International – Page 49

Asking For It

Almost every time we discuss sexual assault on this blog, someone makes the argument that what a woman looks like or what she wears or where she goes is not an invitation to make unwanted sexual comments to her, touch her, or rape her. And almost every time, someone responds by asking, “Well what do women expect?” The argument goes that if you walk around in a skirt, or if you go to a bar, or if you go home with someone, then you should expect whatever the man in question is giving to you.

The idea that men are entirely incapable of behaving like normal human beings when faced with an attractive woman is not a new one, and nor is it a strictly Western one. In discussing the veil, I’ve heard many women say that they choose to wear it and feel safer when they’re covered, because then no one bothers them. I’ve heard men argue that dressing modestly is necessary so that women won’t “distract” or “incite” men. The theory, then, is that women are tempting objects who men will want to possess — and the only way to defend oneself against becoming someone’s sexual prey is by hiding and concealing your body.

Or, to take it to the next logical step, changing it.

A nationwide campaign is under way in Cameroon to discourage the widespread practice of “breast ironing”.

This involves pounding and massaging the developing breasts of young girls with hot objects to try to make them disappear.

Statistics show that 26% of Cameroonian girls at puberty undergo it, as many mothers believe it protects their daughters from the sexual advances of boys and men who think children are ripe for sex once their breasts begin to grow.

Girls are having their breasts pounded with wooden pestles and coconut shells in order to keep them from growing so that they can avoid sexual advances. And mothers do this to their daughters in the name of viginity fetishism. Thanks, patriarchy.

via Broadsheet.

No School for Girls in Afghanistan

But, but, but, I thought we won in Afghanistan! Remember? We went in and we liberated all those burqa-wearing women, because feminist goals are laudable when we can use them as an excuse to bomb the hell out of countries we dislike. We liberated them, didn’t we?

Well, not exactly. And now that we’re waist-deep in our little Iraqi quagmire, the rights of women in Afghanistan aren’t exactly priority numero uno.

Summer vacation has only begun, but as far as 12-year-old Nooria is concerned, the best thing is knowing she has a school to go back to in the fall. She couldn’t be sure the place would stay open four months ago, after the Taliban tried to burn it down. Late one February night, more than a dozen masked gunmen burst into the 10-room girls’ school in Nooria’s village, Mandrawar, about 100 miles east of Kabul. They tied up and beat the night watchman, soaked the principal’s office and the library with gasoline, set it on fire and escaped into the darkness. The townspeople, who doused the blaze before it could spread, later found written messages from the gunmen promising to cut off the nose and ears of any teacher or student who dared to return.

Saudi Women Are Speaking Online

But they’re being censored by their government because they talk about sex and God. If those were the rules here, Feministe would be thoroughly out of business.

Thanks again to Miss Pen Name, who sent me all kinds of fabulous links!

File Under “Duh”

The U.S. doesn’t have the greatest international image. Who woulda guessed?

Favorable views of the United States dropped sharply over the past year in Spain, where only 23 percent said they had a positive opinion, down from 41 percent last year, according to the survey. It was done in 15 nations, including the United States, this spring by the Washington-based Pew Research Center.

Other countries where positive views dropped significantly include India (56 percent, down from 71 percent); Russia (43 percent, down from 52 percent); and Indonesia (30 percent, down from 38 percent). In Turkey, only 12 percent said they held a favorable opinion, down from 23 percent last year.

Declines were less steep in France, Germany and Jordan, while people in China and Pakistan had a slightly more favorable image of the United States this year than last. In Britain, Washington’s closest ally in the Iraq war, positive views of America have remained in the mid-50-percent range in the past two years, down sharply from 75 percent in 2002, before the war.

No one likes the schoolyard bully, even if they’re willing to bend to his will.

“Obviously, when you get many more people saying that the U.S. presence in Iraq is a threat to world peace as say that about Iran, it’s a measure of how much Iraq is sapping good will to the United States,” said Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center.

Yes, I would say it is.

And Americans apparently have our heads in the sand about a lot of things:

Only 75 percent of Americans had heard reports of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and at the American naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, while 90 percent of Western Europeans and Japanese had heard about them.

Is the Sweatshop Defensible?

Nicholas Kristof seems to think so. For those who are TimesSelect-less like me, his column in full:

Africa desperately needs Western help in the form of schools, clinics and sweatshops.

Oops, don’t spill your coffee. We in the West mostly despise sweatshops as exploiters of the poor, while the poor themselves tend to see sweatshops as opportunities.

Read More…Read More…

The Trouble With (Western Feminism and) Islam

When it comes to addressing international feminist issues, I’ve often been criticized for arguing that progressive change must come from within oppressive societies themselves, and for saying that while it’s crucial to discuss the problems that women face world-wide, we must clean our own house before we go around lamenting the plight of “those poor Muslim women.” My point hasn’t been that we should ignore the influence of patriarchal religion, or the effects of poverty and lack of opportunity on gender equality, or the various problems that women face simply because they were born as women. But I think it’s a huge mistake to look at women “over there” and use them as an excuse for complacency here; I think it’s abhorrent when Western conservatives argue that Western feminists are selfish for demanding greater freedom, because “Look at how good you have it compared to women in Afghanistan.” Of course, these (mostly white, mostly male) conservatives are never told to examine how good they have it, but that’s another post. Even more offensive than being told to be happy with your second-class status because it’s not as bad as the worst is having the plight of Muslim women used as an excuse for this administration’s imperialist policies and violent excursions.

And so, after having been told by many an anti-feminist that I’m a bad representative for my movement because I supposedly demean international women’s issues by mentioning the U.S. (and naturally, these people are deeply invested in making sure that feminism has a good name), Laila Lalami’s article on Muslim women, feminism, and the United States struck a chord with me. She starts out criticizing far-right Muslim writers and leaders for insisting that women’s place is in the home, that the traditional family is the backbone of society and therefore women must submit to staying home and reproducing, and that women’s gifts are for child-rearing and home-making — sound familiar? Part of what’s so interesting about hearing the far right in this country champion the emancipation of Muslim women is that while they argue that women should have rights, they’re exactly in line with religious fundamentalists everywhere in limiting what those rights should be. And so they have to do this mad dance between attacking Islam because of its misogynist interpretations, and simultaneously interpreting their own religious texts in a way that oppresses women. And the cognitive dissonance doesn’t stop there:

Meanwhile, the abundant pity that Muslim women inspire in the West largely takes the form of impassioned declarations about “our plight”–reserved, it would seem, for us, as Christian and Jewish women living in similarly constricting fundamentalist settings never seem to attract the same concern. The veil, illiteracy, domestic violence, gender apartheid and genital mutilation have become so many hot-button issues that symbolize our status as second-class citizens in our societies. These expressions of compassion are often met with cynical responses in the Muslim world, which further enrages the missionaries of women’s liberation. Why, they wonder, do Muslim women not seek out the West’s help in freeing themselves from their societies’ retrograde thinking? The poor things, they are so oppressed they do not even know they are oppressed.

The sympathy extended to us by Western supporters of empire is nothing new. In 1908 Lord Cromer, the British consul general in Egypt, declared that “the fatal obstacle” to the country’s “attainment of that elevation of thought and character which should accompany the introduction of Western civilization” was Islam’s degradation of women. The fact that Cromer raised school fees and discouraged the training of women doctors in Egypt, and in England founded an organization that opposed the right of British women to suffrage, should give us a hint of what his views on gender roles were really like. Little seems to have changed in the past century, for now we have George W. Bush, leader of the free world, telling us, before invading Afghanistan in 2001, that he was doing it as much to free the country’s women as to hunt down Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar. Five years later, the Taliban is making a serious comeback, and the country’s new Constitution prohibits any laws that are contrary to an austere interpretation of Sharia. Furthermore, among the twenty-odd reasons that were foisted on the American public to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was, of course, the subjugation of women; this, despite the fact that the majority of Iraqi women were educated and active in nearly all sectors of a secular public life. Three years into the occupation, the only enlightened aspect of Saddam’s despotic rule has been dismantled: Facing threats from a resurgent fundamentalism, both Sunni and Shiite, many women have been forced to quit their jobs and to cover because not to do so puts them in harm’s way. Why Mr. Bush does not advocate for the women of Thailand, the women of Botswana or the women of Nepal is anyone’s guess.

Amazing Women

In a country where people living with HIV/AIDS are routinely shunned and ignored, a group of HIV-positive Vietnamese women have organized to share their experiences, support each other, and help others who are living with (and too often dying of) the disease.

The neighbors know what is going on when they hear peals of laughter coming from the house of Pham Thi Hue. The dying women have gotten together again.

In the U.S., HIV/AIDS activists are careful with their language, and we use terms like “living with AIDS,” because that’s what many people here are able to do now — they’re able to live years and even decades longer, and HIV is no longer the immediate death sentence that it was 20 years ago.

But in developing, less-wealthy nations, AIDS still equals death. And those who are infected often can have no illusions about what they face.

They gathered on a recent Saturday in this big port city near Hanoi, 15 women — many of whom had not told their families they were infected — sharing companionship and the relief of laughter from lives of poverty, illness and dread.

In the face of discrimination and in the absence of adequate health care, they are for the most part one another’s only support.

This is a country teetering on the brink of a nationwide epidemic, with more than 250,000 people infected with the virus that causes AIDS and with only 10 percent of those who fall ill receiving the treatment they need, according to Unaids, the United Nations agency.

The country’s health care system is well organized, but the disease has until now been concentrated among intravenous drug users and has not been treated as a priority. Experts say it is beginning to spread quickly into the broader population, and one of the chief barriers to prevention and treatment is the stigma that makes outcasts of those who carry the virus.

This is the problem with treating certain segments of the population as less important, and therefore less deserving of healthcare, then the mainstream. We saw it here when AIDS was considered a “gay disease,” and our fabulous Republican president refused to mention the disease for years. Because it was assumed that only gays were dying, nothing had to be done. It was an epidemic, but one that affected the undesirables — so why intervene?

We see this now in Southeast Asia, as AIDS is considered to be squarely in the realm of drug addicts and prostitutes. The governments ignore it, which futher marginalizes those communities and stigmatizes anyone who gets the disease — and then you have people who consider themselves members of “mainstream society” who are too afraid of the social consequences of admitting their illness. And it spreads.

What the women rarely talk about, except when they are joking, is the near-certainty that in time they, too, will fall ill and that they will be feeding, bathing and consoling one another, and caring for one another’s children, as one by one they die.

“The meaning of the group,” said Nguyen Thi Sau, 29, whose husband has already died from AIDS complications, “is so that when you die you are less lonely.”

One thing that women have always been particularly good at is forming connections and building informal communities with each other. I suppose this is a natural outcome of being traditionally excluded from male-dominated institutions and having so much of your life operate within the private sphere, but it’s something that women world-wide often have in common. The stereotype of the “emotional female” at least allows many of us to express emotions openly and honestly with other women, as we aren’t always expected to fake stoicism and posture the same way that men are. And it allows women to build these kinds of bonds — to take care of each other when they’re sick, to promise to take care of one’s children as she’s dying.

They also care for those who they never knew.

In what they say is a form of therapy, the women have chosen to look directly into the face of the suffering that lies ahead, nursing, cleaning and feeding the sick, collecting the bodies of people who die alone in hospitals or on the streets and attending the funerals of those whose families have turned their backs.

“Some days I have to take care of four people who have died in the hospital,” said Ms. Sau, who worked at a shoe factory until she was fired. A number of the patients, she said, are prisoners who have been sent to the hospital to die, covered in their own filth and still chained to their cots.

“I’m the one who has to close their eyes when they die,” she said. “After that I can’t sleep at night.”

That’s bravery.

Racism at the World Cup

I’m excited for the World Cup, if only because all my TV channels here are in Greek, and sports are the only thing I like to watch because you don’t have to understand what they’re saying. But apparently some football fans have been on their worst behavior lately.

As he left the soccer field after a club match in the eastern German city of Halle on March 25, the Nigerian forward Adebowale Ogungbure was spit upon, jeered with racial remarks and mocked with monkey noises. In rebuke, he placed two fingers under his nose to simulate a Hitler mustache and thrust his arm in a Nazi salute.

In April, the American defender Oguchi Onyewu, playing for his professional club team in Belgium, dismissively gestured toward fans who were making simian chants at him. Then, as he went to throw the ball inbounds, Onyewu said a fan of the opposing team reached over a barrier and punched him in the face.

Very nice, guys. And it’s escalating as European teams sign more players from Africa and Latin America.

Players and antiracism experts said they expected offensive behavior during the tournament, including monkey-like chanting; derisive singing; the hanging of banners that reflect neofascist and racist beliefs; and perhaps the tossing of bananas or banana peels, all familiar occurrences during matches in Spain, Italy, eastern Germany and eastern Europe.

“For us it’s quite clear this is a reflection of underlying tensions that exist in European societies,” said Piara Powar, director of the London-based antiracist soccer organization Kick It Out. He said of Eastern Europe: “Poverty, unemployment, is a problem. Indigenous people are looking for easy answers to blame. Often newcomers bear the brunt of the blame.”

And perhaps the intense xenophobia and stringent immigration laws in many European nations sets the cultural tone.

After making a Nazi salute, which is illegal in Germany, Ogungbure of Nigeria was investigated by the authorities. But a charge of unconstitutional behavior against him was soon dropped because his gesture had been meant to renounce extremist activity.

“I regret what I did,” Ogungbure said in a telephone interview from Leipzig. “I should have walked away. I’m a professional, but I’m a human, too. They don’t spit on dogs. Why should they spit on me? I felt like a nobody.”

I wonder if they also investigated the person who make racist comments and monkey noises at him.

It’s pretty clear that Ogungbure made the Nazi symbol as a comment on the fan’s behavior, reminding him of where racism led German society before. Maybe not an ideal reaction, but an understandable one. And perhaps in addition to cracking down on racism, Germany should consider free expression rights. I understand that their past is deeply marred by hate, but illegalizing gestures because they evoke a painful past seems a little heavy-handed. That said, of course the authorities are justified in removing offending fans from soccer stadiums.

Gerald Asamoah, a forward on Germany’s World Cup team and a native of Ghana, has been recounting an incident in the 1990’s when he was pelted with bananas before a club match in Cottbus. “I’ll never forget that,” he said in a television interview. “It’s like we’re not people.” He has expressed anger and sadness over a banner distributed by a right-wing group that admonished, “No Gerald, You Are Not Germany.”

That’s certainly disturbing. But the fact is, as much as Germany passes anti-racism laws, xenophobia is deeply entrenched in their laws and culture. Try and immigrate to Germany from a developing nation (or, heck, any nation) if you lack German heritage and let me know how easy it is. The German govermnet sends a clear message with its laws: If you aren’t ethnically German, then no, You Are Not Germany.

That isn’t to say that all racism can be traced back to the government, and if only the laws would change, minds would follow. Clearly, this right-wing hatred operates independent of the law. But German institutions send a clear message with their approach to immigration, and limiting public gestures isn’t going to do much to change the cultural mentality. It’s easy to say that racism doesn’t exist (or to say that you aren’t racist) when you’re surrounded by people with your same skin color — it’s another thing to have people who look differently from you living in your neighborhood, working in your ofice, and playing on your sports fields. This is what supposed bastions of liberalism in Europe are facing now. They’re not doing a great job.

Study Finds Female Genital Mutilation Can Increase Risk that Mothers or Their Babies Will Die In Childbirth By 50%

Scary.

The first large medical study of female genital cutting has found that the procedure has deadly consequences when the women give birth, raising by more than 50 percent the likelihood that the woman or her baby will die.

Rates of serious medical complications surrounding childbirth, such as bleeding, also rose substantially in women who had undergone genital cutting, according to new research being published today in The Lancet, a British medical journal.

“Reliable evidence about its harmful effects, especially on reproduction, should contribute to the abandonment of the practice,” wrote the study’s authors, all members of the World Health Organization Study Group on Female Genital Mutilation and Obstetrical Outcome.

And just so we’re clear on the what’s involved in the practice, the World Health Organization classifies the types of female genital mutilation thusly:

“Traditional Values” in Russia

Focus on the Family would be proud.

Riot police broke up an attempt by gays and lesbians to stage Moscow’s first gay pride parade Saturday. Gay activists who attempted to lay flowers near the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier outside the Kremlin wall and then assemble across from city hall were heckled and assaulted by skinheads, Orthodox Christians and radical nationalists.

Police said they had arrested about 120 people, both supporters and opponents of the parade. Gay activists were dragged away by riot police when they began speaking to reporters, but opponents of the parade, including a nationalist member of parliament, were allowed to speak and chant, “Moscow is not Sodom.”

It’s apparently not a bastion of free speech, either. But it sure does cater to those values voters.

The city had banned the parade on the grounds that it was anathema to the values of most residents and therefore presented a threat of violence. A city court upheld the ban Friday.

Mayor Yuri Luzhkov said in a radio interview Friday that a gay parade “may be acceptable for some kind of progressive, in some sense, countries in the West, but it is absolutely unacceptable for Moscow, for Russia.”

He added: “As long as I am mayor, we will not permit these parades to be conducted.”