreciation for the varieties of feminism that don’t perfectly match her own, and her work encapsulates what was most limiting and shallow in the culture-identity wars of the 1980’s.
Actually, it also replicates the severe radicalism of lesbian separatism that had quite a following in the 1970’s and 80’s, where men were treated as dangerous interlopers at best, and malignant enemies at worst.She may not personally ascribe to these philosophies, but she seems to parrot much of what they write –
perhaps without fully understanding it or its implications, herself.
I suspect she’s read wuite a bit of the canon literature, without being able to parse it completely. This is one of the few most charitable explanations for her rather stunning lack of perspective.
That feminism has moved on from these positions, in fact repudiates many of them, doesn’t seem to faze Taslima.
Her cultural background – coming from a culture where “rape culture” has an actual, hard, on-the-ground reality that Western women usually fail to understand and where patriarchal religious extremism is deeply ingrained, might also help to exlain her lack of ability to distinguish these issues in the West.
I also detect a tone of overweening arrogance in what she writes. She’s absolutely sure of her opinions all of the time. Even Dawkins questions his own beliefs frequently. It’s his mode of thought: Constantly challenging his own assumptions and beliefs, and taking apart both other peoples’ and his own positions.
Taslima is, to judge by her writing, very good at emoting, and very good at being angry, but very poor at breaking down her own ideas and thinking clearly about what she writes. When you combine with her inflammatory political motivation, no matter how well-intentioned, and her very different non-western cultural roots, it means her ability to speak to modern Western feminists is limited.
I’ve shown many of her pieces to die-hard, aggressively feminist women. They’re been able to pick apart the casual misogyny and careless groupthink Taslima seems to engage in. One, a skeptic, though it was kind-of sad that Taslima seems to worship the beliefs of Dawkins and other thinkers, but doesn’t seem to appreciate how they think.
What she’s done is replace an emotional, identity-driven belief system with another. That this replacement belief system is based in logic and reason is beside the point – that’s not apparently important to Taslima, because she doesn’t engage in this mode of thought herself.
Yeah, I don’t think she’ll be losing any sleep over that claim. You appear to be oh so very annoyed with Taslima for regularly posting media showing the extreme abuse of women from across the globe. I utterly fail to see why you feel you are justified in complaining about it.
Except it’s not ‘another note’ is it Gorbachev? It’s exactly the same note as the entire content of both of your posts – namely, “It’s those dirty foreigners that treat women badly, stop making it look as if women in, say, ummmm, I know, Iceland!, have to suffer at the hands of misogynistic men”
Sure, you might be shocked at the religious/tribal-patriarchy-driven murder and assaults shown in the footage, but you appear more outraged that she isn’t posting these clips with some sort of caveat alluding to how western men are far more civilised and respectful to women and that she would think it just awful if we were to mistakenly infer that *any* of this sort of thing should be of concern to us western men.
According to you ‘vanishingly rare’ equates to “So let’s not mention it” – Do you even read the news reports in your area? You see all those pesky police that are known to arrest people in the country where you live, do you think that *some* of those people they arrest might be, ummmm, men who have murdered, raped, assaulted and/or abused women or girls? Or do you happen to live in that mythical land where all is bliss with nary a bad word spoken nor gender disparity to be seen?
I’m going to go ahead and assume that, no, you don’t live in that mythical land because, guess what? It’s a fucking myth. The clue is in the name.
Whether it is the graphic scenes portrayed in the images Taslima posts, or your aforementioned ‘Icelandic’ woman who is taking her third beating of the day from her violent husband behind closed doors, I dare you, I fucking double-dare you to claim again that you are justified in making your nausea-inducing “vanishingly rare” statement as if it were a shield of moral invincibility you can wrap around your pathetically fragile ego.
You disgust me.
How much abuse is ‘ok’ for you Gorbachev? I’m raising two daughters to know that they are equal to men in this world, whether this world is ready to accept it or not. You think I should tell them that whatever chauvinistic misogyny they encounter in ‘The West’, they should just ‘put up with it’ because it’s only the ‘dirty foreigners’ who really have it bad?
Responding to reminders of the hill we *all* must climb by whining “But not me because I’m not *as* bad as that”? – I hope you live a long and miserable life and die a lonely and agonising death.
It’s so moving! You’ve touched my heart.
Well said Bill.
You are not a woman.
Really Gorbachev? Which western country are you referring to? Because here in the US, 1 in 4 women report being violently attacked by their husbands or boyfriends, 1 in 5 women report being raped or the victim of an attempted rape, 3 women a day are murdered by their husbands or boyfriends. And these statistics (http://www.courierpress.com/news/2011/dec/14/survey-1-4-us-women-victims-violence-husbands-boyf/) don’t take into account the women who are beaten who don’t ever report it or admit it. If there was no violence against women in this country, there would be no safe houses for battered women. If a woman has the strength of character to pursue justice for a rape, then she is the one put on trial and the rapists usually get off to rape again. And let’s not forget how women are belittled, denigrated, insulted verbally in the public sphere. If a woman by some chance gets on some kind of discussion group, if she can get a word in edgewise, if the men don’t constantly interrupt her, then she is later attacked, not for what she says, what her points might have been but for her appearance…she’s ugly, her hair and clothes are a fright, etc.
So, yeah Gorbachev, shut up because you don’t know what the hell you are talking about. As long as you are blind to the violence around you and no doubt blaming the very women who are beaten and killed for their beatings then you don’t get to prattle on about how Western men ‘don’t do that’. They do it. They just don’t do it in public where someone can videotape it.
And yes, I know it is not all men. there are good men out there who don’t resort to violence when they don’t get their way.
Gorbachev, yet another long winded diatribe telling Taslima how she’s not doing her job to your liking? How patriarchal of you.
Taslima, thank you for this and your other “imflammatory” posts.
Daniel, that you could look at these videos and in response write a post saying, “poor me, that hurts me” tells me all I need or want to know about you. The probability that, had you been born in some Kurdish or Sudanese village, you would be enthusiastically participating in these atrocities, greatly increases.
Ted Bundy wasn’t a Muslim. Neither was Dennis Rader, or Moses Sithole, or Robert Napper, or any of the other hundreds of thousands of serial killers who operate outside the Muslim world, whose lives have never been touched in the slightest way by Islam but who nonetheless commit vicious atrocities against female victims, simply because they are female.
I wouldn’t deny that there are men who violently prey on women just because they are women in the US or other Western and non-Muslim nations, but I think it’s worth noting the differing levels of social acceptance. Dennis Rader was sneaking into people’s houses to kill and go undetected, he wasn’t splitting girls’ heads open in public in front of a cheering crowd for some ridiculous violation of religious sexual ethics.
Did Ted Bundy, Dennis Rader, Moses Sithhole and Rober Napper commit their crimes with impunity, in front of crowds of men who cheered them on?
Okay. Clearly, I’m dealing with some True Believers; like all religious cults, this neofeminist non-feminist belief system , a system which has at its apex an engineered infantilization of women, removing any sense of agency or human will from them by force of state intervention if necessary, like all religious cults, the cultists all come out to Ra Ra the Great Leader.
-First, this one: “Because here in the US, 1 in 4 women report being violently attacked…” — not even remotely true. That statistic is widely reported, and is a bald-faced, completely discredited lie. In fact, researchers have trouble even finding where the first reports got this information. A whole field of study has emerged to study this kind of gross misinformation.
– 45% of all domestic violence, including violence that ends up with someone in the hospital, is initiated by women, and 30% of serious victims are men. Don’t believe me? Ask Erin Pizzey, the woman who set up the first women’s shelter in the Western world, in the UK. She was a hard-core revolutionary feminist; she was drummed out of her own organization by radicals for telling the truth about the actual stats she was collecting.
– Recent stats for Canada reported the exact same stat, and 45-55% was reported in many US states. Yet no services exist for battered men. In fact, the number of men who called in to a new service offered in California exploded the phone lines: the demand was so huge, the service essentially shut down.
Amount of money invested in male victims of relationship abuse in the US: $0.00
But apparently, men are not human beings. Because some men are very violent (approx. .5-1%) the tiny guy being shouted at and hit by his wife gets… nothing.
What *category* you belong to matters. You as an individual do not.
– Police often report that when they arrive at domestic abuse situations, the man is the one with the injuries. In many US states, even if the man is very seriously wounded (in one well-known case, unconscious with a concussion and stabbed in chest), the law required… the man to be arrested, regardless of who was doing what. Don’t believe me? Do some actual research instead of parroting happy lies.
Abuse in relationships: approximately 0.5-2.5 $ of relationships suffer from abuse that would be considered serious.
Only because men are naturally stronger are there more serious injuries in a small proportion of these cases. In many cases, men refuse to defend themselves, and when they finally do – like two men I know, one an uncle – they often do more damage than a single attack by a woman, due to the nature of their physical srength.
In my uncle’s case, he was verbally, psychologically and physically abused for 20 years, until he at last lashed out and slapped his wife once across the face to get her to stop punching him in the side of the head. He was arrested and luckily for him had his own repeated medical treatment documented, or he’d have gone to jail for abusing his wife. His wife was a domineering, abusive monster who also heavily abused their three children.
— Lesbian relationships have much higher rates of partner abuse than heterosexual relationships, a fact not widely reported but well-known in the sexual services industry. In fact, it’s so bad, lesbians often comment on it in their own literature
Which patriarchal man is responsible when a lesbian physically and psychologically abuses her partner?
All of this talk and not just fabricated but outright ludicrous lies has the following effects:
— The actual social and psychological causes of these problems never get solves, in the interest of maximizing political benefits resulting from false victim identification
– Women are treated like pathetic, helpless children incapable of thinking for themselves or having the slightest agency at all. See Taslima’s posts on prostitution. Then go and read what, um, actual prostitutes write, which is almost always – get the hell away from us, you busybody nannies, I’m am adult so leave me alone. Virtually every word spouted by these “activists” is a complete fabrication – from “pimps” to “first age of induction into prostitution”. Virtually not one word has any bearing or relationship to reality.
The only reason anyone would promote such absolutely fabricated “knowledge” is to encourage massive state control of women’s lives.
– A general mistrust of men (though a shockingly small proportion of men ever cause any trouble at all).
– A moral equivalency between actually oppressive, patriarchal cultures and liberal Western cultures. If you think a village in Pakistan has the same culture and patriarchy as a village in Oklahoma, then there’s just no helping you and you have nothing remotely useful to say about the world. You’ve lost your ability to understand the world around you.
My real beef with TAslima is this: Every single feminist stance she takes infantilizes and marginalizes women.
I am a wholehearted, enthusiastic proponent of female equality. I’ve believed in female equality all my life.
I am not, however, a conspiracy theorist. I don’t think men are plotting to undermine women on a daily basis. I think some cultures are oppressive towards women, and some are much less so. I think the reasons for this are multiple.
You obviously adhere to a lot of Sacred Beliefs that can’t be questioned. One of the problems on this series of blogs – the Free Thought series – is this: free thought requires detached, unemotional …… thought.
My beef with Taslima is that she exaggerates, conflates, uses “no true scotsman” reasoning (Anyone who disagrees with her is NO True Feminist– as if she has some monopoly), uses literally fantastical and fictitious statistics (like 1/4 women) that have not the slightest relationship to reality, and lacks the most basic premise of rigorous thought.
She has lots of social status. She is well-regarded. But I suspect she’s well-regarded by people who don’t read what she writes very closely.
For all of her worship of science, this is the problem: She worships it. Her attitude is almost religious. This is not what science is. You’re not supposed to replace a blind faith in a supernatural figure with blind faith… in anything.
Her mode of thought is not one that uses reason. This is my beef with her.
She does feminist a huge disservice.
Would you like me to list the vast range of feminist authors all with bona-fide credentials, who would disagree with her on almost every single point she’s ever made for solid, well-thought-out philosophical reasons?
That’s the point. These other feminists have… well-thought-out philosophical and rational reasons for much of what they write.
I’m sorry if I’m not hagiographically bowing down and being nice–
But when a respected figure, especially a respected figure, starts to wobble and says things that are not only not entirely true but are of questionable judgment, it’s irresonsible not to point it out.
And if you want backed-up hard stats, on all of these things that you think are true, from multiple sources – just ask.
But be ready to have some of your most cherished, if delusional, assumptions smashed.
Given that you believe these things also somewhat religiously, I doubt you’ll ask. Nobody wants their religious beliefs to undergo any challenge.
Enjoy the Faith.
(PS, – I’ve been a hard-core feminist (of a given variety) all of my life).
–
Here are videos of women getting beaten to death or half to death and getting their head cracked open, her brains running down the street, quite possibly, nay very likely by her father or older brother, after their bones are broken by sadistically laughing men amusing themselves with the execution and you are talking about infantilizing and marginalizing women because your precious feelings are hurt by insufficient stipulation of your white men’s innocence?
And this is what gets your longwinded balls in a twist after seeing this unbearable horror? Really?
You, my dear, haven’t got a clue what us women and girls have to deal with on a daily basis. You’re not female, ans sound like an unfeeling patriarch. Do not try and silence Taslima. Number one-you shall not be successful, and number two, you will be better off checking out the pathetc “Men’s Rights Activists” then coming to this website, (which has been created by a fabulous, fearless crusader for women”s rights), and spewing your nonsense.
Obviously these attacks are horrible beyond description.
My only objection to a post like this is *how* Taslima writes about it.
In fact, every one of her posts has been a deliberate misapplication of basic principles.
In her world, all men who have ever lived or are alive today are always at war with all women; all societies are equally at war with their women; and all patriarchy is the same.
Like a religious fanatic, she sees patterns where there are none and completely misses the misogyny in her own writing, a misogyny so deep and disturbing that it takes a “true believer” not to see it.
Her post on helmets and female passengers not wearing one- this has nothing to do with feminism, it has to do with the fact that usually passengers don’t wear helmets and often get away with it. But in her ideologically deluded mind, where everything is a conspiracy, Patriarchy is at the root of women not wearing motorcycle helmets.
Please. Her posting on prostitution were, at best, hopelessly and tragically naive; paternalistic and misogynist at worst. Her brand of feminism is the same brand of feminism that gets women marching in streets. Of course, she denies that these women are feminists or are acting in their own interests – because any feminist who disagrees with any position Taslima takes is, of course, “Not a true feminist” – because only those who agree with Taslima are “true feminists”. She as much as said this at least twice.
And the ideological fallacy of conflating patriarchy in a place like Pakistan or India with patriarchy in the West is beyond delusional.
And commenters, equally deluded, point out that to see these cultures are more patriarchal, almost homocidally patriarchal, compared to, oh, for example, Sweden or Switzerland or even Ireland or Canada or more or less any Western country– is RACISM, displays a kind of deluded shaming tactic designed to obscure any possible debate.
Conflating Patriarchy and the experience of it in Japan, the Gaza Strip and the US is delusional. In each case, Patriarchy takes on radically different, almost unrelated forms. In some ways, they’re not even the same animal, given the ways that rights, social expectations and obligations interact.
But for the ideologically hidebound, for those who feel this in their bones, like True Believers of any blind faith, there’s no truth but the Truth– and it must be Adhered To.
Say that Islam is pretty harsh towards women – and you’re a racist. Unless you’re Taslima – in that case, you can say things that would get people arrested for hate crimes in the UK (and this has happened, quite frequently). It’s now forbidden to even quote misogynist Arab theists, because this is Islamophobia. Taslima can say such things; but for anyone else to repeat them would be censure and calls of “racism” (though Islam is no kind of race).
Pointing out that Western secular culture treats women better than most cultures in the history of the world is to Agree With Western Patrisrchy and Excuse It or to make Racist comments about the rest of the world.
Please: You can be a multicultural relativist, or you can value women’s lives. You simply can’t have variable human rights. And it’s not just a patently obvious thing to say that Islam is a torturous patriarchal religion for women – it’s also not racist. Call it culturally chauvinistic. If that’s the case, I’ll take cultural chauvinism, please.
These images above are testament to why a little more universalism and human rights are necessary, even if it means denigrating other cultures to get these human rights.
Women are the equals of men, must be treated as such, and ANY values that stand in the way of the universal expressions of human rights that this represents are values that, quite frankly, have no place in the modern world.
if this is insulting to other cultures, tough. Maybe these other cultures (and our own) needs a helluva lot more insulting.
Do I think Western cultures treat women immeasurably better than South Asian cultures? This isn’t an opinion – it’s a hard observation. You have to be so completely blinded by ideology not to see this that it’s amazing you can walk down the street without falling over your own feet.
At some point, logic, reason and observation must take precedence over emotion, courtesy (cultural relativism) and paternalistic ideology.
And Taslima’s particular brand of feminism is excruciatingly paternalistic, ironically enough.
Women, to her, are an indissoluble mass of “female”, not individual people at all. Every argument she makes speaks in categories and mass conflict – in her world, individual women don’t exist. They only exist as representatives of a mass “female” body.
This flavor is what I object to: to respect women, you must respect them as individuals. All feminism that has produced anything for women has respected this principle as its founding argument. Everything else is nothing but endless parades of victim politics which in the end, in all cases, results in greater oppression of women, devastation of agency, and reduction of humans to facile, manipulable tropes.
You can say what she wants to say without invoking the Mass Mind of Patriarchy, the Universal Otherness of Women, or the Group Consciousness of the Ideologically Pure.
Alas, she doesn’t get this.
Taslima Nasrin may be many things, but a modern feminist isn’t one of them. If her greatest source of inspiration is Dworkin, then she has about 30 years of feminist literature (most of which more or less repudiates Dworkins’ whole approach) to read up on.
I’ve never read a major feminist who more comprehensibly infantilized women, or gloried in the perpetual victimhood of the female gender.
In her world, women have no agency. They’re not powerful. They’re nothing but victims, tools and canvasses on whicih tragedies are played out.
This may be true in South Asia. I have no idea. From what she writes, it certainly seems like the best thing to do for women is get them away from South Asian men – so unremittingly bleak is her view of the sexes.
But I know this is not the case in North America.
I’m not saying it’s perfect by any means – but despite claims to the contrary, it’s not an orgy of death, mayhem and conspiracies to belittle women for being women.
There’s something almost pornographic about the way she approaches this kind of empty victim politics. Again, I’m not the only one to have seen this; I’m maybe the only one to say it publicly, to her face, here on a blog. A large number of people have thought this and said it.
Where are the strong women, the women who have successful and very happy relationships with men, the women who become politicians, the women who are successful and feminine, the women who are successful and gender-neutral, the women who achieve what they do in the teeth of sexism, the women who never experience serious sexism at all, the lesbians who don’t dislike men, the women who are happy mothers, the women who are happy childless, the women experiencing human life as women ?
Are there none? I beg to differ.
Add in women who make choices on their own, and live with the consequences. For Taslima, it’s all about how PAtriarchy shapes all women’s choices. They’re not competent, intelligent beings able to choose for themselves: ANy choie a woman makes which Taslima disapproves of is the result of Brainwashing or Patriarchy.
Her posts ring out loud with these sentiments.
Hers is a world of decay and dour matronly disapproval. I don’t see my former and much admired boss in her “women”; I don’t see my neighbor’s happy housewife; I don’t see the incredibly tough and competent woman running her own company I interviewed three weeks ago.
I just see an endless sequence of helpless, almost contemptibly pathetic victims. Evil men! Men are Evil! Men use Mind Powers to control us!
Towards the end of her life, Andrea Dworkin became less and less mentally stable, eventually making up stories of rape that even those closest to her found almost hallucinogenic. Her diatribes were always a little unbalanced, if often brilliant, but virtually nothing of what she wrote made a clean transition into feminism that informs and plays an active role for women in the West. And that’s a good thing: Both she and Mackinnon were widely seen as misanthropes and mildly delusional.
Waves of feminism have come and gone, and left these tired philosophies in the dust. Alas, not Taslima —
In her world, women are just tropes and contemptible creatures useful only for pity or charity.
Pardon me, but I know no women like this.
And pardon me again, but there’s no war of men against women. Not in much of the world, at least. Conflict there may be – but an inernational conspiracy to subjugate the feminine sex, with every twelve year old boy secretly planning his own conquest of Femininity, …
And India is not Vermont, no matter how many times you call someone “racist” for saying it.
Culture makes a difference. And there are lots of them. And different cultures are…
wait for it…
different.
Surprise, surprise.
But not in Taslima’s world.
Who really cares what you think of *how* Taslima writes? (Other than yourself?)
I know I could not care less what you think of her writing.
This might be a bit off the central thread, but I thought I’d have to weigh in on this:
“the Free Thought series – is this: free thought requires detached, unemotional …… thought.”
I don’t think it’s possible for anyone to shut off their emotions like a switch when thinking, and it’s impossible to be detached towards issues that actually affect yourself or people you know, unless you’re adding up some meaningless column of numbers or doing some other mental task that’s completely removed from the human experience.
This doesn’t mean that rational thought is impossible, just that part of rational thought is understanding what we feel, how that might affect our perceptions, and when we might be limited in how we see an issue because of our own personal involvement. It also means that sometimes, people’s strong feelings are actually justified – a person has a right to be outraged over unfair treatment, I’m not going to discount someone’s perspective just because they seem emotional. I have to look at the response and ask whether it’s proportional to what has actually happened.
Simply put, I don’t think we can shut off our feelings, and at least we can admit what we feel and how and why. But we can’t pretend to be capable of total detached objectivity.
Now I know how Muslims who do not condone acts of terror feel.
Shame on men?
What about shame on those societies that allow these girls to be ill-treated?
Where are all the women in those clips banding together trying to stop these atrocities from happening?
Oh no where? They implicitly condone this kind of gross injustice?
That’s what I thought.
I could not even finish watching these videos. They are one of every woman and girl”s worst nightmare. As horrible as these videos are, people NEED to see that these types of quote “punishments” that women and girls face for doing something as ridiculous as wearing trousers in public! These videos disgust me and make my blood boil!!! And the fact that MEN are doing nothing to stop this insanity enrages me! They encourage it-film it-laugh at it-spread it around the internet in a malicious way, etc like these women and girls are not even HUMAN. It goes BEYOND men just being “scumbags.” They desire access to women and girls’ bodies, hearts, and souls 24/7. These “men” view women and girls as non-human playthings and objects instead of thinking, feeling human beings. Hating “men,” in my book, is totally understandable. Afterall, which gender rapes-murders-molests-hurts animals-emotionally abuses-writes horrible sexist “rap” music-music videos-films-art-tv shows-is responsible for the ridiculous misogynistic “men”s rights advocates”-is all over the national sex offender registry-tortures-kidnaps-assaults-is responsible for domestic violence, etc to women and girls? Men! I could go on and on..And these are our fathers, “friends,” lovers (for some women), brothers, uncles, neighbors! Due to a backlash from Feminism, things are getting worse for women and girls. Yes, we have made alot of progress, but the patriarchy is still going strong. Taslima-thank you for creating this website. I am a Feminist and I am quite aware of the savagery that men do to us. When will this end? When shall women be seen as what we are-HUMAN BEINGS who give life (child birth) to these things called men?