Yeah, that's the ticket!
Hit it boys!
Posted on 11/08/2005 10:45:14 PM PST by nickcarraway
EACH time Germaine Greer visits Australia - such as last week when she turned up at the University of Sydney to receive her honorary doctorate - one is reminded how Western feminists have dropped the ball on what really matters on the feminist front.
Greer's feminism is the worst example of Western indulgence.
It's not so much what she says that matters - for it's all rather farcical these days - but what she and other so-called feminists do not say that betrays how feminism has lost its way.
On Friday Greer told her audience: "The intellect is a little bit like sexual ability: use it or you lose it." True enough and nice work if you can get it. But hardly cutting-edge feminism at work there.
Back in late 2002, Greer was back on the soapbox in Australia lambasting the medical profession for imposing unnecessary medical tests on women, such as pap smears and mammograms.
When asked about the impending war in Iraq, Greer suggested that women protest by dressing up in burkas. Go girl! Don the preferred garb of Islamic oppression to protest against what exactly? The continued oppression of women in countries such as Iraq?
Last Friday while Greer was preaching about the importance of knowledge for knowledge's sake, in New York another feminist was delivering a more sobering message. Last week Mukhtaran Mai, a 33-year-old Pakistani woman, collected an award for "her incredible courage and optimism in the face of terrible violence".
Mai was gang-raped by five men on the order of a Pakistani tribal council in 2002 as punishment for her brother's alleged love affair with a woman from another tribe. This illiterate and working-class young woman then did the unthinkable. She took her grievance to court.
A near impossible task in Pakistan where Hudood laws - a series of Islamic decrees applied in conjunction with the country's secular laws - mean that if a woman is raped, a conviction requires four adult male witnesses or the rapist confessing. If sex is held to be consensual, the woman can be charged with zina - extramarital sex - illegal under Hudood laws. In Mai's case, the five rapists were duly acquitted. While the Pakistan Supreme Court has suspended those acquittals, it remains to be seen whether the perpetrators will be punished.
When Mai received $US2500 ($3400) in compensation from the Government for her ordeal, she immediately used that money to build a school for young girls. Through a translator this shy young woman, dressed in a headscarf and flowing robes, told her glittering New York audience that her goal was to end oppression through education. Spot the feminist. Mai or Greer?
Women such as Uzma Saeed, a legal activist in Lahore, are campaigning for a repeal of the Hudood laws in Pakistan. Saeed told BBC News: "About 60 per cent of women in our jails have been imprisoned as a result of Hudood laws. I know many cases where a husband has wanted to marry again and so accused his wife of illicit relations with another man." Spot the feminist. Saeed or Greer?
Back in Australia, the silence of the feminists and others on egregious cultural issues is having devastating consequences for women. Australian feminism has been hijacked by a soft Left loathing of Western culture, a romanticisation of other (especially indigenous) cultures and a trend towards cultural relativism where it is just fine to use culture as an excuse. But criticise another culture? No way.
Indeed, the "culture made me do it" defence is now an essential part of any defence lawyer's armoury. Recently, the lawyer for one of three Pakistani brothers convicted of gang-raping two teenage girls in Sydney in 2002 argued that his client's sentence should be reduced because this 27-year-old man was a "cultural time bomb". The lawyer pointed to the defendant's "cultural conditioning"; he grew up in Pakistan, "a society with very traditional views about women".
Where was the feminist outcry? At least the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal, to its credit, treated that defence with the contempt it deserved. Last Friday Justice Michael Grove said those comments were inappropriate and the court refused to reduce the sentence given to the three Pakistani brothers.
But you can hardly blame a bloke for trying it on. After all, our persisting cultural cringe about imposing our values on those who do not share them is such that these claims are often successful.
Who can forget the footage of the Chief Justice from the Northern Territory descending on the Yarralin community. He took his courtroom to the indigenous community to sentence a 55-year-old Yarralin man for bashing and raping a 14-year-old girl.
The anal rape of a crying, screaming child saw the man go to prison for just one month because the girl was promised to the man under customary indigenous law. And who were the leading critics of this case? Chris Ellison (a white man), Warren Mundine (a black man) and a few indigenous women. But where was the white feminist outcry?
These are just the most recent examples of how liberal loathing of Western culture has become an instrument of oppression. And while feminists such as Greer are harping about the irrelevant, a new wave of real feminists is emerging where it counts. In places where it is most dangerous to speak out. Such as Pakistan. Elsewhere, Islamic feminists from countries such as Malaysia, Mali, Egypt and Iran are marching to launch a "gender jihad" in support of women's rights. This is real-life feminism at work.
If we think Western feminists had it tough, being shut out of the workplace in the 1950s, spare a thought for those women in Islamic countries who are victims of "honour killings" for bringing shame on their families, or the millions of women across western and southern Asia, the Middle East and large swaths of Africa who are mutilated by female circumcision.
These women need our support, not our silence.
Excellent article. Thanks for posting.
Yeah, that's the ticket!
Hit it boys!
You are most welcome.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton must take another spin in her grave every time some "feminist" loon like Greer comes out with one of her ridiculous statements. ("Unnecessary" tests such as mammograms? WTF is up with that??) I feel like Zell Miller and the Democrats: I didn't leave the feminists; they left me. I supported the Iraqi war in part because of what the charming Uday and Kusay used to do to whatever pretty young women crossed their path. And this young woman who used her gang-rape compensation money to start a school is nothing less than a heroine.
I just wish the anti-male loons had not stolen the honorable title of "feminist." I don't know what to call myself these days.
I shot him, but my culture dictates that I must do that to ragheads who try to rape me. There's not a judge in this part of Texas who wouldn't acquit me with that defense.
I applaud the brave women in these third world countries. They are, for sure, the true feminists!
Moral Absolutes Ping.
Good article, as far as the writer takes it. But one sore point - the poor women suffering from hideous cruelty and abuse who want the humane treatment and freedom that every human being should have are NOT "feminists". Feminism has nothing to do with natural laws, natural humane behavior, or respect and kindness between the sexes.
Feminists are silent about the cruelty and abuse as described, because that's not what they care about. The feminist agenda is about abortion, lesbianism, being able to be a slut freely without social opprobrium, leftist social policies, and man-hating. That's it. And at the same time, imagining themselves some kind of oracles, goddesses, and seers. While destroying the social fabric of human civilization.
Women desiring and fighting for human rights? All power to them. But don't insult them by calling them feminists.
Freepmail me if you want on/off this pinglist.
(Maybe someday I'll tell you how I REALLY feel.)
An excellent illustration, among many others, that feminism in America was never about women but was about dividing America in order to conquer it. Same with racism, poor vs others, etc., and all the new politically correct stuff.
Due to fortune, I happened to attend (in the corner) of some feminist "womens' movement" meetings in Berkeley in the late 60s. The feminist movement was not hijacked, it started off bad and went downhill from them. The women who started it were lesbians, screeching and hateful, all smoking dope, and filled with unimaginable anger. I neither jest nor exaggerate. Oh, and they were all communists, and many advocated armed revolution. They just prettied it up a bit for public consumption.
No they aren't. Read my comments.
I feel fortunate indeed I got to witness what I did. And, of course, the "seminal" feminist writers all support what I saw/heard.
Destructive, evil, hateful.
"The intellect is a little bit like sexual ability: use it or you lose it"
I can only assume, based on her 'intellect', that her sexual ability has also entered the twilight zone.
As I've said all along, they are feminists, their communists.
So much truth in a single article. I feel dizzy!
I remember reading a lot of that early feminist literature too. I was not only taken aback by their openly anti-male tone but also their attacks of western society and capitalism. What a lot of pro-feminists today are ignorant of or unwilling to face is that the great majority of feminists were lunatics. But naturally the mainstream press, then as now, regurgitated all their wacky pronouncements as if issued from a pantheon of female geniuses... instead of the virulently anti-male/anti-American wack jobs they really were...and still are.
One time I quoted Steinem's "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle" line to my wife. "Why I never heard of that" she said. But I guess fish are riding bicycles nowadays seeing that even Steinem got hitched a few years ago.
"Steinem married David Bale, a South African businessman, in a Cherokee ceremony conducted by her friend Wilma Mankiller. The bride wore jeans, and the couple subsequently referred to each other not as husband and wife but as "the friend I married". For three years they split their time between his home in LA and hers in New York (she has lived in the same flat since 1968), but in 2003 Bale was diagnosed with brain lymphoma.... He died just over a year ago. Steinem had grown close to his four children - among them Christian Bale, the actor."
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