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A mystery of misogyny
By Barbara Ehrenreich
November 30, 2001
A feminist can take some dim comfort from the fact that the Taliban's egregious
misogyny is finally considered newsworthy. It certainly wasn't high on
Washington's agenda in May, for example, when President Bush congratulated the
ruling Taliban for banning opium production and handed them a check for $43
million – never mind that their regime accords women a status somewhat below
that of livestock.
In the weeks after September 11, however, you could find escaped Afghan women
on Oprah and longtime anti-Taliban activist Mavis Leno doing the cable talk
shows. CNN has shown the documentary Beneath the Veil, and even Bush has seen
fit to mention the Taliban's hostility to women – although their hospitality to
Osama bin Laden is still seen as the far greater crime. Women's rights may play
no part in U.S. foreign policy, but we should perhaps be grateful that they
have at least been important enough to deploy in the media mobilization for
war.
On the analytical front, though, the neglect of Taliban misogyny – and beyond
that, Islamic fundamentalist misogyny in general – remains almost total. If the
extreme segregation and oppression of women does not stem from the Koran, as
non-fundamentalist Muslims insist, if it is, in fact, something new, then why
should it have emerged when it did, toward the end of the twentieth century?
Liberal and leftwing commentators have done a thorough job of explaining why
the fundamentalists hate America, but no one has bothered to figure out why
they hate women.
And "hate" is the operative verb here. Fundamentalists may claim that the
sequestration and covering of women serves to "protect" the weaker, more
rape-prone sex. But the protection argument hardly applies to the
fundamentalist groups in Pakistan and Kashmir that specialize in throwing acid
in the faces of unveiled women. There's a difference between "protection" and a
protection racket.
The mystery of fundamentalist misogyny deepens when you consider that the
anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist Third World movements of forty or fifty
years ago were, for the most part, at least officially committed to women's
rights. Women participated in Mao's Long March; they fought in the Algerian
revolution and in the guerrilla armies of Mozambique, Angola, and El Salvador.
The ideologies of these movements were inclusive of women and open,
theoretically anyway, to the idea of equality. Osama bin Laden is, of course,
hardly a suitable heir to the Third World liberation movements of the
mid-twentieth century, but he does purport to speak for the downtrodden and
against Western capitalism and militarism. Except that his movement has nothing
to offer the most downtrodden sex but the veil and a life lived largely
indoors.
Of those commentators who do bother with the subject, most explain the misogyny
as part of the fundamentalists' wholesale rejection of "modernity" or "the
West." Hollywood culture is filled with images of strong or at least sexually
assertive women, hence – the reasoning goes – the Islamic fundamentalist
impulse is to respond by reducing women to chattel. The only trouble with this
explanation is that the fundamentalists have been otherwise notably selective
in their rejection of the "modern." The nineteen terrorists of September 11
studied aviation and communicated with each other by e-mail. Osama bin Laden
and the Taliban favor Stingers and automatic weapons over scimitars. If you're
going to accept Western technology, why throw out something else that has
contributed to Western economic success – the participation of women in public
life?
Perhaps – to venture a speculation – the answer lies in the ways that
globalization has posed a particular threat to men. Western industry has
displaced traditional crafts – female as well as male – and large-scale,
multinational-controlled agriculture has downgraded the independent farmer to
the status of hired hand. From West Africa to Southeast Asia, these trends have
resulted in massive male displacement and, frequently, unemployment. At the
same time, globalization has offered new opportunities for Third World women –
in export-oriented manufacturing, where women are favored for their presumed
"nimble fingers," and, more recently, as migrant domestics working in wealthy
countries.
These are not, of course, opportunities for brilliant careers, but for
extremely low-paid work under frequently abusive conditions. Still, the demand
for female labor on the "global assembly line" and in the homes of the affluent
has been enough to generate a kind of global gender revolution. While males
have lost their traditional status as farmers and breadwinners, women have been
entering the market economy and gaining the marginal independence conferred
even by a paltry wage.
Add to the economic dislocations engendered by globalization the onslaught of
Western cultural imagery, and you have the makings of what sociologist Arlie
Hochschild has called a "global masculinity crisis." The man who can no longer
make a living, who has to depend on his wife's earnings, can watch Hollywood
sexpots on pirated videos and begin to think the world has been turned upside
down. This is Stiffed – Susan Faludi's 1999 book on the decline of traditional
manhood in America – gone global.
Or maybe the global assembly line has played only a minor role in generating
Islamic fundamentalist misogyny. After all, the Taliban's home country,
Afghanistan, has not been a popular site for multinational manufacturing
plants. There, we might look for an explanation involving the exigencies – and
mythologies – of war. Afghans have fought each other and the Soviets for much
of the last twenty years, and, as Klaus Theweleit wrote in his brilliant 1989
book, Male Fantasies, long-term warriors have a tendency to see women as a
corrupting and debilitating force. Hence, perhaps, the all-male madrassas in
Pakistan, where boys as young as six are trained for jihad, far from the
potentially softening influence of mothers and sisters. Or recall terrorist
Mohamed Atta's specification, in his will, that no woman handle his corpse or
approach his grave.
Then again, it could be a mistake to take Islamic fundamentalism out of the
context of other fundamentalisms – Christian and Orthodox Jewish. All three
aspire to restore women to the status they occupied – or are believed to have
occupied – in certain ancient nomadic Middle Eastern tribes.
Religious fundamentalism in general has been explained as a backlash against
the modern, capitalist world, and fundamentalism everywhere is no friend to the
female sex. To comprehend the full nature of the threats we face since
September 11, we need to figure out why. Assuming women matter, that is.
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