There are some people who only talk to hide their true intentions, esp. politicians. They talk a lot but their beautiful words hide their true intentions of deceits & lies.
Friday, December 29, 2017
How Pakistani-Americans are entering interfaith & interracial marriages — & making them work
In this story, published in a Pakistani newspaper, there were 3 stories of Pakistanis marrying someone non-Pakistani or even non-Muslims. I am ok with Pakistanis marrying someone other than Pakistanis. Here, I will take up the issue with one of those 3 stories. I also have an issue with a Pakistani newspaper glorifying the married lives of a Muslim woman with a Jewish man.
Firstly, Islam prefers people of the same religion marrying within the same religion. It is emphasized so much so in the Quran that "even a female Muslim slave girl is better [to become a wife of a Muslim man] than a beautiful rich non-Muslim girl." The reason is that the off-springs of that marriage, their children, will grow up to be completely confused in their religious views & may end up following no religion at all or some kind of a neo-religion, which is a mix of their parents' religions & coming up with something completely new.
This we can see in the case in the story below that the daughter of Chaudhry and Kravitz think of herself as "a quarter Muslim, quarter Jewish, & half Christian." So, the Islam is already relegated to 25% & eventually, it will be very likely completely lost when she grows & ends up marrying someone for love from another religion. They are also raising their daughter by introducing her to their respective faith traditions and "observe all holidays" including "Passover, the Jewish High Holidays ... the Eid services." Top it all of, the family also "celebrate Christmas each year" & "there’s a tree & ... presents.” The young girl is learning that that's what a Muslim is all about; celebrate Eid, Passover, Christmas, Easter. Prophet Mohammad (Peace be upon him) said that Muslims who will follow other non-Muslims will end up being raised on the Judgement Day with those non-Muslims.
Secondly, Islam prohibits a Muslim woman marrying a non-Muslim man. The reason for this is that, regardless of ethnicity, religion, or race, the woman / wife usually ends up acquiescing to man / husband's wishes in major decision related to the family & household matters. So, children born in that family will end up with either the father's religion or no religion at all, since they will never know what being a Muslim is really about.
Thirdly, I have an issue with a Pakistani newspaper glorifying this marriage union in a Pakistani newspaper. I don't have an issue people, regardless of their religion or race, marrying whoever they want. I don't have an issue when self-proclaimed Muslims marry whoever they want, however they want, but I do have an issue when that marriage union is being publicized, by a newspaper in an Islamic country, to give legitimacy to such unreligious unions. We Pakistanis have an obsession with anything non-Pakistani & a majority of the Pakistani youths (in Pakistan & abroad) are being influenced with the neo-liberal narrative of Islam that Islam is so backward & undeveloped religion that they are willing to marry anyone, but a Pakistani & a Muslim, & some specifically reject such marriage proposals from Muslim Pakistanis.
Since, the skin colour cannot be changed, young Pakistanis are willing to do anything in their power they can do to change the circumstances to not look like Pakistani or Muslim. This thought that as long as a person is a good human, he / she is a good Muslim is a wrong thought in itself. Nobody knows the definition of "a good human". Islam teaches that whoever follows its teachings is a good human. Christians think they are good humans. Jews, Hindus, Buddhist; they all believe that they are good humans & better than the other.
If young Muslims think that Islam is a backward religion & it should be more like Christianity or Judaism, then Islam is not going to change, but yes, those young Muslims are more than welcome to become an ex-Muslim. There is no compulsion in the religion. Believe in it or don't. But don't be a hypocrite. Don't cherry-pick things from the religion & believe in something & reject the other. If you are so ashamed being a Muslim, then better to get out of it. If you want to marry a non-Muslim & celebrate every holiday of every non-Muslim & Muslim, then so be it, but better to get out of Islam & follow whatever you want to believe in. As I quoted Prophet Mohammad (P.B.U.H.) earlier that people who will follow others, will be resurrected on the Judgement Day, with those people. So, those "Muslims" won't be resurrected with other Muslims, but with Christians & Jews. After all, Christians & Jews are not celebrating Eids like Muslims, or Hindus are not celebrating Eid to return the actions of Muslims celebrating Holi, Christmas, Easter, Passover etc. Remember, when we try to copy others, we forget ourselves in the process & usually end up neither here nor there.
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A Muslim-Jewish marriage
A Muslim-Jewish marriage
When Amara Chaudhry’s parents emigrated from Lahore over four decades ago, they settled in a small American town in Appalachian Virginia. This is where Chaudhry was born and brought up.
“There were very few South Asian immigrants in town; they mostly came later in the 80s,” she says. Being different she, “experienced and witnessed a lot of discrimination from childhood through adulthood”.
She believes these experiences have informed her career choice. “That’s why I became a civil rights lawyer, and even within that I focused on criminal justice for so long, because I think that’s how racism is perpetrated primarily in the United States,” the Philadelphia-based attorney says.
She met her husband, John Kravitz when she initially came to Pennsylvania to interview for a legal job. Like many cinematic meet cutes, Kravitz and Chaudhry’s first interaction was on an elevator.
“It’s funny because I’m actually claustrophobic,” she says. But to avoid getting lost in the maze-like office building she avoided taking the stairs and met her future husband on her way up.
This was back in 2003, the couple finally tied the knot in 2013.
We ask Chaudhry if the differences in their cultures and religions was ever a concern for her parents.
“It was not something that my family ever mentioned to me,” she says. She adds that, “I have always felt as though John's extended family had a harder time with it.”
Chaudhry says that some in Kravitz’s family still seems “somewhat uncomfortable” with her and with their daughter, Laila.
She also feels that the South Asian Muslim community has been more accepting of Kravitz than the Jewish community is of her.
“John has accompanied me to several social events in the Muslim community, and I have done the same with him. My perception is that the Muslim community is very open and engaging towards John in these settings, but when I'm at a Jewish event, I feel like a get strange looks and people generally try to keep their distance. Of course, that could just be my perception.”
Chaudhry believes that even though America today is more diverse than the America she grew up in, it is still far from “post-racial”.
She sees this in her daughter’s interactions with some classmates. “My child actually attends a school that is incredibly diverse. Yet, there are still issues… She still gets teased for being darker than other Americans,” she says. This is despite Laila being “extremely light-skinned”.
Chaudhry and Kravitz are raising their daughter by introducing her to their respective faith traditions and more. “We try to observe all holidays. We observe Passover, the Jewish High Holidays... and Laila also attends the Eid services in our local mosque. But then since Christianity sort of permeates culture in the United States… we celebrate Christmas each year at my parents house; we stay overnight, there’s a tree, in the morning Laila opens presents.”
By introducing Laila to different schools of thought, Chaudhry and Kravitz have given their daughter the liberty to actively choose how she identifies. “Laila has boldly declared each holiday season that she’s a quarter Muslim, quarter Jewish and half Christian. Now mathematically that doesn’t work... But I think that’s an interesting thing because she wants to have Christmas and she wants to have Easter, so that’s how she declared it.”
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Islamophobia & a Challenge to Bill Maher - Deepa Kumar on RAI (Part 1/5)
A great series of interviews with Deepa Kumar. She puts the right perspective on how US has always been interfering with the development & politics of developing countries, especially, Islamic countries. The whole interview can easily be summarized in the last line of interview, "the people of the Middle East and North Africa are just like everybody else. They want economic rights. They want political rights and so on. And if the U.S. just stopped interfering, we would see a flowering of a different kind of society."
Islamophobia is perpetuating lies that Islam is a backward religion because it doesn't give rights, for instance, to women. However, the problems of giving or not giving rights to women is more a cultural / political one than religious one. As Ms. Kumar says that by merely focusing on these topics & then equating these "to a problem of Islam as opposed to a problem of politics" perpetuate the notion that "all Muslims are backward, which is the very essence of Islamophobia."
Then, fundamentalism exists in every religion, & heck, even in atheism. Atheists are some of the most fundamentalist people in this world. Every religion has its die-hard followers; there are fundamentalist Muslims, Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhist etc. We can see how fundamentalist Buddhist killed, & still killing, poor Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. We can see how die-hard Hindus (BJP is a very fundamentalist Hindu political party) killing Muslims in India over the issue of beef. Fundamentalist Christians / right wing militias roam free in US & have killed ethnic & racial minorities (African-Americans, South Asians etc.). Their actions are not attributed to their religions & no one asks other non-fundamentalist Christians, Buddhist or Hindus to absolve / distance themselves from the actions of their fundamentalist brethren in religion.
One thing which Paul Jay refers to, which I would really like to highlight is that how the whole world has been focusing on the barbarism of ISIS in Iraq & Syria. What about the barbarism of US when it dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima & Nagasaki, when, as the details are coming forth now, that they were not even needed to end WW2. If one starts to scrutinize American actions all over the world, we see that barbarism of ISIS is nothing compared to what America has done all over the world.
Now, the negative stereotypes of Muslims & Islam has been around since the birth of Islam in 600 AD. They have been perpetuating these stereotypes since the Crusades when the Pope wanted to unite all Christians under the flag of Crusades & paint all Muslims as one evil group of people who have been worshipping the bad or wrong God. The sad & unfortunate part is that even Muslims now are starting to believe in these stereotypes & think that Islam is the main reason which has been keeping Muslims & Muslim societies from developing. US & its Western allies also have their hands in this that they don't want Islamic societies to develop.
Islamic societies / countries have always been ready to develop (while living within the boundaries created by Quran & Prophet's tradition), either scientifically, politically, culturally, but alien forces (US & other Western powers) have always interfered in that development. The West / Global North want dictatorships in Middle East because it serves their own purpose. So, blaming the religion of Islam or thinking that Muslims are so backward in their thoughts that this is all they can come up with, is completely wrong. At the end of the day, a Muslim anywhere in the world is just like anyone else; he / she wants to live peacefully, enjoy his / her life here, peacefully earn a living, & then die a satisfied / happy person.
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PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: So what's wrong with what Bill Maher said? Bill Maher is saying that there's a great denial of rights in much of the Muslim world, not just Islamic State, but Saudi Arabia and so on, and there isn't a lot of loud critique about it. And certainly the American left spends a lot more time critiquing the domestic right. So doesn't he have a point?
DEEPA KUMAR, ASSOC. PROF. MEDIA STUDIES AND MIDEAST STUDIES, RUTGERS UNIV.: Well, what Bill Maher said is a perfect example of what I call liberal Islamophobia, which is to take up liberal themes, such as human rights, women's rights, the rights of gays and lesbians, the right to free speech, and so on and makes a case of the so-called Muslim world, like it is one big monolith in which these rights are uniformly denied to people, and then proceeds to equate, in essence, the politics of ISIS with the politics of the 1.5 billion people who practice Islam, when in fact you actually look at Muslim majority countries, which is the term that I prefer, they vary widely in terms of, for instance, the status of women. In Bangladesh, for instance, we've had two women heads of state voted into power, Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina. But in Saudi Arabia, women aren't allowed to drive.
And so of course there are these kinds of examples from Muslim majority countries like Saudi Arabia, like Iran, where women's rights are restricted. But by focusing just on those and somehow equating this to a problem of Islam as opposed to a problem of politics, he winds up perpetuating this notion that all Muslims are backward, which is the very essence of Islamophobia.
JAY: He does something else, too. He ascribes, essentially, fundamentalism about the Quran, and then all believers in Islam are somehow also fundamentalists.
KUMAR: Right.
JAY: But he doesn't do that for Christianity, because there's just as much craziness in the Bible as there is in the Quran, I think. ...
KUMAR: No, you know, any religious text, whether it's the Quran or the Bible and so on, can be interpreted in multiple ways. There are progressive interpretations of it and then there are reactionary interpretations of it. ...
Imagine if for every act of terror committed by a Christian fundamentalist, a far-right militia person like Wade Michael Page, who went to Oak Creek, Wisconsin, and shot a gun at a Sikh temple and killed people and so on, now imagine if we were to generalize from Wade Michael Page to all of Christiandom, to all of the United States, and say, now everybody else should denounce this man and distance themselves from him; otherwise, you're all culpable. Now, that's completely ridiculous, and of course that would be ridiculous if we talk about Christians in the West, but apparently it's completely acceptable when it comes to talking about Muslims. And so even President Obama said moderate Muslims should separate themselves from ISIS and from other groups and so on. Why? In what way, shape, or form are regular Muslims responsible for fundamentalism any more than regular Christians are responsible for Christian fundamentalism or regular Jews for Jewish fundamentalists? You get the idea. We see those people as being the extreme wing of a particular religious interpretation.
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JAY: ... There is nothing the Islamic State has done that compares to the barbaric activity that the United States has done in Iraq and on and on, going right back to the atomic bombing of Japan. So if we're talking scale here, the Islamic State is a whisper of what the United States has done.
That being said, one does not need to hold back on describing IS as a barbaric, brutal force that the people of the region on the whole, you would think, will despise, just as much as most Afghans despise the Taliban.
KUMAR: Absolutely. I completely agree with that. ... in my book, actually, I have a pretty strong critique of the parties of political Islam, and I don't think we should be soft on that. There was a tendency back in the 1970s, when Foucault goes to Iran and so on, to see--particularly in France there was a tendency to somehow see the Islamists as being progressive and painting with progressive colors the Iranian Revolution and so forth. But I don't think that tendency exists anymore. I think, if anything, one of the first few pieces that I wrote on this topic is about the left and their attitudes towards political Islam, is how ignorant the left was in terms of, actually, Islamophobia and in terms of sort of equating the Islamists with all of Islam and all of Muslims and so forth. So I think that there is, in the United States especially, a sort of blind spot around Islamophobia and a lack of a nuanced analysis of who these groups are, why they come to power, and what the historic conditions are for their rise.
JAY: It seems to me where he is--one is this part of where he extends this to anyone who believes in Islam and tries to make Islam itself and come up with some quotes from the Quran that are particularly backward is one thing. But the second thing, which is this idea that he talks about our society having liberal values and free speech and this and that, you can argue what that's becoming and with this national surveillance state and so on, but it's still true. I mean, compared to a lot of societies, ... we can have this conversation, and we're not going to walk out and get arrested.
That being said, it's at home you have those things. The United States has 50, 60 years of supporting the worst kind of dictatorships everywhere, and particularly in the Middle East, whether it's supporting the Saudis and so on and so on. There's no support for these kind of values when it conflicts with American interests abroad.
KUMAR: Right. ... the narrative that gets constructed in the West and that Bill Maher and people like that are echoing is the clash of civilizations rhetoric, which was coined by Bernard Lewis and then popularized by Samuel Huntington, which is the idea that in the post-Cold War period, conflict would no longer be political, it will be cultural, and that there were seven or eight civilizations, each with their own unique cultures--the West and the Islamic world and so on--and that they are bound to conflict with each other.
... there are any number of problems. It's ahistorical, it's just wrong, and so on. But the problem I have with it, one problem, at least, is that it negates the fact that the rights that people do have in this country, whether you're talking about workers' rights, the rights of African Americans to vote, the right of women to vote, this didn't happen automatically because some benevolent president decided. It's people's movements, it's women fighting for 100 years and their male allies that caused suffrage, right? And, therefore, somehow to assume the liberal mantle as being the natural inheritance of what it means to be the West, starting from Greece to the present, and seeing the East, particularly Muslim majority countries, as being mired in barbarism, this is the classic language of colonialism, which whether Bill Maher knows it or not, that is what he's echoing. And, in fact, even in the East, in Iran, in Egypt, you've had Feminist movements, you've had women's rights movements, which we barely ever hear of.
JAY: Well, the roots of this go right back to the early days of the Catholic Church and the fighting against--the Crusades, and then the Ottoman Empire. I mean, it wasn't about liberal values then. It was about the true god, and they got the bad god, and we're going to fight it out. But it's kind of--the roots of it go very deep.
KUMAR: Absolutely, which is why my book is called Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire and it starts with the Crusades, because every empire needs an enemy. And at least one of the motivations for the Crusades was to create this ideal Muslim enemy, which could then motivate people to go out and fight wars. But it was always--there was always a very contradictory notion of how to look at the East, because even while the Crusades are going on, you have the most horrific stereotypes of Muslims and all the rest of it.
In al-Andalus, which is the name given to Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula--Spain and Portugal--you see the most advanced civilization. Remember, Europe is in the dark ages at this time, right, and here in al-Andalus you have street lighting, you have developments in science, medicine, and so on. In that region, Europeans had a very positive idea of Muslims and what they developed because they had actual contact with them. So, typically this idea of a Muslim enemy works when people have never met anybody from the Middle East or North Africa or have never traveled. And then the stereotypes can work, just as it's working in the case of ISIS and scaring people to death.
JAY: But I think one of the things that always gets missed in this conversation in the mainstream media is that these are class societies we're talking about, the Muslim societies, Arab societies. And in many of them, the classes that are in power are barbaric and they are backward and they do call up the worst of whatever you can call up in Islam, the same way you can find in Christian fanatical regimes in Latin America and other times.
KUMAR: Absolutely.
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JAY: I think part of it is ... like, if you're in any of the Muslim countries and you see what American policy in the Middle East has been, you are going to--unless you're in the elite and you somehow benefit from it, but even amongst the elites I think there's going to be resentment ... . The thing is: what else is there to have some sympathy for than the Islamist opposition? Why? Because the American policy and the Israeli policy destroyed the secular opposition.
KUMAR: That's right. And this has been happening through the course of the Cold War, when it was clear that the secular nationalists, whether you're talking about Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt or you're talking about Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran, when it was discovered that they couldn't be co-opted to serve the U.S.'s interests in the region, the key policy from 1958 on with the Eisenhower doctrine was to create an Islamic bulwark to act as a counter to secular nationalism. And you read some of the accounts of what the CIA is doing, and they're putting poison into Nasser's cigarettes, they're trying to put poison into his chocolates, some of these sorts of awful things that you think happen only in the movies. But at a very systemic level what they're doing is funding and sponsoring all sorts of radical Islamist groups, all the way from Iran and across the region.
JAY: Well, and most importantly it starts with Roosevelt, the deal with the Sauds. I mean, the Saudis are the heart of all of this. And this was the deal, that the Saudis would use the defense of Mecca to be the force to spread Wahhabism throughout the region, and all this extremism is part of American policy.
KUMAR: Absolutely. In fact, the language that they used in the State Department is that they wanted the Saudi monarch to be an Islamic Pope and to use the legitimacy of being the guardians of Mecca and Medina to actually push people away from secularism. So absolutely. And Saudi Arabia had a very systematic program of Islamization, whether it was distributing Qurans for free, whether it was giving tons of petrodollars for setting up madrasas all over. Not just in the Middle East, but even in Pakistan they set up schools and colleges and send their preachers there and so forth. And the end result is the mujahideen, is al-Qaeda.
And, I mean, I think that's really important to bring up, because there's a tendency to somehow think of the parties of political Islam as being the sort of logical outcome of this region -- this is all that Muslims can produce. But if you don't talk about how left secular alternatives were systematically crushed by the U.S., by Saudi Arabia, by Israel, and so on, then you don't get a sense that these are people just like anybody else who have a range of politics.
JAY: And not only left-secular; they destroyed in Afghanistan a more normal capitalist development. They had a king that was a modernizer. They wanted to have a more modern capitalism. And they threw it all out the window to suck Russia into a war and then arming all the jihadists and, village elders who didn't know anything, give them rocket launchers, and they become the new powerbrokers. And then you wonder where the Taliban comes from.
KUMAR: Right. In fact, every single reformist and pro-democratic movement that has come into being in the Middle East and North Africa, the U.S. has always been on the wrong side of it, even in Saudi Arabia. There was a modest movement called the Free Princes Movement, where they wanted a constitutional monarchy. Would the U.S. have any of it? Absolutely not. They immediately dispatched forces to make sure these forces are marginalized. There was a workers movement in the Shia eastern region trying to form unions, but Aramco, at that time American-owned, would have none of it. And so they got rid of that. So every step towards creating rights for a whole group of people, from workers to women and so on and so forth, the U.S. is always been on the wrong side, including after the Arab Spring of 2011, right? So you look at the role that the U.S. is played: support the dictators till the very last second, and then back to counterrevolutionaries, whether it's Egypt and the military or it's giving the green light to Saudi Arabia to crush the resistance in Bahrain, what have you.
And so I think that framework is important, because then you start to see that the people of the Middle East and North Africa are just like everybody else. They want economic rights. They want political rights and so on. And if the U.S. just stopped interfering, we would see a flowering of a different kind of society.
Wednesday, December 6, 2017
Feminism's Radical Turn
A great opinion piece on the West's struggle with the feminism movement. Feminism movement was made by humans / people who don't have any ability to see / predict the future. Circumstances are always evolving & one's situation is never same as the other. Hence, feminism movement was not only short-sighted to start with, it lacked inclusion of all women from different backgrounds; based on ethnicity, religion, race, culture etc.
The idea of feminism was women are equal to men. Which they definitely are. No doubt. Problem was, & still is, that women were expected to act & do things exactly like what men were doing. As Jessa Crispin notes in her book that "feminism sold women a bill of goods by framing work as self-fulfillment and self-actualization. Women who rose to positions of traditional male power in corporations, in politics, in the military, on boards, like Clinton or Sheryl Sandberg became feminist role models." Essentially, a woman's self-worth was how much money she was earning by working in male-dominated sectors of the economy; heck, it didn't have to be male-dominated sectors of the economy. Period. That's why, some women in pornography industry are very happy & rose to the level of company CEOs themselves, & on their way to the top, debased other women, because they themselves have become millionaires; their self-worth is being measured in cold hard cash by themselves & the society around them.
As the writer details Jessa Crispin's thoughts on feminism in the following paragraph, it becomes evident that women were only fighting for equal rights & jobs as men, as long as those jobs were of privileged positions in the society. Women were not fighting to get in menial jobs. After all, those menial jobs are also held by men.
The idea of feminism was women are equal to men. Which they definitely are. No doubt. Problem was, & still is, that women were expected to act & do things exactly like what men were doing. As Jessa Crispin notes in her book that "feminism sold women a bill of goods by framing work as self-fulfillment and self-actualization. Women who rose to positions of traditional male power in corporations, in politics, in the military, on boards, like Clinton or Sheryl Sandberg became feminist role models." Essentially, a woman's self-worth was how much money she was earning by working in male-dominated sectors of the economy; heck, it didn't have to be male-dominated sectors of the economy. Period. That's why, some women in pornography industry are very happy & rose to the level of company CEOs themselves, & on their way to the top, debased other women, because they themselves have become millionaires; their self-worth is being measured in cold hard cash by themselves & the society around them.
As the writer details Jessa Crispin's thoughts on feminism in the following paragraph, it becomes evident that women were only fighting for equal rights & jobs as men, as long as those jobs were of privileged positions in the society. Women were not fighting to get in menial jobs. After all, those menial jobs are also held by men.
Equality is another issue in Western ideal of feminism; equality based on racial, ethnic, cultural, & social grounds. It seems that feminism became the movement-du-jour for the Caucasian / white privileged women. Every other women didn't get the memo; be they be women of African descent in America or of Latin descent in Northern & Southern America, or Muslim women in Middle East & South Asia or Hindu & Buddhist women in Asia. As Crispin correctly "echoes the sentiment in her rejection of the condescending attitude of Western feminists toward women in Muslim countries—this idea that these women need to be rescued (itself a masculine model) from their head scarves and their traditions."
In the name of feminism, women were driven out of their homes to work alongside men, & to become one more bread-winner for the family. However, nobody worked towards sharing the house work, & hence, women's responsibilities became child-bearing, child-rearing, all house work, & corporate work. Men still enjoyed their work outside the house & that was the end of their day's work.
What the general public has forgotten now that the women were driven out of the house to create a two-income family, to essentially, increase GDP in North America. The public & private sectors weren't creating any more jobs & GDP increases when the public spends on house & home purchases. Wages had become stagnant. So, instead of increasing wages or creating more jobs, women were encouraged to get out of the house, be independent, & make their own money; helping to keep up the lifestyle the public was used to; all in the guise of gender equality.
Here, I am going to bring feminism in Islam. The West & now, even the East, thinks that Islam, as a religion, suppresses Muslim women & their rights. In Islam, women are equal to men. Islam recognizes them as EQUAL, not as IDENTICAL. Both genders are complementary to each other & need one another to create a fully-functional, proper society.
This is all beautifully summarized by a letter to editor in the May issue of Maclean's magazine, by a Dr. Howard Taynen, from Ancaster, Ontario, Canada:
"... I am struck yet again by a routinely mistaken fundamental in this ever-present & evolving subject - equal is confused with identical. Thankfully, men & women are not identical anatomically, physiologically, temperamentally or psychologically. We are a magnificent complementarity of great potential value to ourselves, our children & the world. Eliminate the abuse, not the difference! It is naive & futile to defy nature by arbitrarily imposing identical roles in parenthood, marriage or the world in order to be equal. We are equal & different. It is a partnership that can function wholesomely without trying to change the differing roles & their respective strengths."
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Literary Critic Jessa Crispin clearly appreciates the value of a catchy title. Her blog was named Bookslut. Now her new book, Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto, seems calculated to grab attention at a moment when feminism is portrayed as either trending or dead—or trending because it’s dead.
Feminism’s most recent and much exaggerated death spiral can be traced to the assumption, an absurd one, that the U.S. election provided a referendum on the topic. “Hillary Clinton’s loss in the presidential election to America’s most famous sexist instantly plunged the feminist cause into crisis,” The New Republic proclaimed hours after Trump’s win, as if the “feminist cause” is a single entity run out of a central command. If anything, the reverse proved true: the political upset galvanized organized protest driven by fear that the advances made by the feminist movement over the past 50 years would be reversed. The New York Times was bleaker: “Feminism lost. Now what?” ran a headline that suggested Clinton was herself synonymous with an ideology that dates back more than a century.
It’s precisely that conflation of a powerful, high-achieving woman with modern feminism that Crispin denounces in her slim, bracing polemic. The thought-provoking, sometimes frustrating book is part of a new literary groundswell: works grappling with the complex inequities of sexual equality and the ever-shifting gender see-saw a half century after “women’s lib.” Toronto writer Stephen Marche also wades in with his trenchant new book, The Unmade Bed: The Messy Truth About Men and Women in the 21st Century, in which he recounts leaving his job to be primary caregiver to his son so his wife could fulfill her career ambition. A countervailing groundswell is simultaneously at work: this vocal contingent calls for a return to the zero-sum game of the alpha husband, beta wife just as more than a third of women out-earn their husbands. The Alpha Female’s Guide to Men and Marriage by Suzanne Venker, the niece of conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, laments that “society is creating a crop of women who are unable to love” and advises “it’s liberating to be a beta!” Similar messaging underlines the North Carolina billboard that sparked outrage last month. “Real men provide,” it read. “Real women appreciate it.”
Taking a cue from Crispin’s title, the media have described its message as more piling on the feminism-is-dead pyre: “The fall of feminism,” read the headline of a Los Angeles Times’ review. “Why this literary critic rejects modern-day feminism,” said CBC Radio.
Yet Crispin sits at an extreme rarely discussed in modern-day feminism: she’s a self-professed radical feminist, hell-bent on dismantling a patriarchy she blames 20th-century feminism for buttressing. “I am angry,” she writes. “And I do pose a threat.”
Feminism sold women a bill of goods, Crispin states, by framing work as self-fulfillment and self-actualization. Women who rose to positions of traditional male power in corporations, in politics, in the military, on boards, like Clinton or Sheryl Sandberg of Lean In fame, became feminist role models. Crispin doesn’t buy it, noting Clinton dismantled social welfare programs and supported international interventions that killed thousands.
Only spaces occupied by privileged men were desirable, Crispin points out; women, who’d always worked, but in menial positions, weren’t fighting for jobs held by poor men, labourers or miners, for whom the workplace and society would become increasingly hostile. The consequence, she writes, is a “kind of hyper-masculinized world, where women are participating—and absolutely expected to participate in this world by feminists—in patriarchal values.”
Crispin also takes aim at “universal feminism”—her term for a non-confrontational feminist status quo that bends over backwards to be agreeable to avoid the “man-hating” stereotype of decades earlier. This mainstream, she believes, is preoccupied with identity politics, narcissistic “self-empowerment” and whining about TV shows rather than the hard work of bridging to universal human rights. It’s a pop star battle: on one hand, Beyoncé embraces the “feminist” label; on the other, Taylor Swift, never one to rock the boat, prefers “equalism,” the belief that both sexes should be equal without highlighting feminism. “Lifestyles do not change the world,” Crispin writes.
Within this Instagram feminism, shrillness is anathema. That’s a problem, Crispin writes: “I hear the word ‘feminazi’ coming from young feminists’ mouths today way more often than I have ever heard it coming from the mouths of right-wing men.”
The reaction can also be chalked up to marketing forces that have diluted and co-opted “feminist” to sell products with an upbeat, friendly “empowerment” message for decades—from the “You’ve come a long way baby” Virginia Slims ads of the ’70s, to Acne Studios’ “Feminist Collection” featuring a $650 sweater, to the recently published picture book Strong is the New Pretty: A Celebration of Girls Being Themselves.
The fact that anyone can self-define as feminist, or not, also can render the word meaningless. Ivanka Trump claims both she and her woman-objectifying, women-grabbing dad are feminists. ... Marche rejects the self-proclaimed “male feminist,” saying it’s typically used to win points or get women into bed. Just be a decent guy, he writes.
Decades of hindsight offer perspective. For one, “trickle-down” feminism is about as effective as trickle-down economics. Equality has not touched all women equally, and there’s anger, as was evident at the Women’s March in Washington, where I saw a black woman hold up a sign at a largely white crowd: “F–k you and your white imperialistic feminism,” it read. She had a point.
Crispin echoes the sentiment in her rejection of the “condescending attitude of Western feminists toward women in Muslim countries—this idea that these women need to be rescued (itself a masculine model) from their head scarves and their traditions.”
...
Non-feminist history also reveals that blaming 20th-century feminism for the glorification of the work and the workplace, as Crispin does, gives it too much credit. Yes, the civil rights movement stirred second-wave feminism and The Feminine Mystique raised consciousness. But other factors, namely the need for dual-income-earning families and the Pill, which let women delay child-bearing or defer it altogether, played a role.
Now it’s evident that the very corporate workplace that women—mostly wives—flocked to in the ’70s was built on a male-breadwinner, female-homemaker model that remained unchanged. Needs of the new working wife and mother were ignored; nor was there a movement to replace or redistribute her labour in the home. The result: that famous Ms. magazine cover “I want a wife,” which also became a common working women’s half-joke.
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That disconnect could explain why, 60 years after the “women’s movement,” reproductive health rights and sexual violence remain barriers to women’s freedom. Female politicians receive death threats. A gender pay gap exists, even in the professions. Yet Crispin isn’t offering an olive branch to men. She slams “casual hatred of men as a gender,” yet in the next breath, tells men it’s not her job to make feminism easy or understandable to them. “Figure it out,” she writes. “I just want to be clear that I don’t give a f–k about your response to this book. Do not email me, do not get in touch. Deal with your own s–t for once.” She offers one consolation: “Everything is more complicated than anyone wants to admit.” And that vague understatement pretty much sums up the long march ahead.
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