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I have done a few ‘Hero of the Day’ posts and I have a few more on the way. The recipients have done great work spreading important information, rallying against injustice, educating us masses, and have been generally awesome. But today’s hero is special. On top of those usual achievements, she’s done it all while personally facing off against one of the leading threats to civilization as we know it. Oh, and she’s only 15.
The Taliban, with its “all powerful god”, is threatened by literate females. So much so, it will use brutal violence, murder, torture, and arson to enforce its view that girls should not be allowed in schools. What else would you expect from the “religion of peace”?
Malala Yousafzai, from the Swat district of Pakistan, however, does not agree. With aspirations of becoming a doctor or a politician, Malala is a strong advocate for gender equality, especially for equal access to education. Like many other girls in Swat, Malala has risked her life to attend classes against the wishes of the Taliban. At the same time, she was also doing something extraordinary. Malala, using a pseudonym, started blogging for the BBC, reporting to the world what it was like to be an ordinary child under the Taliban as it destroyed schools and forbade girls from attending the ones they hadn’t destroyed yet.
Adam B. Ellick from the New York Times made a documentary called Class Dismissed profiling Malala, her activism, and the difficulties and dangers for girls wanting to go to school.
Since the documentary, Malala’s has kept on advocating for girl’s education, growing in influence and visibility. This earned her and her father numerous death threats from the Taliban. Undeterred, Malala kept working for equal education opportunities.
On October 9th, 2012, the Taliban tried to make good on its threats. To preserve the glory of Islam an Allah, Malala was shot in the head.
Now recovering in a UK hospital, Malala isn’t done yet. Her message and story are spreading and the world is taking note.
Tarek Fatah, from Toronto, started a petition on change.org to nominate Malala for a Nobel Peace Prize. The response has been tremendous. The Prime Minister and the leaders of all of our major parties have unanimously endorsed this petition. If you haven’t done so already, please sign as well.
In the west we’ve had huge media organizations cower and retreat when islamist extremists raised their hate filled voices. In Swat, a 15 year old girl stood directly against the guns, bombs, soldiers, and machetes wielded by the worst of brutal zealots, just outside her door.
It is interesting to watch the mainstream media wrestle with feminism and the backlash from the perceived violations of cultural norms. The Guardian blogged a piece called Why is ‘feminism’ such a tough badge to wear?‘ Then the Blogsphere reacted and some thoughtful writing took place and was captured by Slendermeans and thus appeared in my wordpress reader and is now coming to you here and now.
Echidne of the Snakes has broken down the arguments and responded quite succinctly to each in kind, however I think she does a particularly marvellous job of ferreting out some of the reasons why feminists are often negatively identified in our society. I’ve added italics in the quoted material.
“This is the argument that the piece itself mentions:
As Siobhan Garrigan, who studies English at the University of Lincoln, puts it: “Young people don’t want to identify as feminists because there is this man-hating, frumpy, lesbian image forced on us.”
[…]
[…], those three accusations don’t have anything to do with each other. The first one states that anyone wanting gender equality must hate men. That’s pretty weird. The second one argues, that women who want gender equality cannot be attractive enough to get men in a system where women are second-class citizens. Only unattractive women would want equality!
That’s illogical, too. Finally, one’s sexuality has nothing to do with one’s desire for a gender-equal society. All illogical, says Echidne.
But squint your eyes a bit, and you see the underlying pattern, what all three of these things share: These women do not try to please men. Or that’s the suspicion of anyone using those accusations. Wanting equality means not wanting to please men. Therefore, women who want equality must hate men, be unattractive or prefer women in their sexuality.”
I’m thinking that the not pleasing men angle is the interesting notion brought up by Echidne (as I think more I realize she’s precisely on target – her observations parallel what I’ve read in Beauty and Misogyny by Sheila Jeffreys so far. Oh, go read B&M asap!). What comes into play is the interference feminism brings to the cultural norms of society. Women are supposed to perform to the expectations of men, those are the expectations in our society. Feminists explicitly do not conform to what is expected of them, thus opprobrium results. Hence we get the homosexual, ugly and frumpy characterizations.
Here lies the danger of letting ones opponents define who you are – women are beset by the misogyny implicit in society, like running a race with and just because of your two XX chromosomes you get a extra forty pound backpack to wear for the duration of the race. Who would want to add to their already onerously full backpack by self identifying as a feminist? The price of perofrming femininity is already so high and it is rewarded, such as it is, in the patriarchy for complying. Choosing to go against patriarchal expectations (not to mention the social conditioning of being passive and accepting) is huge; not playing by the rules disqualifies one from the limited benefits afforded to women within the patriarchal system and exposes women to damaging patriarchal animadversion as mentioned in the quoted material.
Knowing and understanding the insidious effects of patriarchy is half the battle; then one can choose the battleground and know when to take to the field. Unfortunately, patriarchy once seen, cannot be unseen. We shouldn’t fault those who have struck their patriarchal bargain, but should know what it entails.
Tough choice to make, but I do agree with Socrates – “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
Project Unbreakable is well worth your eyeball time.
Still reading Against Our Will, but found this quote on the internets –
”I wonder if the ACLU’s position (on pornography) might change if, come tomorrow morning, the bookstores and movie theaters lining Forty-second Street in New York City were devoted not to the humiliation of women by rape and torture, as they currently are, but to a systematized, commercially successful propaganda machine depicting the sadistic pleasure of gassing Jews or lynching blacks? Is this analogy extreme? Not if you are a woman who is conscious of the ever-present threat of rape.”
| — | Susan Brownmiller |
“Against Our Will” is an important book, I suggest that everyone read it as soon as possible.
“A world without rapists would be a world in which women moved freely without fear of men. That some men rape provides a sufficient threat to keep all women in a constant state of intimidation, forever conscious of the knowledge that the biological tool must be held in awe, for it may turn to weapon with sudden swiftness born of harmful intent… Rather than society’s aberrants or ‘spoilers of purity,’ men who commit rape have served in effect as front-line masculine shock troops, terrorist guerrillas in the longest sustained battle the world has ever known.”
| — | Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (1975) |
*TW for sexual violence.
Project Unbreakable is about the survivors of sexual assault. It is a photoblog of survivors holding up signs with messages about their experiences and feelings. Powerful stuff.
Abuse is epidemic in our societies, not thinking about it does not make it go away. Please link to and propagate Project Unbreakable’s message.
Trigger warning for Language, Homophobia and Racism and violence in general.
This is by no means a scientific finding. This isn’t even a good sample, but lets background that for bit and look at what is going on in the video. How many times do you hear the word “Bitch” or “Fag” or even more inappropriate terms? These are examples of people at their worst, but what I find of sociological value is the idea that when we are at our most angry the blinders of everyday “polite” behaviour quickly fall to the wayside. What is left is the unvarnished raw core of feeling and emotion that can give some insight into the some of the uglier systemic features of our society.
U Mad?
The idea that being a “fag” or homosexual apparently is one of the worst insults you can direct at another male – why? Because being homosexual equates to un-masculine thus powerless, helpless; a second class citizen in our society (where men are the ideal) you know, like being a woman (the horror). The prevalence of the word “bitch” completes the circle because being a bitch is to be female and subservient; inferior in every way. (There is more to be said, but consider this a start.)
There are tonnes of vulgarity in the video, but unsurprisingly, most of it is gender or race based. One could hypothesize that video-games bring out the worst in us, but I’d rather look at the idea that video games, as a cultural artifact of our patriarchal culture, show exactly how far we still need to go to make our society a safe egalitarian place for everyone, and not just the menz.
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Mystro
The Arbourist
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