Larvatus Prodeo

I was tempted to write a riposte to Pamela Bone’s schtick about the alleged betrayal of Islamic women by Western feminists the other day, but in the end I was pretty busy with work and I also decided that I didn’t want to give her the time of (International Women’s) day. It’s probably significant that when a lot could be said about the declining position of women in the workforce here in Australia, the increasing difficulty of finding childcare, and a whole lot of other issues (many of which were covered in tigtog’s Blog against sexism post and the comments thread) that the only thing the Australian found worth publishing on IWD was a left-bashing rant. Shaun took Bone on in a post linking to tigtog’s previous refutation of similar claims by number one feminist of convenience Janet Albrechtsen. But the whole thing was niggling at me. There are two obvious counters to claims (which I think are in fundamentally bad faith, but more on that later) by people like Bone that:

I don’t hold much hope on this International Women’s Day of seeing big protests in Australian cities against female genital mutilation; or against honour killings, stonings, child marriages, forced seclusion or any of the other persecutions to which women are still subjected. The fire of Western feminism has quietly died away, first as a victim of its success, lately as a victim of cultural relativism, of anti-Americanism and reluctance to be seen to be condemning the enemies of the enemy.

The first is that “big protests” tend to be directed at domestic issues. The Iraq War is not an exception - what was at issue was Australian participation. This canard is identical in logic to the slur made by other RWDB columnists - that anti-war Australians didn’t march to protest about Saddam’s human rights abuses. Aside from the fact that neither did any of those columnists or all of the chicken hawks in the blogosphere who like to shriek loudly about this, the claim that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are fought for human rights reasons is just risible. And of course, for those who want to make that claim (and the feminist of convenience argument is rarely made these days about Iraq where women’s rights are under sustained attack), there’s an obligation to reflect on the degree to which military and civil violence against civilians (including many women) advances human rights. As I’m suggesting, women in Australia have a lot on our plate here at home. But I also suspected that the claim that women in the West gave no support to Islamic feminism was a complete furphy. My guess was that about ten minutes’ worth of research in the blogosphere would refute that (op/edders are apparently exempt from the requirement to test their ops against facts). And so it proved to be. Over the fold.

Continue reading ‘A bone to pick’