{"id":1004,"date":"2006-09-02T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2006-09-02T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/?p=1004"},"modified":"2024-03-29T16:50:44","modified_gmt":"2024-03-29T22:50:44","slug":"just-because-you-dont-see-it-doesnt-mean-its-not-there","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/uncategorized\/just-because-you-dont-see-it-doesnt-mean-its-not-there\/","title":{"rendered":"Just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mark A. Rose muses<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I have never understood why liberal feminists, who are all about women’s rights, heap all (or at least 99%) of their vitriol on President Bush, the GOP, and fundamentalist Christianty while ignoring Islam .<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It would be presumptuous of me to assume that Mark A. Rose doesn’t make the feminist blog rounds every day, but I think it’s safe to say that if he did, he wouldn’t make such a careless charge.<\/p>\n

While it is true that the bulk of American feminist attention is pointed toward our increasingly conservative government and all the subtle<\/a> and not-so-subtle<\/a> ways it seeks to restrict and rigidly define women’s roles and behaviors and rights, it is patently false that feminists are ignoring fundamentalist Islam and its detrimental effects on women.<\/p>\n

As a public service, I want to point Mr. Rose and anyone else who holds this misconception toward just a fraction of evidence to the contrary.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Here’s a list of news bulletins<\/a> at the Feminist Majority Foundation’s website that pop up if you do an article search for “Islam”<\/p>\n

\u2022 Here’s NOW’s position<\/a> on the Iraqi Constitution and the loss of rights women face under it (and, for good measure, all the stories<\/a> that pop up at NOW.org if you search for “Islam”)<\/p>\n

\u2022 Here’s my own post<\/a> from last year lauding the organizers of the Islamic femnism conference<\/p>\n

\u2022 Here’s a list of all the entries<\/a> that pop up if you search for “Islam” at Feministing<\/p>\n

\u2022 Here’s an MTSU Sidelines column by Angela White<\/a>, then merely a lowly college student but a fierce feminist and someone I looked up to a lot, writing about the Taliban months before Sept. 11, when most people had never even heard of them<\/p>\n

Despite all this, I think you could absolutely make the case that American feminists \u2014 myself emphatically included \u2014 could be doing more to help our Islamic sisters. But I don’t think you can say feminists are ignoring Islam and its effects on women. When compared with the basic problem of lack of gender parity in the religious Middle East, we probably worry way<\/i> too much about the outlandish Western sexist traditions of high heels and boob jobs and Caddychicks and all that profoundly stupid and annoying shit. We should worry more about educating and aiding Muslim men and women and working toward an increasingly accepted moderate Islam that does not seek to control its women the way fundamentalist Islam does. Because while American women may face discomfort and self-doubt when they try to live outside prescribed gender roles, women in Sharia-abiding countries and areas face pain and death for what the state and society deems improper. It’s sickening.<\/p>\n

And I think feminists are acutely aware of how sickening and sad the state of affairs is. I think we just can’t decide what to do or how best to approach the problem, because it’s such a huge and overwhelming and especially pervasive problem, the whole world over.<\/p>\n

There are a lot of factors at play here that keep many American feminists from making this type of global feminism their top priority, above abortion and birth control and stripping and porn and prostitution and rape and Supreme Court justices and everything else. First, and most obvious, is our proximity to the problem. We American feminists are all the way over here dealing with our own society’s strange brand of hyperconsumerist sexism, and doing our best to keep the White House from totally taking back the freedoms we’ve won over the past century (we can still vote, woohoo!), so we are preoccupied with our own immediate freedoms. After all, who else is going to worry about those freedoms if we get preoccupied with helping women elsewhere catch up to the 17th century \u2014 Mark A. Rose? Sorry, dude, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen you write anything positive about feminists, so we can’t count on you to hold the fort down while we go and save the Muslims from their sexist holy texts.<\/p>\n

What makes this so complicated is the whole nature of Islam and how the religion dictates everything about gender roles, and how Islam, because of its status as something relatively foreign to most of us here in America 2006, is both sacred and frightening to Americans. I think a lot of people \u2014 not just feminists \u2014 are reluctant to confront a culture for its assbackward ways because, well, what makes one culture better than another? We might all be able to agree that the fundamentalist Islamic way of treating women is bullshit \u2014 just like we may agree that Catholics have a colossally stupid view of birth control \u2014 but who are we to step in and say that any culture or religion should be forced to do things differently, or more like we in the sane, secular world do them? That’s the ultimate and most daunting problem. While I personally believe that tolerance of intolerance is complete and utter bullshit, I’m still torn about how to best defuse the volatile situation in the Mideast and get some concrete gender parity out of the struggle. You know? Does equality have to evolve on its own? Is it ethical to stand by and just let it happen, even if we’re not sure it will? How can we enlighten people without, say, bombing them or condescending to them about how behind the times they are? How do win converts that way, how do you spread secularism? Or just a moderate version of their stringent religion? How can we disseminate the notion that all people are equal and deserving of basic human dignity and parity when the holy books are interpreted by most to mean something very different?<\/p>\n

This is the crux of the problem, and it’s exacerbated by the fact that there are so many women who actively participate in their oppression because that’s what their holy texts and their fathers and mothers and brothers and imams tell them is right.<\/p>\n

How do feminists get past that? Who are these Muslim women going to trust, Allah or Gloria Steinem and the scantily clad and morally ambiguous American brigade (please note that I’m being semi-facetious)? Seriously? It’s an uphill battle but there is hope. There has to be hope. The fact that there is even an Islamic feminism movement makes me very, very happy.<\/p>\n

So, Mark A. Rose, while you may get some giddy satisfaction out of imagining that American feminists \u2014 those hairy, shrill, child-support-sucking witches! \u2014 are being hyprocritical by “ignoring” their Islamic sisters, you should just remember that American feminists are simply feeling helpless in the face of a monolithic challenge known as religious fundamentalism.<\/p>\n

Might sound a tad familiar to you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mark A. Rose muses: I have never understood why liberal feminists, who are all about women’s rights, heap all (or at least 99%) of their vitriol on President Bush, the GOP, and fundamentalist Christianty while ignoring Islam . It would be presumptuous of me to assume that Mark A. Rose doesn’t make the feminist blog rounds every day, but I think it’s safe to say that if he did, he wouldn’t make such a careless… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1004","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1jWWl-gc","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1004"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1004\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8274,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1004\/revisions\/8274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}