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Right, let's try and pull some sort of cease-fire together here. I start by saying that:
When a subject (person) talks about misogyny in cultures other than their own, two dangerous flaws might occur. These are, that the subject
a) is, in anger at the ill-treatment, pulled into the orbit of Imperialist ideology which presents "Islam" as a state more worthy of criticism than anything in the West, so that the poster's feminism is bought out by the Empire,
or that the subject
b) cares about the ill-treatment of women only in so far as it can be used to justify violence towards the Islamic "other"; the suffering woman is a tool, or a bargaining chip.
Part of my point is about how, as you can read in Marx or in that Jared Diamond book, Guns, Germs and Steel, economic factors (which I made a list of including the American interference, tand the hardness of making a living from the ground, to which we ought to add Soviet interference as well) will drastically affect a community's chances of education, and the ease with which that community can work out what social changes need to be made. I think Garbage Gnome puts this as:
I'm talking about an economy that is good enough to keep the majority of people in a good standerd of living. If a country is in such a state that the average citizen has no utilities, no modern transportation, no modern devices that make living easier, like lets say...a tractor, then they have to work much harder to sustain themselves.
I'm saying that if your economy has improved enough so that you no longer have to go work in the fields, and have more spare time on your hands to read, write, talk and reason with your fellow citizens, thats when people start to think about societal changes.
I don't think anyone here ever said, nor tried to say, that the Afghans were naturally, inevitably, conservative or violent, as a Victorian might have claimed; and any conservative or violent culture in Afghanistan, we are putting down to a poor economy, which makes much more sense.
Tell me if I'm wrong, but was not the wealth of, to make an arbitrary choice of country, England, in the 19th/early 20th century, a neccesary precursor to the far-reaching changes in the rights and lot of women there - certainly there were earlier points at which some women had some kind of power, such as medieval nunneries, and the first Queen Elizabeth, but as I understand it the industrial revolution and the wealth it brought was of fundamental importance.
Yet that could lead us to the faulty idea that the economy affects the Afghan subject utterly and inevitably; the idea that because of the poverty, there can be no changes there yet; effectively meaning we return to the Victorian inevitable-natural state argument but with different causes - rather than "The Afghan male will never treat women well because he is naturally bestial and treacherous", we have "The Afghan male will never treat women well because his economy makes it impossible"; which is not a great way of thinking because it shuts down any option for better treatment of women in contemporary Afghanistan, and denies the Afghan man the free agency/will which all human beings have, even in harsh cirumstances (like the leaders of the Slave Revolts, or MLK).
Which is possibly what Lady sees in Garbage Gnome's statent:
"Your average Afghani isn't chomping at the bit for a revolution in women's rights because he might be more concerned about survival and bringing in his crops or goats."
Now, I don't think anyone can say what "the average (type of person)" is or is not thinking about, or to what extent someone is chomping at a bit; rather, I'm sure there is a spectrum of Afghan opinion, and potential for better treatment of women there right now, even with the poverty - but the sort of education and discussion that needs to go on for this to happen will be much, much more difficult than in, for example, France, because of the poverty, and the effects of poverty, such the lack of well-established secular universities, gangs of bandits, jobs which require a lot of time spent on physical labour that tire the subject and make it hard to find time to study, and so on.
Now Lady replies to GG:
Are you suggesting that being a misogynist and oppressing his womenfolk take your hypothetical Afghani male less time and effort than not being a misgynist and not oppressing his womenfolk? Following your model the obvious solution would be that if your hypothetical Afghani treated his woman as being equal to him then they could share the work and he'd have to work less hard.
Which is very logical, but it would be harder for me to see such logic if I had to do hard labour all day and had been brought up (as many men all over the world are) to see a woman's "natural" job as looking after children and cooking. Am I right in thinking that in England it was only accepted that women could do "men's work" when all the men were off in the war and the women were working in the munitions factories? |
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