Pamela Bone has decided that the best way to celebrate International Women’s Day is to buy into the myth that Western feminism cares little or ignores Islamic feminism. tigtog has a fine post from last month that demolishes a similarly themed Janet Albrechtsen piece from last year. tigtog notes:
Yet slowly and quietly the message is getting through, as more and more educated women meet within Muslim countries and now across borders to discuss the reform of antiquated laws. The reforms that have been gained so far have come about from a coalition of Islamic feminists and foreign advisory groups working within the human rights framework to challenge unfair laws and agitate for new laws against oppressive practises.
And it’s not only in Islamic nations that such activist coalitions are making their voice heard:
“in Europe many note the new converging of religious and secular women in practical human rights campaigns not only for women, not only for Muslims, in areas such as for refugee rights, for improved housing, for girls’ education, and, one great unifier, against current western policy in the Middle East.”
I sense a pro-war conservative nightmare: anti-war and pro-immigrant activists in Western nations who are leftist, feminist and Muslim!
Bone (and Albrechtsen) are not really interested in raising awareness of Islamic feminism. The issue is just a convenient springboard for them to indulge some hoary culture wars stereotyping. It is not as if Bone has tilted ignorantly at leftist windmills before. tigtog’s conclusion is an excellent summation of the real situation in regards to feminists and Islamic feminism. Initially directed at Albrechtson the message equally applies to Bone.
It’s articles like Albrechtsen’s that feed into the social conservative base’s stereotypes about both feminists and Muslims, and don’t end up helping a single oppressed Muslim woman. Scolding only makes the scolder feel self-righteous: it’s not actually a productive contribution.
Albrechtsen has much in common with the typical internet anti-feminists who like to argue that Western feminists are so useless, so self-centred, so busy being bleeding heart liberals about Muslims dying in the War on Terror that we are “throwing Muslim women under the bus� in our “support for terrorists� and ignoring women’s oppression in Islamic nations. They are of course wrong, and here’s why: Western feminists have been well aware of the Islamic feminist movement for the last fifteen years at least, and some of us were even aware of the earlier Islamic feminist pioneers. That’s a lot more than Albrechtsen, for one, can boast.
Islamic feminists do not need Westerners to lead them or speak for them in their own countries, and that’s where they are working because that’s where they are needed. They do need the support of Westerners financially and in networking to further their activism, and that is what Western feminists have been doing. The article doesn’t mention Australian Islamic feminists, but guess what? They also exist. Did Albrechtsen seek out and interview anyone from any Australian Islamic feminist group before getting up on her high horse?
Feminists are not the ones who have been ignoring Islamic feminists.
Shaun says:
Whoa, all that pent up outrage. But nary a factual observation or logical validation in sight. Albrechtsen, Cohen, Bone et al must have hit a particularly raw nerve.
Exactly the same and worse could be said of Shaun and Kim in regards to the clash of cultures both here and abroad. “Liberationists of convenience” is what I call them.
Fact is Western Cultural Leftists appear not give a tinkers cuss about the opressed and exploited condition of women in the Southern Hemisphere, going by their moronic cultural philosophy. They have given little comfort and no aid to the US military’s fine efforts to ameliorate the subjection of women in Afghanistan. Instead they and their mates waste everyones time clotting up the internet with borderline paranoia about US military intentions in that region.
If “liberationists of convenience” did care one iota about cultural liberalism without partisan boundaries they would be in the forefront of movements for the re-construction of mysogynist pre-modern cultures over there and the conservation of modern cultures here. Instead they are in the forefront of movements for exactly the opposite.
What hypocrites.
… a series of ropey pre-packaged assertions to support your arguments?
Welcome to the new paradigm.
Oh yes, like that is working well.
Read the post again Jack this time continuing beyond the first sentence.
That just has to be satire. Might I suggest you start your own movement, you can call it “Comfort Women for the Cause.”
WTF has the US military done for women in Afghanistan?? In case you hadn’t noticed it is women- Afghani women especially, who are advocating for themselves.
You plainly haven’t read any of the post and specifically tigtogs excellent analysis. Statements that begin “The fact is…” and then utterly fail to provide any factual evidence at all are a bit of a give away.
anthony on 8 March 2007 at 3:47 pm
Open your mind and visit Nick Cohen’s recent articles for a “series of ropey pre-packaged assertions”, if that construction makes you feel any better. He has been chronicling the liberal-Lefts steady backpedal from its Enlightenment heritage these past few years. Cohen says:
I dont have a big problem with conservatives who arent that keen about bringing the blessings of cultural liberalism to the great un-washed at home and abroad. Conservatives have always taken pride in the courage of their non-conviction.
The left-liberal program is not always all its cracked up to be, especially for the bottom half of the Bell Curve. And sometimes the political blow-back is far worse than the cultural blow-ins.
What I do have a problem with is cultural liberationists who set themselves up as the arbitrators of liberation in principle and its denigrators in practice. Wets have no further to look than the bathroom mirror for that type.
Even worse, the revolutionary Left now makes common cause with reactionary Islamists. We truly live in a world turned upside down. Cohen recounts how, at a recent conference in London on Islam and the West, the hypocrisy of Left liberals on the clash within civilizations was exposed:
Agnès Poirier, a French feminist…wanted to know: Does Ken Livingstone’s idea of multiculturalism acknowledge and condone segregation?
The political abandonment of the women of Afghanistan by the Bush-hating liberal-left is a classic example. That war is winnable, especially if the esclation in Afghanistan could be sold in parallel to a disengagement from Iraq to the marginal members of the public.
But the Left-liberals find it more satisfying to call for a plague on that house. All to score a few lousy points against Republicans or the Coalition.
Jack Strocchi since your concern for women is so palpable you can take some action in honour of International Women’s Day.
I am just stunned to come across a community where people describe themselves as “feminists.” How retro! How so 1977. how so, er, er Eva cox and Anne Summers! How, er, er, YUK!
Y’all need to get out more. I was out with my favourite carpet-munchers over the weekend at Mardi Gras and appropriate “recoveries.”
The contempt with which my favourite dykes would regard you Old Dears is palpable.
Shaun
I challenge any LP-luvvie women to put their “feminist” credentials against the married Ph.D-holding former corporate-lawyer who is now one of Australia’s most highly-paid and influential journalists while she raises a young family; Janet Albrechtsen (or even Miranda Devine if you prefer).
Come on, all you girls sprouting from your Centrelink or other tax-payer funded soapbox, shows us your gonads. Yo wit, put up or shut up
To JG:
I never realised that feminism was a credential competition to be only won by high-flying corporate-career supermums with PhDs. Fancy that.
Does that mean that only high-flying corporate career superdads with PhDs get to win the sexism competition?
Oh dear, oh dear, what is the poor blue-collar sexist to do, so thoroughly outclassed in every way?
John,
My problem with Albrechtsen is how repetitive she is. I remember the same material four years ago in the Oz when I left Australia for Việt Nam. Four years later, back in Brisbane, and I’m reading the same guff. I used to bother reading the stuff; now I just glance at the headline.
Obviously they’re not having much effect if she has to spin the same ideas over and over again. So I guess she’s doing it for the paycheck.
Geez John, I would be really proud to be compared to Eva Cox, she’s a personal hero of mine.
You’re completely right, btw Shaun. Anyone with more than a casual aquaintance with feminist writing in the last ten years would be well aware of what a huge amount of it deals directly with feminism and Islam, and the complicated nexus those ideas engender.
But that wouldn’t really fit in with Albrechtsen’s sound-the-trumpet-beat-the-drums white man’s burden crap, I suppose. Love her talk of emancipation, too. Wasn’t she the one who wrote that piece (blogged here, I’m sure of it) about importing bosomy island women to dandle youngsters on their knees whilst WASPs go off to smash the glass ceiling? What a feminist. Hooray.
No, that was Ms Ove, her colleague.
Oh, damn. Well, I still dislike Albrechtsen intensely!
I’d just like to remind people that while I put the post up, the ideas are very much tig’s and she deserves all the credit.
Central Committee of the Spartacist League, c.1980 on 8 March 2007 at 6:59 pm
Implying that the USA’s intervention in Afghanistan (a liberal democracy responding to sectarian terrorist attack) is morally equivalent to the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan (a totalitarian dictatorship attempting to shore up its sphere of influence).
Proving that knee-jerk Leftist double standards extend to cover national security as well as cultural identity.
No doubt the anonymity would insist that jokes shouldn’t be taken so seriously. But when they are so feeble they beg for a mercy killing.
But the rights of women improved after the Soviet regime was set in place, Jack. I thought this was all meant to be about women’s rights. That’s your big concern isn’t it, along with Ms Bone and Dr Albrechtsen? Not a figleaf for a culture war?
Got to love that; Jack Strocchi refuted Anthony’s “new paradigm” with a quote from Nick Cohen that fitted the paradigm (a series of ropey pre-packaged assertions to support your arguments?) to a T!
You don’t have too many feet left to shoot mate, I’d stop now.
To give them their due, the Sparticists I remember published a great essay on Alexandra Kollantai, the Bolskevik Central Committee member and Commissar of Social Welfare who became a Workers Oppositionist 1919-20 and opposed the banning of factions and associated lack of democracy in the party.
She was one of the few old Bolsheviks Stalin didn’t have killed; he kept her o/s as a diplomat and she died naturally in 1954.
Kollantai was a powerhouse organiser, theoretician and leader for women’s emancipation from about 1905 onwards. She also wrote fiction, “Love of Worker Bees” etc, which explored the politics and psychology of love and sex. She was involved in drawing up some of the astonishing legislation granting women civil, legal and electoral equality, equal pay for equal work, easier divorce, paid maternity leave, the abolition of the concept of illegitimacy, the attempts to socialise housework through communal kitchens, laundries,etc.
On sex, she was a good materialist and said merely that a new morality would emerge in the process of building the new society; that relationships would not necessarily be monogamous or long-lasting. Men and women would stay together as long as love lasted and separate when it ended and that was ok. She wrote about “erotic love” which she referred to as “winged Eros” – non-possessive love based on emotional compatibility, spiritual closeness, equality and respect. A love freed from the constraints of bourgeois society.
She was also concerned about women being exploited by men during the period of greater sexual freedom that opened up after the revolution.
She said changing property relations would lay the basis for free relationships to develop but they would have to be accompanied by a “revolution in the human psyche”. “Without fundamental re-education of our psyche the problems of the sexes will not be solved”.
Most interesting and relevant to comments above was the work the Women’s Bureau (forget the Russian name) did post-1917 in reaching out to Muslim women of Soviet Central Asia. Volunteers travelled from the cities armed with feminist texts and held secret meetings with Muslim women (sometimes in the bath houses to escape detection from the men) explaining the new Soviet laws on marriage etc that would change their lives.
According to some of the first-hand accounts the Sparticists cited, there were scenes of Muslim women tearing the veils from their heads and sobbing with relief! But this work, they recounted, proved rather hazardous for all the women involved, and many of them were hacked to death, boiled alive or torn to pieces by dogs set on them by the women’s husbands and fathers.
Suze
Yeah cheers, I went and had a look, saw WH Auden and realised that Christopher Hitchens must have taken the Orwell for the weekend, and got a bit bored.
Kollontai is great value, Bridie. Her fiction is worth reading too – a lot is available in English translation from Virago.
Paul, one interesting aspect of the revolution you might like to cover would be the repression of cultural and sexual and feminist revolutionary trends by Lenin – which goes way back to his early pre-revolutionary attacks on “God-Building” or aesthetic communism. There’s not just the transition from futurism to socialist realism, but a huge story about the reimposition of authoritarian and patriarchal ideas of social order to be told.
Just a bit of historical gossip I read somewhere regarding Kollontai. She was spared by Stalin and allowed to function as an ambassador largely because she was, but that stage, wheelchair bound. However, at one stage the NKVD decided to subtly bump her off. They sent a junior agent to do it, but he bungled the job. The agent’s name was Vladimir Petrov.
Of course, “I read somewhere” is hardly the best of academic citations, and I’ve been caught out once on this site with a related error – thinking that Kerensky was buried in Queensland.
Still, it would be nice if it was true.:)
Interesting! no-one here tried or even mentioned the ignoring of issues of women living in Muslim majority country, or worse under Sharia law.
Based on the article I thought at least one person would explain to us poor bumpkins living in such places the reason for that.
It would seem the doesn’t matter who, or what you you do as long has you hate the US ..the enemy of my enemy??
So as I understand the position of the Bones, Albrechtsons and Stocchis of this world, unless I agree to endorse any and every military adventure into the lands of the ‘oppression of women’ ie; about 85% of the world, then I, and everybody else who refuses to go along with the great adventure of ‘bringing the light of reason to the benighted’ has no right to speak, write or act, for greater democracy or liberation at home. This is a new twist on that old but gold favourite of authoritarian conservatives ‘how dare you have a view on x, when you disagree with me on y.
I don’t know why anybody engages Albrechtson et al. The idea that democratic debate is to be foreclosed on the basis of a refusal to join the growing conservative movement for a new ‘mission civilitrice’,in the lands where our oil is under their sand, strikes me as absurd. These are the every same dishonest megaphones for unaccountable power, who, twenty years ago and just yesterday, were decrying and denying any view that proposed women in this country still felt less than equal in the treatment accorded them.
If Ms Bone, Ms Albrechtson and Mr Cohen could pause long enough from smearing and misrepresenting the position of those who disagree with their views on appropriate foreign policies for one minute, they might like to pick up the burden of international feminism and start campaigns or join existing ones, for an ethical foreign policy which makes the freedom and liberation of women (and the care of their children) a centre piece of its actions and programs. This would mean of course, opposition to a foreign policy which kills those same women and their children without any reference to any ethical norm other than ‘might makes right’ . When they are actively pursuing such policies, and risking their careers and comfortable emoluments to pursue such an outcome, I might, just might, take their bleating seriously.
This is the rub of my impersonation of the Spartacist League. As someone who was old enough to be politically active at the time of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and who opposed it from (at that time) an anarchist anti-Stalinist perspective, I was constantly belaboured by the Sparts and other supporters of the Soviet invasion with accounts of the improvements in Afghan women’s position which were being introduced by the Soviet-backed regime, and the “clerical-reactionary” nature of the anti-Soviet resistance in whose camp I had “objectively” placed myself.
It can be safely said in retrospect that “liberation from above”, sponsored by the authoritarian elite of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, and backed by force of Soviet arms, did not work out very well for Afghan women in the long run as it brought the notion of gender equality into disrepute through association with an unpopular foreign-backed regime, and enhanced the standing amongst ordinary Afghans of the misogynist mullahs and warlords (i.e. Taliban precursors) who were leading the anti-Soviet resistance. Whilst an extreme case, it does suggest what the consequences might be of misguided attempts by Western missionaries of modernity to “export liberation” to women in Islamic societies, as distinct from sensitively supporting feminist and liberal movements which emerge within those societies under the leadership of people who understand such societies and understand how change can be brought about within them.
Jack Strocchi Afghanistan is an illiberal democracy. Liberal democracies dont attempt to execute apostates, as I believe the Afghans did recently.
Mohammed was almost as close as you could get to a progressive/feminist for his day. The following point’s illustrate his sympathy for women’s issues.
1) His wife, Khadija, owned a business (“equal opportunity” in the workforce and commerce for women over a millenium ago), and in early Islam at least was revered as the first person smart enough to convert. ¿Shades of Mary Magdalene shoved aside by male clergy?
2) In the Koran’s nativity scene, Mary/Miriam cries out from the pains of childbirth (roughly: “This hurts so much I wish I’d never been born”).
3) Women/kids/non-combatants were sacrosanct even in war. “Collateral damage” is unacceptable in the Koran. (Islamist suicide bombers – please note)
4) Even though divorce was easy, a man had to provide shelter and food for his ex-wife for at least 6 months.
It’s a pity that modern Islamist fundamentalists are not as progressive on women’s issues as their prophet. Modern feminists could well use the Koran AGAINST the less-enlightened imams. But then, fundamentalist Christians and Judaists are similarly regressive.
Chris on 9 March 2007 at 11:30 am
The “liberal democracy” I was referring to was the USA. My grammatic bad, I should have placed the parentheses after the national acronyms to avoid confusion. Emphasis added:
It is true that Afghanistan is more or less an illiberal democracy. Afghans are mostly Islamic Caucasians, a regional culture which generally identifies church and state.
It remains to be seen whether a seriously multi-ethnic jurisdiction can sustain any kind of constitutional democracy, as the your example demonstrates. JS Mill believed not, and thats not a guy I would generally want to line up against in an ideological debate.
The Afghans are taking some fledgling steps towards basic cultural liberalism ie rights of women and children. US officials have been driving this. They could do more but they have done more than anyone else, not that anyone on this blog could be bothered to know.
The Cultural Left has generally ignored or derided these progressive moves. They have other priorities, such as gluing their ears to the easy listening Bush-bashing channels.
How about, just for once, providing some evidence about what the “Cultural Left” have been doing, Jack?
Jack, the Afghan Women and Children Relief Act was non-partisan. The “Cultural Left” just as much as anybody else, supported it.
Want to try again?
Kim says on 8 March 2007 at 8:12 pm
Read what I wrote, not what your knee-jerks you to. For the benefit of the functionally illiterate this is it:
This clearly refers to the “USSR’s invasion”, not the pro-Soviet regime in place before the Islamist uprising. The latter certainly improved the rights of women, a fact that I have never denied.
However the USSR’s invasion did not improve anyones rights. It just killed alot of people and after they left the Taliban cleaned up. Not much gain for women there.
By contrast the USA’s intervention improved the rights of women straight off, since it deposed the Taliban. It was also decisive in installing a constitutional govt that has given formal recognition to women for the first time in Afghan history.
Jack said:
The ideological connection between “national security” and “cultural identity”, comes up all the time when foreign Civilizational Clashes overlap with domestic Culture Wars. Maybe its time learned how to chew gum and walk at the same time.
“Improving the rights of women” is a big concern of mine, if you must know. Although I dont make a big song and dance of it. Global Womens Lib improves our national security, their cultural identity and everyones economic prosperity.
This is why I pour scorn and ridicule on some of the so-called “peacenik” Wets. Their national security posture derides or ignores US military efforts to reduce states that oppress ethnic women overseas. And their cultural identity posture hastens the oppression of ethnic women at home.
Their feigned care for women often masks a sincere desire to bag conservative politicians and build a bureaucratic empire. A fat lot of good that does for down-trodden women of this earth.
I was going to post this, but forgot about it. Fortunately, Oigal reminded me: International women’s day in Iran, care of Crooked Timber:
Unfortunately, I don’t understand what s/he blabbing about when saying:
Care to explain further? Because I don’t see any Yank-bashing on this thread.
Kim,
The term ‘cultural left’ is a rhetorical device that gestures towards a politics of smear and defamation in pursuit of authoritarian politics at home, and militarism abroad. It is the 21st century equivalent of the 1930s kulturkampf against ‘rootless cosmopolitans and effete intellectuals’ that proved so effective (for a time) in restoring the good old status quo ante, of the brutish middle ages. You know, lebensraum in the East together with the elimination of weakness and social disintegration at home. It is an old and reactionary trope, and one which is increasingly being deployed, including by people who should know better, to defend the indefensible, such as illegal preemptive wars and domestic campaigns against the ‘enemy within’, now handily identified with migrants who are Muslim. It is a disgusting term, one with an old and dishonourable history, and one whose use tells us more about the times we live in than any other term I can think of.
Although this group of Cultural Drys seems to have a very long record in support of Afghan women.
Paul Norton on 9 March 2007 at 11:20 am
I am doubled-up with laughter really splitting my sides with your vaudevillian skills. Why compare ideologically militant, pro-Soviet Trots with me, a mild-mannered moderate social democrat fighting a never-ending battle for truth, justice and the American Way? Trots give me the shits anyway.
Paul Norton says:
There is some truth in this. As I mentioned earlier, cultural liberalism is not always all its cracked up to be. Especially for the bottom half of the Bell Curve, which is where a lot of Afghans currently find themselves parked. There seem to be alot of dope-fiends in that part of the world.
And a heavy dose of freedom straight after a long civil war is likely to leave the patient woozy. Even well-brought up children from stable affluent families are liable to go off the rails if given too much freedom too soon.
But I dont think you could accuse the US military mission in Afghanistan of being especially heavy-handed or culturally insensitive. They are treading on egg-shells, when not threading their way through mine-fields. There is no pleasing some people.
No indeed Jack,
There’s no pleasing some people. The ingratitude of our dusky responsibilities grows ever more wearisome and burdensome. Time for a bit of strong medicine do you think?
wbb on 9 March 2007 at 1:06 pm
Want to try again?
Sure, although for humanitarian reasons I would prefer not. Mugs like you seem to not know when you are beat.
The Afghan Women and Children Relief Act was a piece of US legislation, passed by the hated Bush-admin.
The Act would have been so much hot air (a speciality of the Wets) had the US military not enforced it with the barrell of a gun. This would be the same military, which that cops nothing but crap from the Cultural Left. Covenants without the sword…etc
Let me refresh your memory [said with sinister menace]. THe record shows that “peacenik Cultural Leftists” were often strongly opposed to the Operation Enduring Freedom, right the way round the world. Before you entirely purge your memory hole you might want to take a gander at this.
Cultural Leftists, both inside and outside core CoW states, were certainly not effective supporters of the Afghan war. Before the war the most of the chattering classes spent their critical energies apprehending the public about the “dreaded Afghan winter”. After the war they spent most of their critical energies exaggerating occasional US atrocities.
Care to lead with your jaw again?
wbb on 9 March 2007 at 1:24 pm
They and whose army?
Sorry, you’ve lost me there, Jack. I thought you were illustrating to the gathered plebs, that the Cultural Left ignored the plight of oppressed women. I was merely trying to provide evidence to back you up.
Kim on 9 March 2007 at 12:42 pm
Its what they have not been doing abroad: hoodwinking the Afghanistan Hawks. The be-luvvy-duvved UN forces have been as useless as tits on a bull in that beleaguered nation. A bit more solidarity with the liberation forces might have helped.
And what they have been doing at home: post-modernist bed Wetters have fouled our nest with their embrace of reactionary tribalism. But I don’t need to provide anymore evidence on that score Kim, since thats where you live.
amused on 9 March 2007 at 1:19 pm
Why dont you come right out and say it: cultural conservatives want to ressurect the Third Reich. Thats why you find so many of them in the RSL.
Thank you for telling me that I wrote something I didn’t write. You have proved my point for me.
Your so called ‘views’ are nothing more than smear and innuendo.
Where is your evidence that members of the RSL are what you term ‘cultural conservatives’? Which RSL members? All of them? Some of them? Your friends?
The men (and women) who fought in WW2, the Korean and the Vietnam wars, were responsible in large part, for the increase in democracy that I support and you oppose so sneeringly. Those people included both my father and my grandfather. Both of them would have despised your fake and phony pose as the defender of the values they fought for, and both supported movements for greater personal and political freedom for everybody, not just for old men like themselves.
It never ceases to amaze me that you and others like you are so big on what everybody thinks, but so unable to provide any evidence whatsoever for the ‘majority’ status of the opinions of which you approve, and the allegedly ‘leftist’ nature of the opinions you are hostile towards. You and others like you are hostile toward genuine democracy, and in favour of rule by an elite comprising people who share your dour, pessimistic, and fundamentally anti democratic assumptions about people and social possibilities. You are entitled to your opinion, but you should not feel entitled to deal dishonestly and corruptly with the views of those who disagree with you, and expect to be taken seriously as a committed liberal democrat, valiantly defending democracy.
That’s a precise summation of Strocchiverse thinking, amused, and a nice indictment.
Dave Bath: “[in early Islam], Women/kids/non-combatants were sacrosanct even in war.”
Yeah, but *after* the fighting, they made utterly spectacular slaves, right?
A google searching using the terms “feminism and Islam”
The same term in Google Scholar.
How about, for example, the Feminist Majority Foundation, Ms Magazine (which has had several good articles about the plight of women in the Middle East), Bust magazine with a rather critical analysis of women in the West choosing to become Muslims, how about the mention of Women Against Fundamentalism in Iran on an Oz feminist e-chat list just the other day, how about the many Muslims feminists who are more than capable of speaking for themselves (put feminism Islam Wikipedia into your search engine). How about actually talking to a Muslim woman?
And I’d add amused, that Jack seems quite unable to grasp the fact that pointing out fallacies in his arguements is not the same thing as supporting whatever he is arguing against.
But enough yacking. It’s a beautiful sunny Indian summer POETS Day in Melbourne and I’m outta here.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article1480090.ece
Read it.
amused on 9 March 2007 at 3:20 pm
No, I merely performed a reductio ad absurdum on your ridiculous analogy. A lesson in the logic of ideological polarites in the Culture War is indicated.
The Cultural Leftists (CLs) are sometimes called Wets, small “l” liberals or luvvies or constructivists. They tend to sympathise with individual autonomies
“vibrantly blossoming” amongst diversified minorities.
These folk are clearly and invariably in opposition to Cultural Rightist (CR’s) who are sometimes called Drys, small “c” conservatives or maybe ultras. In a stable democracy the CR’s tend to be apologists for the institutional authority established by a fairly unified majority.
The CRs are obviously critical of the CLs values. Just as the CL’s are critical of the CRs power. That is the essence of the Culture War.
You state that CR’s are somehow “the 21st century equivalent of the 1930s kulturkampf against ‘rootless cosmopolitans and effete intellectuals’”. So it is fair to infer your position is that conservative CR’s are anti-semitic crypto-Nazis. This is a violation of Godwins Law, automatic loss of argument.
amused says:
My own lyin’ eyes are always a good place to start. But wikipedia. It characterises the RSL as “politically conservative, Anglophilic, and monarchist”. Yet it is also indisputedly anti-Nazi. Therefore your attempt to smear cultural conservatives CR’s as crypto-Nazis blows up in your face.
Nabakov: “But enough yacking. It’s a beautiful sunny Indian summer POETS Day in Melbourne and I’m outta here.”
Boy howdy! Meantime I’ve been awake for I believe about 72 hours continuously at this point, guiding a particularly rare species of tugboat in through the narrows. Heeeee-whack!
“Now I’ve heard some
say you’re crazy, they being excessively
calm themselves to my mind, and other
crazy poets think that you’re a boring
reactionary. Not me.
Just keep on
like I do and pay no attention. You’ll
find that people always will complain
about the atmosphere, either too hot
or too cold, too bright or too dark, days
too short or too long.
If you don’t appear
at all one day they think you’re lazy
or dead. Just keep right on, I like it.
And don’t worry about your lineage,
poetic or natural. The Sun shines on
the jungle, you know, on the tundra,
the sea, the ghetto. Wherever you were
I knew it and saw you moving. I was waiting
for you to get to work.”
– Frank O’Hara, from “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island”
I have, and your point is?
Afghan Women: Used by the Taliban, Used by Us
Life as an impoversihed widow in a warzone may not be the vast improvement some are imagining the Western occupation to be creating.
Nabakov on 9 March 2007 at 3:46 pm
Thats rich, coming from a world class straw-man fabricator such as yourself. I would be interested in applying logical validation tests on the fallacies that you claim sprout, like mushrooms after spring rain, from my arguments. But so far these spectres remain as flighty and vapid as you.
Gossip-tattling, bait-switching and falsehood-spreading are not the high methodological road to positive truth.
You fancy yourself as Enlightened but you align yourself with partisans whose cultural policies promote anything but.
[And with that he, face chortling with rage, storms off-stage to a therapeutic G&T fixed by doting g-f.]
Amused, Razor’s point in linking to that article is that because he rarely actually reads the posts here, particularly not those by women, and particularly particularly not those by thoughtful and intelligent women who take complex and nuanced positions on these vexed and wretched matters, he thinks, quite wrongly, that we all need converting.
Preumably he also thinks we are those very same nasty girls who got Phyllis Chesler’s panties in a bunch by not inviting her to parties.
Jack, if your g-f is as doting as all that, perhaps after she’s brought your pipe and slippers you could get her to look up ‘chortling’ for you.
Paul, re your comments about the self-defeating nature of “liberation from aboveâ€?: I couldn’t agree more. In many ways the whole Soviet period is testimony to the truth that social emancipation must be a product of self-actualisation of individuals acting collectively, not something than can be imposed by fiat, either from within or without nation states. The lesson can be drawn universally historically.
To the extent that the struggle for women’s emancipation, since that is what we are discussing, becomes politically dependent upon and determined by ruling political parties or bodies of armed men, the less satisfactory or meaningful the outcome. The history of second wave feminism in the “developedâ€? world also illustrates that completely.
Despite initial progress and raised expectations, the gender wage gap for full time women workers in Australia is as bad now as it was in 1978. Subsequent social democratic governments made some progress for a short period, but we are now going backwards. The stats on violence against women over this period too show an increasing inability of the state to give support to the growing numbers of women and children in need. See the latest stats from NSW: 1 in 2 women with children who apply for emergency housing currently are turned away and I doubt these stats include the vast numbers of Aboriginal women in need.
The absence of a strong, visible, vocal, independent women’s movement, its fragmentation and demoralisation and lack of replenishment, in the face of a system that really cares not a jot for them as human beings, has reaped the whirlwind we now contemplate. Things can only get worse for the majority of women.
As far as Afghanistan goes, the self-organisation of women there in the past decade has a lot to do with the international attention given to their successful efforts to at least highlight and challenge their ongoing, profound, heartbreaking oppression.
What about crusty, lived thru culture wars way before you even drew a breath and don’t even know…had to fight for abortion rights feminists?
Nah. Don’t tell a thing.
You women are pretty on top of it.
Not.