Even Women’s Breasts Are Not Safe From Torture!

In certain parts of Africa, a number of horrifying customs are still prevalent. One such
practice is that of female genital mutilation (FGM) or female circumcision, done to ensure
women cannot experience sexual pleasure. Another is breast ironing, essentially nothing but
torture, to ensure breasts don’t grow and men don’t feel sexual attraction for her. The fact
that such customs are still practiced in Africa is technically not new information. In fact, it is
fairly common for African immigrants and people of African descent in Europe and America
to make their girls undergo female circumcision too. However, what is new is that even in
the Commonwealth, right this very moment, there are at least ten-twelve girls who are
undergoing absolute torture in the name of ‘breast ironing’. London, Yorkshire, Essex, West
Midlands – news has trickled in from many such places that there have been instances of
hot stones being rubbed on girls’ breasts to singe the cells and stunt their natural growth.
This painful torture is brought down upon these girls every week, or at least once every
fortnight. A women’s rights organisation from the Commonwealth has issued a statement
that although the cases of these ten-twelve girls are relatively recent, if a proper survey was
to be conducted one would discover that at least a thousand girls of African descent have
gone through this torture till date.
Women’s bodies are tortured and mutilated only to make sure men cannot sexually abuse
them. With breast ironing, the practice inhibits the natural growth of breasts, they never
look like how they are meant to. The damage for the girl in question is both physical and
psychological. Besides, these tortures are carried out by their own mothers and
grandmothers, women who truly believe that these practices will protect their girls from
falling prey to rapists and such people. The question that remains, however, is this – in order
to prevent rape or sexual violence committed against a women why does society not take
any steps to educate men and make them aware? Why is it that women are the ones who
have to undergo a series of strange, unnatural and humiliating experiences, ironically just to
ensure their own safety? Men will grope, they will stare, they will pounce, they will harass
and rape – women have to be wary of myriad such anxieties right from their childhood. So

the moment they hit puberty their well-wishers shower and smother them with advice after
advice – cover yourself, cover your breasts, cover your hair, your thighs and legs! Customs
have to be followed out of fear of male violence. The fact that men are the hunters and
women are the prey – this logic is drilled into women even before they reach adolescence. It
is indeed quite strange that those people to who young girls are the closest to in society are
also their worst enemies – their rapists, their abusers, their murderers. Is such a society of
any use to humanity? If this was the case with men, if they had to be always on edge that
their bodies were going to be violated, that their lack of breasts was going to be a point of
abuse, that their genitalia was going to be crushed and brutalised, then such a social
formation would surely not have worked for them. Why are their breasts not as big as
women’s, why are their genitalia so weird, why do their testicles hang, why do they have
moustaches and beards – what if men were to be attacked over these things by the very
people they cohabit with, the ones they trust the most Surely they would have termed such
a society uninhabitable! Men must similarly understand the condition of women. They must
understand that the society they have built up is equally uninhabitable for women.
I was born a woman. Why should I have to be ashamed or afraid of my own body? Why
should the fear of a man force me to endure my breasts being flattened, have my genitals
mutilated, often sewed shut to prevent me from experiencing sexual pleasure till a husband
can literally cut me open and have me for the first time! Why should I have to suffer my
entire life because I was born with the body of a woman! Don’t we have to pay for being
women all our lives anyway? Why do you have hair on your body? Hide it! Cover your face!
And why do you have breasts? Cover your breasts! And why hips! Cover it, and the butt too!
Why do you have a vagina? Keep it secure! Thighs! Feet! Cover them as well! From the root
of her hair to the tip of her toe, every part of a woman’s body has been put under embargo
by the patriarchal society that surrounds us.
Breast ironing involves hot stones being rubbed on a pubescent girl’s breasts to arrest their
rapid growth. Even when translated to Bangla the name remains just what it claims to be –
the ironing of breasts, like we iron our clothes. Let more people become aware that such a
thing exists, that breasts are things that can be ironed too! Despite the number of rapes
men commit, their genitalia never face being melted with hot iron as punishment. But
despite not having done anything wrong with their breasts, women force women to

undergo breast ironing only to prevent men from being swayed into committing a crime at
the sight of them. None of this is for the sake of women, it’s all of the sake of the men. The
sole objective behind practices like breast ironing and female genital mutilation is the drive
to make sure that if a girl manages to escape rape or harassment when she is young, then
the man who gets to marry her is promised someone chaste, a virgin body that he can be
the sole consumer of. The primary function of women’s bodies is to provide sexual pleasure
to men. They must keep their bodies pure to be offered up to the opposite sex.
Consequently, the most primitive rituals connected with preserving the chastity of a woman
are still so very prevalent everywhere, definitely in Africa, and in Asia as well. Many Africans
and Asians too, no matter which end of the earth they move to and settle in, carry their
customs there with them irrespective of how inhumane some of those rites might be.
Misogyny is now travelling from one end of the world to the other; it is being globalised.
Practices from many backward cultures are seeping into many progressive and so-called
civilised societies. On the other hand, discourses on human rights, women’s equal rights,
democracy and the freedom of expression, all hallmarks of a civilised social system, are not
making the reverse journey and finding their way into repressive and regressive societies.
What people claim as democracy is not democracy at all, while most regular people are not
even made aware about things like human rights and gender equality. When someone tries
to rectify these oversights, they are invariably trapped in some circuitous legal mess and
their freedom to express their opinions is taken from them. Such is the picture in much of
the east. The civilised societies of the west, which men and women have built out of years
of struggle over human rights and women’s rights, now face a severe crisis when practices
like female genital mutilation and breast ironing find their way there, or when their social
institutions find themselves stumped by the rise of things like burqas and naqabs.
Many women of the west have found their life-partners in many men who have immigrated
there from other cultures. When you live in one society it’s expected that people will meet,
that they will fall in love. Many women from the west have come into contact with men
from the east and taken to the hijab, the burqa etc. Who can tell that one day they will not
lose every last bit of reason and logic and end up advocating for terribly misogynist customs
like breast ironing and genital mutilation as well! As it is the left has long been
magnanimous in its proclamations that customs of all communities have to respect, even
the hijab and the burqa and suchlike. Perhaps even the ritual of genital mutilation too! Will
we never accept the fact that not all cultural customs deserve to be accorded the same
respect? One culture encourages music and dancing, the other propagates breast ironing –
do they both deserve the same respect? Just because a handful of misogynous people
continue to sustain and preserve patriarchal and misogynous customs does not make it
necessary for us to adhere to them. Rather we must rise up in protest to ensure such rites
are prohibited for good. We must not forget that in most communities the majority of
traditions and customs are inherently laced with misogyny. In order to truly become civilised
we must acknowledge the importance of equal rights of women in society. In order to truly
become civilised we have no recourse other than completely delegitimising any and every
misogynous tradition that we see around us.

The perfect marriage

I am so happy to see Deepika and Ranveer smiling and laughing during their wedding day. I never saw any bride laughs on that day. Since my childhood I have been witnessing brides are sad and grooms are glad. It is true for a bride no matter how rich she is, how beautiful or educated she is, she is sad. No matter what her political and religious beliefs are, she is sad. Brides are sad because they are moving to uncertainty. Subcontinent’s most marriages are unfortunately arranged marriages. And almost all men, irrespective of their religion, they demand or expect dowry. Even though Muslim men need to pay ‘mahr’ or money to bride, still it is common that they ask for dowry from girls’ family. We know how women are tortured even killed by their in-laws if they are not capable of paying dowry. Misogynistic patriarchal culture is so deep-rooted here that it is almost impossible to make people treat women as equal human beings. It was a part of Bengali ritual that men had to tell their mothers while going to a bride’s house to marry her that ‘I am going to bring a slave for you’. Bengali men may not say it nowadays, but they mean it. They marry so that wives can serve them and their parents and siblings. A bride moves to groom’s house, and she is forced to adapt with a bunch of strangers and accept everyone as her most closest relatives and start cooking and doing all household chores. They are just unpaid maids. Men are glad during the wedding day because they get dowry money, as well as a slave for the house, a free cook, a free cleaning lady, a free caretaker,a free gardener, a free nurse, a sex slave, and a free child-bearing machine. Women are hundreds in one. They have to. Otherwise, they are not ‘good women’. If women are not ‘good women’, society will definitely make women’s life hell. Women are forced to accept all anti-women societal systems.

So, in our society, not many couples want female babies. Because females are a burden. Collecting dowry money for daughters marriage is quite challenging for poor or lower middle-class families. I wonder how popular the dowry system is that no law can make it go.

We now know that there are hundreds of reasons for women to cry during their wedding day. They go to a house of uncertainty. They do not know how the man would behave, whether she would be a victim of bride burning or domestic violence. They do not know they would be cut into pieces and put in the refrigerator. They do not know whether they would be strangled to death or beaten to death. This is so common among all classes and castes and creeds in the subcontinent.

The truth, marriage cannot make life secure. If anything can make women’s lives secure and safe, that is financial independence. Dependent women have insecurity, inferiority complex, and many other issues. Patriarchy has been telling women to be dependent on fathers when young, on husbands when grown up, on sons when old. When would women start to reject the anti-women guideline of patriarchy?

Deepika is an independent woman. Deepika and Ranveer are in love. They are not victims of arranged marriage. They know each other well, they are friends, and they want to become husband and wife, they have become. They fulfill their wishes. They are happy marrying each other. Deepika would not need to be dependent on her father or husband. She is neither a slave of her husband nor a slave of her in-laws. She has her own house. She will never allow any domestic violence because financial independence has made her stronger than millions of women who are not allowed to earn their own money or if earn, are forced to give all they earn to husbands. Women’s money does not belong to women. Money always belongs to men no matter who earned it. People believe that women are considered lesser humans, so they can earn but they do not know how to spend money.

Deepika is happy, Priyanka also is. But many Bollywood actresses were not happy. Some of them committed suicide. Deepika is loved by Ranveer. Both are gorgeous and talented. I want women to wipe their tears and laugh on their wedding day. I want them to laugh like Deepika, I want to see women happy like Deepika. I want they say NO to arranged marriages, NO to financial dependency, NO to dowry, NO to domestic violence, NO to marital rape, NO to patriarchy, NO to misogyny.
Deepika and Ranveer will make love. But unfortunately, most women in the subcontinent have to be passive on the bed. Men do not like to see women equally active during sexual acts. It is men who do sex, as they believe sex is for the enjoyment of men, and men only. Women are supposed to dedicate their body for the sexual pleasure of their husbands, whenever husbands desire. Many women are victims of marital rape. I do not know why marital rape is not considered a crime anywhere in the subcontinent. Many women still do not know what orgasm is. The male orgasm is important, not the female orgasm. In some societies, female genital organs are mutilated so that they can not enjoy orgasm.

It is enough for the traditional joint family. Man and woman should start living in their own home from day 1 after marriage. Living with in-laws is really weird. No woman with dignity and honour would move to husband’s parent’s house to live for the rest of her life. Men do not go to live with his in-laws, women also should not go to live with her in-laws. Women do not need to be submissive only because society wants them to be submissive. And they do not need to sacrifice their lives for husbands and husbands’ relatives. Women have their own life and they should decide what to do with that life. They deserve to be happy. Most women are indoctrinated in patriarchy that they sincerely believe that a woman’s happiness is in her husband’s happiness.

Women need to learn how to enjoy everything life offers to them. Her own identity is more important than her identity as a wife, or a mother. She must not give up her own surname in order to take husband’s surname. I wish Deepika would not turn to be Deepika Singh. I wish she would remain as Deepika Padukone exactly the way Ranveer would remain as Ranveer Singh.
Husband and wife should be respected as individuals. They should stay together as long as love exists. If there is no love, it is horrible to live as a couple under the same roof. Nothing is better than divorce if love is not there anymore. It is also weird to live with someone without love for the sake of children. Children get depressed and disturbed when they see no love between their parents. If women are independent, they would not hesitate to divorce abusive husbands or the husbands they love no more.

I hope Deepika and Ranveer become the ideal happy couple. Neither of them needs to give up their identity or their job for the marriage.

Women’s Day – It comes and it goes

We celebrate all kinds of special Days in today’s time – Children’s Day, Labour Day, International Day of Persons with Disabilities, Father’s Day, Mother’s Day. The reason behind commemorating these entities is that our children, the disabled, the workers, our parents don’t receive sufficient respect throughout the rest of the year and that we must mark an occasion to emphasize the importance of these roles in human society. The International Women’s Day is one such occasion. A woman, much like children, disabled individuals, a person belonging to the working class is a vulnerable object. And that, probably, is why civil society has granted a day in the year for compassion towards womenfolk.

I remember, nearly thirty years ago, when I’d demanded the ‘freedom of the uterus’, this particular expression had shaken up the bulwarks of patriarchy to not a slim degree. Thousands of religious fanatics had thronged the streets waiting to tear Taslima apart. Well, at least they weren’t the educated elite. And what were the respectable educated men doing then? Were they singing my praises – no, not! They were sitting in their comfortable apartments with their friends and discussing how best to get rid of me. While the fanatics were deliberating on my beheading out in the open, the genteel men plotted the same in the privacy of their drawing rooms. On the other hand, at every turn, I was expected to justify exactly what I’d meant by the ‘freedom of the uterus’. I would politely explain, whether a woman wishes to have children or not is her decision, at what age to have them and how many, that, too is her choice; whose semen to let enter her and who’s not to, this decision also rests entirely with her. My explanation had incensed many at the time. The elite, the unschooled, the literate, the illiterate, all kinds of men had turned anti-Taslima, for every single one of them believed that a woman’s body,every part of her body, indeed her entire physical existence were owned by men and men only. A woman has no say over the matter of her own body, she doesn’t deserve a say, and if she does hold an opinion, then she must be a ‘whore’. And a ‘whore’ I was called in Bangladesh, although at the time I’d been working as a medical doctor at a Medical College Hospital and was already a reputed writer.

The word ‘whore’ is one that’s hurled at women by all sorts of men in order to frighten her, to make her cower and crawl back into a grotto-like a fragile earthworm. Women who have been deceived by fate, cast off for some reason or another, stricken by poverty, sickness or ill-fortune are gathered by patriarchy and turned into sex slaves for the sexual satisfaction of men. It is such a woman that men call a ‘whore’. As also the woman who has defied all constraints placed upon her by dint of her gender, has refused the trammels of sex-slavery, has gone out and educated herself, made herself independent, not needing or seeking out male validation, ` is possible that many women have consented to the hijab simply to avoid being branded a ‘whore’ or safeguard themselves from getting raped. But can the hijab really protect anyone? Men force women to become whores for their own interests, and men also use the word whore to humiliate women whom they do not like. For many years now, I’ve been telling the women I meet not to kowtow before this abuse, not to be frightened when she’s called a whore, not to relent but continue undaunted on their own paths in life.

Does the story of my life not demonstrate with perfect clarity how terribly misogynistic Bengali society is the way it stands today? Must I spell it out for myself every year that – despite never having killed or violated anyone, looted, cheated or deceived anyone – the crime that got me banished from my own land was writing a novel about the liberation of women in society. I’ve been banished for having the gall to claim that an empowered woman doesn’t pay heed to the barbaric rituals and customs that constrain her, that she has no respect for them. If we belonged in a truly just and equal society, I wouldn’t be living in exile like this. It is only autocratic societies that banish their writers and stifle voices of dissent among its people.

Bangladesh celebrates International Women’s Day with pomp and fanfare. It’s their attempt to convince the world that they are indeed a civilized nation. Possibly also to tell the world that if a woman can be Prime Minister of the country, women here are allowed to inhabit other positions of power as well. So that the rest of the world may believe that women are accorded equal rights as men in the country and allowed to exist freely in the spaces they inhabit, that women are allowed education and healthcare to lead a life as qualitatively rich as a man’s. That a woman may be allowed to hold her own moral, ethical and political beliefs, stand for elections, assume leading roles in a system not rigged against her. Who is to contest these egalitarian claims? After decades of struggle against discrimination, who is to say whether a woman may really have all this without borrowing from the power and privilege of her eminent father, or a well-known husband, or her famed male sibling? Tell us, how many ordinary women have been allowed the privilege to continue her education, have not been married off forcefully by her family to serve as an unpaid maid at husband’s household, have been allowed to make decisions that freely affect her own life? Tell us, how many women in the country can honestly claim to have full sovereignty over the terrains of their own bodies, claim they may choose to or reject the idea of having children of their own? What clothes a woman will wear, which places she travels to, where she spends her money, how far she may be educated, what she will eat, whether she will bear children or not – every single decision forming the trajectory of her life rests with the male members of her family, not with herself! It’s not simply her body that belongs to others, it’s her whole life. A woman is a marionette – she does what she’s ordered to do, she may not defy commands from those above her, and she may never dare display a glitch in her programmed servility! And the woman who wants to go against the grain, be a free person of flesh-and-blood, make her choices, utilize her education to be an autonomous individual in her own right, she is a dangerous element who must immediately be eradicated. Take her life, violate her, shame her, send her away into exile!

The violation and abuse continue. Physical, psychological, in all spheres of a woman’s existence. The act of raping her has little to do with sexuality. It is to establish his dominance over her, to exert his will through brute force, compelling her forced submission to the misogyny that enslaves her through fear. Every year, the International Women’s Day comes and subsequently, passes. Beginning right from the old woman to the young girl, nobody’s lot improves. What use is such a Day then? If misogyny still gets free reign for perpetuating infinite brutality, if patriarchy still thrives with equal strength and force as it did before, what’s the point of having this blasted Day marked as special on our calendars?
So, here is my poem for Women’s Day:

They said—take it easy…
Said—calm down…
Said—stop talkin’…
Said—shut up….
They said—sit down….
Said—bow your head…
Said—keep on cryin’, let the tears roll…

What should you do in response?

You should stand up now
Should stand right up
Hold your back straight
Hold your head high…
You should speak
Speak your mind
Speak it loudly
Scream!

You should scream so loud that they must run for cover.
They will say—’You are shameless!’
When you hear that, just laugh…

They will say— ‘You have a loose character!’
When you hear that, just laugh louder…

They will say—’You are rotten!’
So just laugh, laugh even louder…

Hearing you laugh, they will shout,
‘You are a whore!’

When they say that,
just put your hands on your hips,
stand firm and say,
‘Yes, yes, I am a whore!’

They will be shocked.
They will stare in disbelief.
They will wait for you to say more, much more…

The men amongst them will turn red and sweat.
The women amongst them will dream to be a whore like you.
***

Gender stereotyping needs to end

It was around 1993 when some women working in Bangladesh’s garment factories used to come visit me. The problems they faced at that time were less wages, long and extra hours of work, no transport back home, no matter how late at night it may be, absence of maternity leave, and to top it all, sexual harassment. Today, 22 years on, the problems remain just as acute. The same poverty, the same abysmal work conditions, the same low wages and the same rampant sexual harassment. Occasionally, we come across news of how there was a fire in some factory and several women succumbed to it.

These factories came into being somewhere around 1976, hit a peak period around the 90s and continue to thrive till now. So much so that today, Bangladesh’s chief export is garments. A majority of workers in these factories are women, and therefore, largely neglected by the nation’s lawmakers. If the country understood the worth of this workforce, it would have created a better working environment for them. But what it has inflicted upon them is a labyrinth of lies and deceit, completely setting aside all international labour laws. MisogyBangladesh has, in fact, honed its skills in keeping its women in the worst possible scenario.
There is no benevolent attitude in offering employment to women, instead, the attitude is that of looking at women as “cheap objectified subjects” rather than as human beings. These women cannot ask for better, more humane conditions of employment, but can be forced to work ungodly hours to suit their masters’ needs. The idea of labour is the means to an end. If there is death along the way, there is always more cheap labour available to fill the space.

But then, there is a gender bias of wages not only in Bangladesh but across the world. Gender stereotyping — the judgment passed on a human being based on their gender — is an inherent vice that has dug deep roots in society. Some familiar examples are the notion that a woman doesn’t need money to survive because a family is run by its male head. Thus, her earnings are but a frivolous sum and her work outside is trivial. It is the men who carry everything on their shoulders; women do not have it in them to work at higher posts or to take important decisions in a workplace. They are emotional by nature, prone to sentiments and frail, hence more suitable for raising children rather than raising professional issues. This gender bias makes it easier for women to lose jobs than to get them.

The world is changing rapidly and women these days are not only handling their families but are also instrumental in sustaining them. But still, they lag behind men in all facets of life. The roots of this gender bias are so deep that they are impossible to get rid of no matter how many times a woman puts herself through a trial and comes out victorious. The standards by which women are measured even today are their beauty and not by their qualifications. And because women are looked upon as sex objects rather than human beings, it is easier for young beautiful women to get jobs — we have all heard about terms like “casting couch” and sexual favours asked from women to give them a job that they deserved on merit in any case. Women are targeted for harassment wherever they are. This is more rampant in places where their basic rights are denied on a daily basis.

Just a few days ago, an acquaintance argued with me that the muscular superiority of men entitles them to a higher place than women who are by nature weaker. I refuted it by asking if every job was a physical test that required brute strength? The reply was “No.” So I asked, “Then how did brawn found more favour than brains?” I received no reply, but I am certain he was hurling the choicest of profanities at me in his head.

What we first need to do is to get rid of such anti-women myths. If not, these will further fuel the gender bias that has become so predominant in society. To cure any illness, we must first eradicate its cause, else it will always lurk behind the shadows bidding its time.

About half the world’s population consists of women. If such a force is considered to be weak, denied the opportunities they are entitled to, and their contributions go unacknowledged, then it is matter of shame for the entire human race. As I have so often repeated, women are not meant only for household chores and sexual pleasure. They are more than capable of holding their own ground, and it is time to recognise that and demolish these demarcations of society, or suffer at our own peril on its outcome.

#yesallwomen

I would not see such a strong campaign for feminism if I did not read #yesallwomen tweets. I am so moved by thousands of heart touching tweets posted by women of all ages, from different parts of the world. It is amazing to see the problems women facing in the West, in the East, in the South and in the North are the same. I can’t stop myself from mentioning some of my favourite tweets.
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Oppression against women is much more nasty, brutal and barbaric

Wonderful film but very mild. Just a little bit of assault in the street. No rape or gangrape, no domestic violence, no dowry murder, no bride burning, no sex trafficking, no sex slavery, no stoning to death, no burqa etc. We know very well that we who do not want patriarchal society, do not want matriarchal society either, we rather want equal society. This film is not about equal society, this is just to imagine how a man might experience a sexual assault in a matriarchal society. Everyone should have some reverse experience. How would you feel if it happened to you? Men always forget the golden rule, ‘one should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself.’

The film maker Eléonore Pourriat is now working on her next project – a mockumentary about the removal of pubic hair. I am waiting for that film. I hope that will be much more stronger.

Gender-based censorship

The next guest blogger today is MEREDITH TAX. She has been a writer and political activist since the late 1960s. She was a member of Bread and Roses, an early socialist-feminist group in Boston, and her 1970 essay, “Woman and Her Mind: The Story of Everyday Life,” is considered a founding document of the US women’s liberation movement.

In A Room of Her Own Virginia Woolf asked why the literary and intellectual world (overwhelmingly male in 1929) was so cold to works written by women. She concluded that men need to believe women see them as superior beings in order to justify their control of society; hence evidence of women’s actual views is unwelcome. Silencing of women writers is thus essential to patriarchy. Recent cases of gender-based censorship, ranging from Taslima Nasrin in India to feminist bloggers in the United States, indicate that Woolf’s analysis still holds.

And what is gender-based censorship? The Women’s World Organization for Rights, Literature and Development (Women’s WORLD) defined it in The Power of the Word: Culture, Censorship and Voice, drafted by yours truly in 1995:

“Women who write on issues of state politics are silenced by the same means used to silence men in opposition, though, in practice, even these forms of censorship are affected by gender. But gender-based censorship, as we see it, is much broader and more pervasive than this official, organized suppression. It is embedded in a range of social mechanisms that mute women’s voices, deny validity to their experience, and exclude them from the political discourse. Its purpose is to obscure the real conditions of women’s lives and the inequity of patriarchal gender relations, and prevent women writers from breaking the silence, by targeting women who don’t know their place in order to intimidate the rest.”

Though much gender-based censorship today is done in the name of religion, its roots are in misogyny and sexual panic. Take, for instance, the US, where this month’s big story is “Why Women Aren’t Welcome on the Internet,” by feminist journalist Amanda Hess, who describes herself as a freelance writer reporting on sex, Hollywood, teenagers, and technology, and whose blog is called Sex with Amanda Hess. Among other examples, she notes the blizzard of online rape threats that hit Caroline Criado-Perez when she started a website petitioning the Bank of England to put more women’s faces on banknotes. Hess also notes the lack of action on internet death and rape threats and the assiduous passing of the buck between law enforcement agencies and internet companies. Last year, for instance, US atheist blogger “skepchick” Rebecca Watson found that the reaction of the police when she reported death and rape threats was to say they couldn’t do anything unless someone actually did attack her, “at which point they’d have a pretty good lead.”

All this can have a chilling effect on women’s freedom of expression. As Hess relates, “Threats of rape, death, and stalking can overpower our emotional bandwidth, take up our time, and cost us money through legal fees, online protection services, and missed wages.” Conor Friedersdorf postulates that such “gendered online abuse” may explain why there are so few prominent women bloggers compared to men; in response to a constant stream of threats and invective, many of his women friends “either shuttered their personal blogs and stopped writing for the public, or shifted their journalistic efforts to a traditional format rather than the more personalized blog format.”

The internet is an area in which censorship operates differently for men and women, for the interests of women bloggers, who need to feel safe enough to write, conflict with those of internet trolls who want to feel free to abuse women as much as they like. The feminist movement fought for many years to develop legal protections like the US Violence Against Women Act, which criminalizes phone threats, and recently proposed including online threats. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a watchdog group, opposed this idea, citing privacy considerations. But should privacy trump death threats? In the age of Snowden, nobody wants to call for more government interference in online communications yet, like freedom of religion, male self-expression must be limited by recognition that women too have rights, and that women’s voices—especially when they take up subjects others do not want to deal with—are central to democracy, equality, and the public good.

The same consideration applies to Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin, whose censors have brewed a lethal mix of fundamentalism, political opportunism, and sexual silencing to try to shut her up. In 1994 Nasrin was driven from Bangladesh by a combination of Islamist fatwa and government indictment for “offending religious feelings.” The Islamists hated the way she criticized religion and the government hated her because she wrote a book exposing Muslim violence against Hindus, which the Bangladesh National Party government claimed did not exist. She was put under death threat, went underground, and became one of the Northern media’s first poster girls for Islamist mistreatment of women. I helped organize a campaign on her behalf at the time and, I wrote in 2002, thought sex was as central to her persecution as religion or politics:

“Nasrin did not have to flee Bangladesh merely because she wrote a novel about the persecution of its Hindu minority, or told an Indian reporter the Sharia … was outdated and should be left behind. Other Bangladeshi writers, male and female, have said such things; some have also been threatened by fundamentalists; but most are still there. Nasrin combined the violation of those taboos with an even more daring transgression: She opened the closet door on a whole world of subterranean sexual experience and feeling, much of it abusive, and none of it considered fit to be discussed. She wrote about sex and religion and state politics all together, and she did it at a bad time, when fundamentalism was on the rise. The combination did her in.”

Nasrin eventually settled in Kolkata ,where she lived quite happily from 2004 until 2007, when Islamists began protesting her existence again. What had begun as a movement by poor, largely Muslim farmers against forced industrialization and land seizures in Nandigram got deflected by political manipulation into a riot over Nasrin. The ruling party in West Bengal, at that time the leftwing CPI(M), found it a lot easier to get rid of her than to deal with land issues. When I saw Nasrin the next year in New York, she told me they had shipped her off to Delhi without even giving her time to pack. In Delhi the federal government essentially kept her under house arrest for months, claiming this was for her own protection while trying to convince her to get out of India.

One might ask why leftwing secularist parties like the CPI(M) and its federal ally, the Congress Party, would collude with Muslim fundamentalists to suppress free speech. As Nasrin says, it is all about electoral politics. “Who doesn’t want to get Muslim votes? They are 25% of the population.”

She stayed away for a few years, then returned to India and, being barred from Kolkata, settled in Delhi, where she resumed work on a projected TV series for a Bengali station. The series, called Doohshahobash, which means something like Difficult Cohabitations, is about a Hindu family of three sisters who confront various kinds of gender oppression. The station ran a huge advertising campaign, plastering Taslima’s face on billboards around Kolkata, and the series was to be broadcast in December.

But suddenly, on December 20th, everything ground to a halt when a coalition of 22 Islamist groups went to the government of West Bengal, now led by the Trinamool Congress party. Even though they hadn’t seen any of the series, they were so certain it would offend Muslims that they insisted it should be banned; otherwise people might riot. And, like the CPI(M) before it, the Trinamool Congress caved. A station spokesperson told The Hindu, “due to external pressure we have deferred the telecast of this serial indefinitely.”

As Nasrin noted in her blog, this censorship was met by a stunning lack of protest from Kolkata’s literary community. Garga Chatterjee made a similar point in the Indian weekly Outlook: “Kolkata’s current and the erstwhile rulers, the Trinamool Congress and the CPI(M) respectively, seem to be competing with each other in setting a record on muzzling free speech at the instigation of groups in whose worldview free speech has no place. While there may be short-term electoral gain for such posturing, this race to the bottom has no winners.”

The silence of Kolkata’s literary lions may have more to do with male sexual solidarity than party politics. Nasrin is not deferential and has always been outspoken on issues of rape, child molestation, and sexual harassment. The second volume of her memoirs, Dwikhandito, was banned in Kolkata, allegedly because it violated Muslim sentiments, but she told me in 2005 that the real reason was because she named names about sexual harassment and relationships within the literary elite. She recently accused a well known Delhi intellectual, Sunil Gangopadhyay, of taking advantage of his position to harass young women writers. Public discussion of this kind of thing is relatively new in India, where a law against workplace sexual harassment was just passed in April 2013, and a young journalist’s story of being assaulted in an elevator by her editor at the muckraking paper Tehelka made headlines in November.

A democracy’s commitment to freedom of expression can be measured by how it treats two groups of people: those of such low status that they have no voice, and those who push the limits of acceptable speech. There is no need to protect those who are powerful and those who never offend. Protesting gender-based censorship is part of mobilizing against rape and sexual harassment, for women’s freedom of expression and movement are related, and if either is limited to what does not offend, it will not exist.

Public secular space, on the internet and on the streets, in intellectual fora and on TV, is essential to the health of civil society. This space must be as accessible to women and atheists as to men and the pious. That means that men—including Kolkata intellectuals and US bloggers—should defend women’s right to a public voice, and women should be able to speak publicly without fear of violence. And if these women then offend against male amour-propre, hey, as Virginia Woolf said in 1929, that’s part of free speech.

Some unreal women talk about an unreal world

(Source)

They say: ‘Real women do not need feminism. The problem with feminism is the cultivation of an attitude of victimization. Feminism tries to make women believe they are victims of an oppressive, male-dominated, patriarchal society.’

Do those women try to make women believe society is not patriarchal or male-dominated and women are not oppressed?
Those superficial, silly, stupid, snobbish, selfish unreal women are talking about an unreal world that does not exist. It is like a bunch of delusional people talking about god. I wish they at least knew that without feminist movement they would not be there where they are now. They are not confined to their kitchen and they are speaking their mind.

Miri protested against anti-feminist propaganda.

PZ Myers is angry with anti-feminists.
Ophelia Benson reacted.

Avicenna is angry too.

I would be very happy if patriarchy becomes extinct. But the truth is, it exists. So does misogyny. Sex trafficking, sex slavery, domestic violence, bride burning, bride trade, dowry murder, female infanticide, child marriage, sexual abuse, rape, gang rape, exploitation, stoning, whipping are our everyday reality. Hope those women come out of their imaginary shell to see how real women in real world get tortured and murdered by real men living in real patriarchy.

Women have been fighting for equality and justice for centuries. Not only women, men too. But throughout history misogynist men and women have been very active against women’s basic human rights. Patriarchy would have been extinct long time ago, if anti-feminist misogynist-women did not help men to keep it. It is impossible for men alone to make male dominated society survive without the help of women.