Tsk Tsk Christina Hoff Sommers

My fave anti-feminist who has benefited from the efforts of feminists, Christina Hoff Sommers, is at it again. While she is right that there are not massive demonstrations all over the US to bring attention and effort to the liberation of Muslim women from the particular forms of oppression they experience, she's also conveniently obscuring the Massive academic and activist literature in which Muslim Feminists have asked Western Feminists to kindly back the hell off and let them design their own liberation according to their own desires and within the particular conditions of their cultures and societies, which, they point out, they understand better than we do.

And, just a minute, but why this issue, and why feminists? Hmmm? Where are the college demonstrations and the large scale protests appropriate to Simply Outrageous Unethical and Completely Avoidable plethora of hydra-headed, Scylla and Charybdis coin-toss, five dimensional paradox type issues that face us in the US as well as the world? --- It's overwhelming. We are overwhelmed into a kind tweak-your-own-experience passivity by the sheer megatonnage of the problems. How does one protest the manifestly obvious and nearly universal aggressive, stubborn, and colossal stupidity of man and humankind? Really? EVERY social justice movement and church and synagogue and mosque and ethical society and homeowners association should be organizing at this point. We are in the midst of a calamity in history, and our choices are Bad, Very Bad, and Unthinkable.

Your choice of issue and Fall Gal strike me as convenient, my dear.

When apartheid was a big issue, no one new about the Taliban and FGM and the Hell many of these women are consigned to by men who claim to honor them. And the biggest open war we were involved in was Grenada (for the love of Bridget). I mean really. Get some perspective and play your history fair.

Yes, Christina, we should be working harder with our Muslim sisters. Yes, we should be offering them more material support for their causes. We should be demonstrating. Yes, yes, yes.

But your argument for this very good point is simply too fallacious and factually cherry picked to be relevant or inspiring, and that tells me that you don't want the Feminists to save the Muslim women, you just want to embarrass the feminists. And are we really soooooooo powerful a force that you and the partriarchally committed media who publish you need to do so? Nope. You get published because they like to hear a partriarchally identified girl pick a cat fight. It turns them on. It's part of what media does.

And let us remember that women as a category are just as diverse of opinion and desire and relative degrees of oppression in the Muslim world as we women are here in the US, and that these differences are to be made into alliances and not played off to create convenient schisms that disempower and endanger every woman, no matter her politics, faith, social class, sexual orientation, ability, age, location on the planet, and so on.

Instead, we get your usual "scary feminists" or "misguided feminists" claptrap and easy pot shots which have been answered in so many elsewheres. If you would notice that most of what become social ills has its seeds in the abusive nightmares that are many many traditional patriarchal family structures, you might use your intelligence to say something more subtle and useful.

You ignore, of course, some of the very real, and deadly, issues that face women in the US, because feminists are hysterical and all that. It would be troubling and inconvenient for your audience to know these things, so you don't mention them. Perhaps you accurately assess that your audience can't handle the real complexities of the situation.

For a small instance, this catch at Jasmine Blossom in which the normal effects of menopause, like reduced sex drive, are now being categorized as a sexual dysfunction in need of treatment. This is the opposite of FGM, but springs from the same cause: Shaping Female Sexuality and Bodies to The Service of Men. It is in a society that holds that women are supposed to be sexually available to men all the time (one form of oppression: ignoring women's sexual autonomy), and that has been willing to play against nature to accomplish this availability, that men or women would consider a perfectly normal lowering of sex drive with aging a medical dysfunction.

Or this catch by Lioness concerning rape.

Or, golly, why not India and much of Southern Asia where families sell their daughters into the sex slave trade for between 20 and 400 dollars, because they cannot afford to keep her alive themselves, and besides boys bring money into the family, girls only cost money? (thanks Jasmine, for the correction) Hmmm? Are these women not also worth our activist outrage? Or the women and children in the basements of suburban America who have been abducted into sexual slavery, many of whom are so unutterably abused that they will die there? Hmmmm? Why not that issue? And where are the Values First Types on these issues? Huh? Where the hell are they? Their values and faiths should have them in the street over all this too. Why aren't we and they also teaching men that their sexual "needs" are not the organizing principle of world????

But no. It's just those Feminists who just are not doing enough.

Get with it, dear. Oppression has many forms. Many complexities. From the obviously brutal to the culturally subtle. They all need our attention --- that's why there are so many kinds of feminists addressing so many different aspects of our on-going work. You're not helping. Feminists are the women brave enough to address the problem. Non-feminists just benefit from our efforts, and we're glad we all do. Not getting some thanks or recognition for these efforts, however, is a little annoying. But, it has not stopped us. Of course. But it is hard to keep up anymore, isn't it?

Christina, please stop taking a good point and mucking it all up just to make hay off of dissing the very movement that made your career possible. Ungratefulness is most unattractive in a sister.

You're just distracting us from the very work you ask us to do. Rather, you might put out a call and organize just such a demonstration yourself. Now, there's an idea.

I'd really like to see how many of your readers showed up, made noise, and contributed to the cause of the "mothers of terrorists." You have some more thinking to do, dear.