The Wahhabi Woman ProblemWhy no campaigns against Saudi Arabia's institutionalized sexism?
Posted Monday, Dec. 17, 2007, at 7:59 PM ET
"A court in Country X sentenced a black man who had been severely beaten by white men to six months in jail and 200 lashes."
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StumbleUponHow would you react if you read that in a newspaper? With shock, horror, and anger at the regime in Country X, no doubt. And once you learned that punishing blacks for associating with whites is routine in Country X, you might get even angrier. You might call for sanctions, you might insist that Country X not participate in the Olympics. You might insist that Country X be treated like apartheid-era South Africa.
In fact, the sentence is real—almost. When originally published on the CBS News Web site last month, it concerned a woman, not a black man, and Country X was Saudi Arabia. Here is the real quote:
A Saudi court sentenced a woman who had been gang raped to six months in jail and 200 lashes.
True, this extraordinary case, in which a rape victim was condemned for associating with a man who was not a relative, did create a small international echo. Hillary Clinton led a chorus of Democrats condemning the ruling, and a few editorials criticized it. It wasn't much, but it mattered: Thanks to international pressure, the Saudi king has now "pardoned" the woman. And now? In Saudi Arabia, women still can't vote, can't drive, can't leave the house without a male relative. No campaign of the kind once directed at South Africa has ever been mounted in their defense.
This comparison of Saudi and South African apartheid, and the different Western attitudes to both, has been made before. Recently, journalist Mona Eltahawy argued that while oil is a factor, the real reason Saudi teams aren't kicked out of the Olympics is that "Saudis have succeeded in pulling a fast one on the world by claiming their religion is the reason they treat women so badly." Islam, she points out, does take other forms—in Turkey, Morocco, Indonesia, and elsewhere. But Saudi propaganda, plus our own timidity about foreign customs, has blinded us to the fact that the systematic, wholesale Saudi oppression of women isn't dictated by religion at all, but rather by the culture of the Saudi ruling class.
I think there is another explanation, too. As a nation, we are partial to issues that seem familiar, and the story of apartheid South Africa had echoes in American history, in our own civil-rights movement. It wasn't that big a leap for Jesse Jackson to support the anti-apartheid movement when it was at its peak in the 1980s, and it wasn't that hard for college students at that time, either: We had been taught about institutionalized racism in school.
By contrast, the women of contemporary Saudi Arabia need a much more fundamental revolution than the one that took place among American women in the 1960s, and it's one we have trouble understanding. Unlike American blacks, it has been a long time since American women grappled with issues as basic as the right to study or vote. Instead, we have (fortunately) fought for less fundamental rights in recent decades, and our women's groups have of late (unfortunately) had the luxury of focusing on the marginal. The National Council of Women's Organizations' most famous recent campaign was against the Augusta National Golf Club. The Web site of the National Organization for Women (I hate to keep picking on them, but it's so easy) has space for issues of "non-sexist car insurance" and "network neutrality" but not for the Saudi rape victim or the girl murdered last week in Canada for refusing to wear the hijab.
The reigning feminist ideology doesn't help: Philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers has written, among other things, that some American feminists, self-focused and reluctant to criticize non-Western cultures, have convinced themselves that "sexual terror" in America (a phrase from a real women's studies textbook) is more dangerous than actual terrorism. But the deeper problem is the gradual marginalization of "women's issues" in domestic politics, which has made them subordinate to security issues or racial issues in foreign policy. American delegates to international and U.N. women's organizations are mostly identified with arguments about reproductive rights (whether for or against, depending on the administration), not arguments about the fundamental rights of women in Saudi Arabia or the Muslim world.
Until this changes, it will be hard to mount a campaign, in the manner of the anti-apartheid movement, to enforce sanctions or codes of conduct for people doing business there. What we need as a model, in other words, is not the 1960s feminism we all remember, but a globalized version of 19th-century feminism we've nearly forgotten. Candidates for the role of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, anyone?
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Remarks from the Fray:
Maybe Americans, male and female, are just weary of being told it's their historic mission to straighten out some other part of the world. Especially that part of the world. This, too, is a cost of Bush's presumption: now that we've wasted blood, treasure and credibility on his war, we would rather try taking care of our own problems for a while. Tens of millions of American women, and their children, have no health care insurance. Zero. Are you so sure they should be spending their time and energy agitating about the bizarre laws and customs of a faraway nation they have no power to change?
--Fritz Gerlich
(To reply, click here.)
The women's movement learned a lot about multiculturalism during the 70s and 80s: that white women weren't necessarily welcome to prescribe behavior to women in other cultures. In Sex and Destiny, Germaine Greer reported that when she interviewed them, Arab women told her they like the veil, and their lives, and aren't interested in becoming like men. She described lives that sounded very full and happy, despite the restrictions, lives that made the hardship of dying for full personhood seem somewhat beside the point. Granted, it's a coopted existence, where your love for your family becomes your focus as well as the prison that keeps you in your private world. But think of the parallel: be a good, obedient girl and nothing will go wrong. Only bad girls get lashings, stonings, beheadings. It's easier to relinquish control to those who love you and protect you, than it is to give up everything, even your children, your parents, your home, your income, your life, for a freedom that may be short lived indeed. It's a lot to ask, but it's the "good" who must be taught to identify with and empathize with the "bad" in order for a women's movement to mean anything.
Postmodernist feminists took Greer's admonishment to heart, and nowadays you'll find few white women in the American feminist movement willing to tell a woman from another culture how she should live her life. It's terrible that women are killed for having sex, or can get lashings for driving or being with someone she's not related to, and we as a country should speak out about all such things. It's echoed in America's unwillingness to truly confront our national blame-the-victim policies on domestic violence and rape, and the still-rigid roles that really plague both sexes, although women moreso.
Despite those failings, through the relentless broadcasting of our culture and values via Cartoon Network, CNN, and I Love Lucy reruns, we do provide a model, and the material and psychological incentive, for liberation, and if women want to fight and die as our foremothers once did to be considered full human beings, we will, as a nation, sometimes find a way to help; but you can't save someone who doesn't want to be saved.
American women are complicit in their own oppression, to a great degree, and so are Arab women. It's not easy to let go of the safety of traditional roles. It's dangerous for women anywhere, and the rewards aren't necessarily clear. Women aren't truly equal here. We just have a better shot at it.
--Isonomist
(To reply, click here.)
I think it is a very disingenuous charge to accuse progressives of tolerating such practices. If anyone is "timid" about offending Saudi Arabia it's the business class that invests billions of dollars in the country, especially now as the Gulf region is experiencing a boom.
To blame "the rest of us" (American people who aren't investing in, say, the nascent Saudi insurance industry or its long-standing energy sector) is just another way of ignoring the fact that it is in the interest of the thousands of large companies in the United States and Europe to have beneficial relations with Saudi Arabia regardless of its treatment of women, guest workers, or even its own liberal reformers. Companies from North America and Europe are more than happy to joint venture with Saudi companies that have discriminatory hiring practices, segregated workplaces, very low glass ceilings and ill treatment of guest workers. I find it disgraceful that Ms. Applebaum is willing to echo Hitchens' argument without even paying lip service to the "timidity" of American (and European) business interests in the Gulf.
Kicking Saudi Arabia out of the Olympics might be an insult to Saudi Arabia, but an embargo on business ties would send a strong message. Too bad the business class in America is too timid to do that.
Wasn't Saudi Arabia just admitted to the WTO? Whose fault was that? Timid, multy-culty American liberals, or just those evil, tolerant Americans in general?
--olegonzo
(To reply, click here.)
It constantly amazes me that we assume everyone in the world should adopt our philosophy, standards of human to human morality and ethics, and standards of behavior. Perhaps we would do well to intersect with other cultures and understand why they continue to live in and endorse these behaviors, laws, and morays we consider so reprehensible? Try reading the Koran and see if allegiance to this religion is rationally connected to some of the rules we find so objectionable. Anyone can tell you that all acts in life within this religion are governed by the dictates of the religion and that separation of church and state is a much more ephemeral thing than it is in western culture.
It is interesting that Osama bin Laden's whole point is that secular government should be totally subordinate to the Koran and that governments which direct Muslims to act in ways not endorsed by the Koran are blasphemous. His objection to the West is that we support these governments and their actions contrary to what he believes and that we should mind our own business.
The article in question here is in support of women's rights. I totally agree. This is outrageous- by OUR understanding of right and wrong. The actions of the Saudi courts are certainly reprehensible by OUR standards; apparently not by theirs. Perhaps we can remember; it was not so long ago that torture , stoning, and religious persecution and war were perfectly acceptable in western culture?
Are we currently debating what torture is in this country? Is our support of capital punishment considered an outrage of human morality and ethics by most of the countries in the world? Perhaps we should re-read the history of the Pullman Strike and the Bonus March in this country less than a hundred years ago, and then see what we think about Tiananmen Square?
Folks: a hundreds years is an eye blink in human history.
--RJETT
(To reply, click here.)
(12/20)