The menace of men who hate women

IMAGINE for a moment that terrorist violence was, as some insist, linked to real grievances.

Think what the women of the world might do to some of the men.

Let's say the Iranian authorities, who insist they will not be "swayed by the hue and cry in the West", do hang or stone Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani for alleged adultery and murder. Would any Iranian diplomat be safe from the avenging female army?

Or the husband of Aisha, and the Taliban judge who ordered him to cut off his young wife's nose and ears after she dared to run away from her spouse's violence. What might the women's mujaheddin do to them? Set fire to their beards and cut off slowly the attributes they imagined conferred on them the right to mutilate another human being?

And the executioners of the nameless woman of Badghis. Or say Mullah Daoud, the Taliban big cheese who was one of three judges who declared that a widow who had become pregnant must be an adultress, and should be flogged in public until nearly dead and then shot in the head. "We gave this decision so that in future no one should have these illegal affairs," the mullah said, although no man has been punished.

The "Revolutionary Women's Command", unable to locate the mullah, would simply target any male in any country with a Pashtun name. "You must learn to suffer as we have suffered," a video made by a woman in a burka would say.

The cases are real, the fantasies of revenge are not. In some ways I wish they were. If only you could take these bearded, yelling, violent woman-haters and subject them to the same treatment they hand out. But it would be wrong, counter-productive, and there are so many of them.

Twenty years ago, political philosopher Amartya Sen raised the relatively undiscussed question of the missing women. In any population, he pointed out, you might expect slightly more women than men because of life expectancy. But in some parts of the world this wasn't the case. In China, there were 107 men to every 100 women. In India it was 108, and in Pakistan 111.

For whatever reason, this meant something like 100 million women were simply missing. So where had they gone?

Probably they were killed at birth, died avoidably in childbirth or were denied the same rights as males to medical care.

In a recent book on women in the developing world, Half the Sky, American writers Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn write about how girls in India between the ages of one and five were 50 per cent more likely to die than their brothers. "More girls have been killed in the past 50 years precisely because they were girls than people were slaughtered in all the genocides of the 20th century," they say.

Kristof estimates there are annually about 6000 "honour killings" (ie murders of women wanting minimal rights) worldwide. And as many as three million girls and women have been coerced - as opposed to recruited - into the Third World sex trade.

Weirdly, when Sen or Kristof and WuDunn or Time magazine point this out, the reaction of some in the West is to accuse them of a colonialist mentality.

One female Cambridge academic said last week - from the very belly of women's free speech and free agency - that the "affluent West" had "little to offer Afghans other than bikini waxes and Oprah-imitators". And a British critic of Half the Sky demanded: "Why are we so wonderful? Our society is still just as sexist, albeit in more subtle ways, than the burka-enforcing Taliban. Working on a farm and producing your own food is a far more viable and healthy option than slaving in a sweat or sex shop."

The dead woman of Badghis is in no position to argue that perhaps the West might have offered equality before the law, a fair trial, an absence of overwhelming judicial male violence, and life. She may have gone to her death with that "stoic docility" noted by Kristof and WuDunn. She is unlikely to have had any education, and may have regarded her death as in some way inevitable and necessary. No one seems to have asked for her views, or to have been interested in them.

And why should we be? We have our own battles to fight. We ought perhaps to lament the way the world is, the way its different cultures are, and then move on. It isn't as if we don't have plenty of stuff left over from our own misogynist past. Take that residual squeak of what the Iranians call the "golden penis" - the entitlement of the boy to a greater share - emitted every time girls do better at school. Up goes the whine that there is "feminisation" of education that disadvantages boys, who can only succeed when coursework is not assessed. What utter rubbish!

Here's why it matters so much. Even if we felt no moral imperative to help (and many do), we have every practical motive. We simply aren't cut off from the fate of the world's women. A small example surfaced last week after the shooting of the British couple in Pakistan.

We reported the cases of a number of young British women on the run from forced marriages and male "honour" violence in this country. As the Muslim Labour MP Khalid Mahmood explained, when young Asian women have the chance and the education, they certainly want to exercise their own choice.

But far more than that, the oppression of women holds back social and economic development in societies that practise legal misogyny, making them poorer and more violent.

Birth rates are higher and poverty worse in the world's anti-women cultures, where girls are usually uneducated.

And where there are more young men than young women, as a result of polygamy and early death, I bet there is also more violence, more psychosexual dysfunction, more substitution of the bomb for the girlfriend. And we all get it in the neck.

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Original piece is http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/the-menace-of-men-who-hate-women/story-e6frg6ux-1225905590147

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I just have to weigh in again to say I think Paul"s comments are excellent, and I think Brian"s comments are brilliant. I have copied some sentences to remember and suggested that my friends MAKE IT A PRIORITY to read. Fools ignore/dismiss the threats from Islam to the wider world, but as Aaronovitch concluded, from this backward belief system we "all get it in the neck."

Posted by Roberta on 2010-08-17 20:54:41 GMT

The examples of misogyny by Aaronovitch, Roberta, Paul et. al., are but a little puff in the hurricane of events occurring daily, in a cruel, criminal, and sickening history of abuse that so many Islamic cultures have institutionalized. Centuries of abuse has been linked with godliness - arrogantly professing that it"s god"s will: even to the point of cutting off the clitori of little girls, strapped to a chair in the kitchen, using a scissor or bread knife to mutilate these children for life - all in the name of Allah. Isn’t it all based on same psychosexual dysfunction, anxiety and fear of inadequacy that we see manifested again and again in Arabic and Islamic traditions? Women are forced to cover up so men won"t become aroused, rather than men simply learning to control their sexuality. Men are bigger and stronger than women, so it"s easy to be a bully - like kids in a school court yard, picking on the smaller ones. But, that an entire religious and philosophic ideology has been structured around the desire to dominate, and in this case women, lends even more credence to those who feel this "religion" is no more than a cruel and insane compilation of senseless edicts, crudely copying Judaism and Christianity in some macabre and misbegotten fashion, and perhaps missing the point entirely. Maybe it"s as simple as a means for men to compensate for deep ontologic and sexual anxiety; a man’s simple fear of inadequacy. So, we have a ideology, more a ‘religion,’ that allows a man’s anger and childish whims to be unfolded against their weaker counterparts. Indeed, that may be in part the attraction. And, the women who end up believing that shrouding themselves in black robes from foot to toe some odd form of Stockholm Syndrom, in sympathy with their captors. That all this is built on a fundamental lack of anger management, institutionalized over centuries, and promoted as godliness and the will of Allah, is astounding, in my mind. Clerics attribute religious justification for flogging women for wearing pants, or stoning the victims of rape, or mutilating the woman who flees from open violence of bullying in-laws, ‘honor killings’, etc. The insane examples abound. That repressing of women chokes and destroys the resources, intelligence and creativity of 50% of the population is obviously self-destructive for a culture, and therefore Islamic countries the world over are little more than harsh, backward, and despised sand storms of terror, and enmity – families hating the other, tribes hating the other, Sunni hating Shi’ite, and all hating the West. It’s a caldron of hatred and envy. In obvious fashion, anxiety and control are linked at the hip. One would simply feel oceans of pity for these poor, ignorant and manipulated people, if it weren"t the fact that they cause so much pain and danger to the rest of us, along with the harsh repression of their wives, daughters and mothers.

Posted by brian_007 on 2010-08-16 10:49:29 GMT

Aaronovich covers a very wide range of misogyny, not all of them related. The main problems are the mohammedan woman hating societies which idealise the male dominate seventh century Arabic tribal practises and fight us to impose it on us. The cruelty in those societies is endemic and life is not valued or respected. Women in those societies are mere chattel to be abused and in matching the PC feminists in our own societies, many of their women support the cruelty as their way of following the Arabian moon god. It is beyond belief that any religion prescribes the beating of one"s wife. It is beyond belief - at least to a Western, 21st century mind - that cold-blooded, premeditated murder is deemed to be honourable to preserve the family"s good name. The mohammedan saying that the hijab covers 1/10 of a woman"s shame and the grave will cover the remainder speaks volumes for islamic societies. But in other areas, like China, the traditional male centred demand to carry on the family name and have the responsibility to provide for aged parents operates. In India, the greed of husbands and his family for more bride money leading to the murder of wives operates and again there as in Pakistan, boys are prised and girls are neglected. Such primitive societies must not be allowed to rot in their own sexist immorality, the West needs to impose sanctions unless they modernise. As for Zelda"s comment all one needs to say is that equating comments about Gillard to femicide is a sad commentary about Western feminists.

Posted by paul2 on 2010-08-16 03:38:48 GMT

In a Saudi school fire, 15 girls died - locked IN the burning building because they were not wearing their head scarves. The mullahs insisted the doors stay barred. The ignorance and lack of humanity in these \"religious\" leaders is appalling, setting the tone and condoning brutality. Wasting the talents of half the population and elevating men to a superior position is a disaster for society. The barbaric and violent treatment of women, and of powerless men (prisoners) is the dreadful result.

Posted by Roberta on 2010-08-16 03:06:42 GMT

Misogynism is certainly a timely topic. Its noxious fumes have been all too apparent since Julia Gillard became PM.

Posted by Zelda Cawthorne on 2010-08-16 01:11:49 GMT

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