Posts by anjum rahman
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To be really brief, it requires information ('you can freely choose between A and B, but I'm not telling you what they are'), and it requires freedom from non-logical non-inherent consequences.
and therein lies the problem - it requires freedom from consequences. you can have all the information in the world, but when the opportunity cost is low self-esteem because your boobs aren't big enough, then you are going to ignore the information and go ahead with the surgery. if the opportunity cost of doing the housework when your partner doesn't is being a solo-mum & having to do it anyway, then you shut up and do it. information doesn't help.
i'd also like to make clear that i am not judging strippers or other women for how they might dress or how they act. what i am judging is a society which creates the conditions that mean women feel the need to do these things or behave in these ways.
and one final point: the fact that a couple are sitting in the audience and enjoying a strip show is irrelevant. it's not whose in the audience and how happy they are feeling that's at issue here, it's what's happening on stage. it's a sad indictment on the human race that that we have, in our long and chequered history, enjoyed wathcing people being fight each other to the death; have enjoyed bulls being slowly and painfully killed by matadors; have enjoyed watching roosters peck each other to death as a sport; have enjoyed watching women have sex with animals; and many other variations. again, i know that these are very different to stripping etc. the point is that if audience enjoyment is based on exploitation, then it doesn't seem in any way right to me - even when it's women watching other women and loving it.
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What rankles with me is the idea that it is men who have done this.
well yes. when you look at female genital mutilation, the ones doing the mutilating are in fact women. and the foot binding of females in china was also done by women. and the one pulling the whalebone stays tighter in victorian england would be another woman. i guess an exception would be breast mutilations - oops sorry, enhancements - done mostly by men cos there aren't as many female plastic surgeons around.
it would be easy to conclude that women are the greatest abusers of other women. but look deeper, and you will find that the predominant reasons why women do these things is because they genuinely believe that they or their daughters would have no prospects of a partner (and hence a family) if they didn't.
now where would they get that idea from?
what amazes me most though, is that societies where these kinds of mutilations are rife defend these practices vehmently. it's bizarre. outsiders looking in can see them for the horrible abuses they are, but the insiders can't.
Choice. It's choice.
again, i'd have to say, well yes. this would be the argument i use to argue that women should be able to cover their faces if they want to. which i still pretty much stand by.
however, a friend of mine who used to teach in women's studies put "choice" into perspective. she related "choice" to the practice of suttee (ie burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands, a charming practice which is part of india's past). she said that women often chose to burn themselves, they went quite willingly to their deaths in many cases. she asked me if we should accept that as a valid choice.
if a working woman chooses to spend her lunchtime cleaning the house, and generally runs around while her partner does bugger all when he gets home, then that is also her choice. she's free to leave or to stop doing it. why worry about it?
at some point, you have to make a judgement about which choices are healthy and which ones aren't. it's never an easy judgement to make, the boundaries are rarely clear. and i would agree with deborah that societal pressure really hampers choice quite a bit.
i would like to point out that i'm not trying to make parallels between mutilation of the female body and strippers/sexualisation of young girls/images of women in music videos & advertising etc. i know there's a vast difference in terms of the level of exploitation and pain. however, that doesn't mean there's no exploitation happening in terms of the latter.
i don't have any particular solutions to offer - i'm not interested in forcing women to cover up. i'd go and live in saudi arabia if i was into that kind of thing. but at the least, i would like to think that we could create the space for women to express their unhappiness with sexual images & exploitation without having to take the kind of flak they do currently (not here on PAS, of course!).
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Society's pendulum swing - we're still trying to find that equilibrium between allowing people of all genders to express themselves as sexual beings, while extending gender equivalence to all the other areas that have previously discriminated.
the problem i have with that is that is that men are expressing their sexuality by obejctifying women and women are expressing their sexuality be being objectified. where's the gender balance in that? again, i'm talking about music videos, and the expression of sxuality is hardly gender neutral. i have no experience of strip clubs, but expect that things are not too different there.
and gender equivalence in other areas? well women are still earning less than men for doing the same job; tracey watkins latest piece in the herald gives the stats for women in management/leadership positions which are sadly pathetic; got the stats at a child abuse seminar in hamilton last night on women being killed in domestic violence incidents - can't remember them but they weren't good. yes, girls can do anything, but they aren't - eg only 9% of those in the modern apprenticeship scheme are female.
we seem to believe that we have or are approaching gender neutrality because girls are getting good marks at school & there are more of them at uni. but if they are still earning on average $3,000 less for the same job as a male on the day they start work after graduation (which i believe is the figure for the legal profession), then what is the point? where is the equality? and on the flip side, women are also by far the higher number in low paid professions such as cleaners, shop assistants and caregivers.
why are we so loathe to accept this reality and do something about it, rather than pretend that we live in a society that treats women as equals?
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most depressing are music videos, which teenagers are watching all the time. there are hardly any that treat women as human beings - the female singers are as awful as the video clips done by "boybands". i'll lay myself open to charges of racism, but i find videos of black male singers to be some of the worst - all shaking breasts and bums, as if women are nothing but tits & arse...
i have a strong desire to fight back, but don't even know where to begin! i just think that our girls deserve to have better role models, better images of women as thinking, feeling human beings with dreams & goals that go beyond being the subject of schoolboys' wet dreams.
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Although 'more Chinese than thou' types can be annoying (I'm probably one of them at times) as can 'more Indian than thou' types, are they the primary source of racism experienced by those groups in the West?
primary? i don't know. but just as difficult to cope with. because you end up not belonging anywhere. too different to blend into kiwi culture & not indian enough to be indian. so you just end being in an in-between place that is quite lonely, at least it was back in the 70's & 80's in hamilton! as an adult i find it liberating, because i feel that i don't have to be bound by any cultural norms. however, it has been a big struggle to be able to achieve that state of mind, especially when society (any society) puts so much pressure on individuals to conform.
it's much easier for my kids cos there are heaps more local-born indians (& chinese & somalians etc etc). but i can't think of a descriptor for them that captures that place in between two cultures where children of migrants end up. i agree that banana is hardly the right word. what is? any label you think up to try and describe a particular group of people ends up pissing some of them off completely...
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well i get fed up with the racism my kids & myself face for not being "indian" enuf. i consider myself to be a kiwi who happens to have been born in india. the latter had nothing to do with me, so i don't see why i should have to embrace indian culture if i don't want to.
my children are born here. the only link they have with india is that they have relatives living there so go to visit them now and then. i'm not bringing my kids up to be "indian", although they have plenty of exposure to indian culture. i leave it to them to choose what aspects of nz or indian culture they want to take up, and try to keep my personal views to myself, so that i don't influence their choices too much. can't say i'm always successful, but i do try!
but i hate how some indians will treat us as inferior because we choose not to follow their cultural norms. it's not like i've broken any laws, ffs, and i would have thought that those people would at least respect the fact that i have thought deeply about who i want to be, and have made informed choices based on my own ethics and values.
but i hate it most when i see my kids being treated that way. i hate it when they are pressured to conform to practices or values that have little relevance or meaning to them, simply because it's supposed to be part of their heritage.
well as far as i'm concerned, culture is a living and changing thing; traditions were put in place for a reason and if that reason is no longer valid, then the tradition isn't either. and everyone has the right to rebel. our heritage is what we choose it to be, and mine is mostly kiwi, with a bit of indian when i feel like it. i think my cooking explains me best - a bizarre mix of east & west that somehow comes out tasting ok!
ok, rant over.
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this from http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20339 (hat tip: dr nabil zuberi) regarding similar concerns in the indian context seems relevant:
Nussbaum is right to say that the "level of debate and reporting in the major newspapers and at least some of the television networks is impressively high." In fact, India is one of the few countries where print newspapers and magazines, especially in regional languages, continue to flourish. But the most influential part of the Indian press not only makes little use of its freedom; it helps diminish the space for public discussion, which partly accounts for what the philosopher Pratap Mehta calls the "extraordinary non-deliberative nature of Indian politics."
On any given day, the front pages of such mainstream Indian newspapers as The Hindustan Times and the Times of India veer between celebrity-mongering—Britney Spears's new hair-style—and what appears to be "consumer nationalism"—reports on Indian tycoons, beauty queens, fashion designers, filmmakers, and other achievers in the West. Excited accounts of Tata, India's biggest private-sector company, buying the Anglo-Dutch steelmaker Corus make it seem that something like what The Economic Times, India's leading business paper, calls "The Global Indian Take-over" is underway. Largely reduced to an echo chamber, where an elite minority seems increasingly to hear mainly its own voice, the urban press is partly responsible for a new privileged generation of Indians lacking, as Nussbaum points out, any "identification with the poor."
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getting back to growing business in vietnam, what are the labour laws like? minimum wage? maximum hours? health & safety reulations - how many workplace deaths & injuries do they have?
i had a debate last week with a couple who were spouting about the ease of doing business in asia compared to here. but my question was: who exactly is paying for that ease of doing business, and is that cost worth it?
i'm all for trade links and better business opportunities overseas - as long as there is some assurance of minimum standards and no exploitation of people who are too poor to demand basic protection.
would be interested in your views russell, while you're over there, on such matters.
on a related note, i'd be really interested in a socially responsible investment fund for kiwisaver purposes. does anyone know of any products of this kind?
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dammit, the good stuff always happens when i'm too busy to get online!
well, a very belated congrats to tze ming et al. keep making waves guys!
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on the off chance that anyone is interested, i wrote a strongly worded letter of complaint to the "religious intelligence" people, regarding their misreporting on the hindu conference. well, here is the reply i got:
Dear Mr Rahman, thank you for your e-mail about our story, which was taken from agency reports. I have taken your comments into account and made some alterations to the story.
With many thanks for your vigilance,
Colin Blakely
Editorso there you go. outrage does help sometimes.
(and note, he assumed i was male!! #@*%...)