All things are subject to interpretation; whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth. — that putz Nietzsche
It is with curled lip and bloodshot eye that I anticipate a total lack of surprise at the news that last month a 17-year-old Iraqi girl was stoned to death in an “honor killing” — words I cannot type without overloading my Oxymoronitron. I expect abhorrence, yes. Disgust, yes. A crushing sense of the futility of it all, yes. Surprise, no.
Because this shit never goes away, it will surprise no one that this girl’s murder began by eight men dragging her from her house into the street, and ended after they had hurled rocks at her for half an hour. Nobody will raise much of an eyebrow when it is revealed that a mob of people watched this murder, and that none of them felt sufficiently moved by notions of a higher moral purpose to intervene. There is nothing particularly out of the ordinary, even, in that more than one of the frenzied spectators possessed such sangfroid as to record the murder with a cellphone video camera and post it on the internet, where it is causing a mild sensation; after all, this is nothing that American soldiers haven’t done, and done famously.
I post the video here, not out of prurience, but because anyone who thinks men don’t hate you ought to see what happened to this teenage girl. They ought to hear the jeering of the mob of men who circled her like hyenas and tortured her to death. They ought to watch the flash of flip-phone videographers trying to capture the butchery for posterity. They ought to puke when confronted with the delusional, sociopathic depths to which any man can degenerate when indoctrinated, as all men are, by a culture of domination.
The Daily Mail and other reports title the story more or less like this: “Teenage girl was stoned to death for loving the wrong boy.” Implying that the girl, however much sympathy we have for her, nevertheless brought the savagery on herself.
Whereas it would be much more accurate to say “Mob of men tortured fellow human to death to engorge patriarchal godbag delusions.”
Murdered for “loving the wrong boy”? Oh, dear god, that is just too sick for me to wrap my head around.
I guess I’m numb from knowing things like this happen all the time, though that was certainly not a pleasant video. I do tend to bring up Iraq’s women when some idiot says that the war at least got rid of Hussein (though it’s a rare event these days in my circles for anyone to say anything remotely favorable about the war). However, I would be inclined to read the Daily Mail as trying to make the girl more sympathetic, rather than as blaming her. Calling her a “fellow human” does not do as much to make her seem like a fellow human as calling attention to her human proclivities, such as being in love, and for that matter being in love with the “wrong” person in some sense; experiences we have all had in some form or another. So while I’m sure the Daily Mail is guilty of all sorts of blameworthy patriarchal activities, I’m not sure this is one of the things for which they should be blamed.
Oh, and “honor killing” may be a perfectly appropriate name. The notion of “honor” is surely intimately bound up with the patriarchy, and perhaps we should be criticizing the notion that anyone thinks honor is a good thing, rather than criticizing those who use honor to refer to bad things, since honor mostly refers to bad things.
They will never understand that the stated reason is never the real reason and that constructions like “girl murdered because of X” that involve culturally approved traditions are really “girl murdered because of Y having nothing to do with girl.”
I just can’t watch the video.
I’d be interested to see what (if anything) becomes of the boyfriend.
I watched the video and intend to further it along, if I can, to the war apologists that I know. Of course, it will also tend to fuel the fires of racism and bigotry, which truly solve absolutely nothing. The damned of our various human cultures gain no benefit when bigotry supposedly serves as justice, as violence only begets and apologizes nothing more than violence.
Thus Nietzsche’s very correct assessment.
The Daily Mail title is plenty blameworthy. Notice that there is no reference at all to the perpetrators of the stoning. Instead it reads like the girl went and got herself stoned to death. Stupid girl.
This is going to be one of those “Duh!” moments, but that girl is dead. Anything she may have done, or may not have done is irrelevant. She had a consciousness, had fear, had pain, but now she has nothing. I may bungle my words here, and not truly convey my feelings and meanings. I knew I did not want to watch that video, but seeing her limp body, bloody face, stripped waist really brought reality home to me. Yes, I understand people die in atrocious ways all over the world, but to see a specific victim’s face forces me to identify with her in an intensely emotional and personal way. It is truly horrific, and I don’t possess the words to describe how I feel. And this is reality for women all over the globe. I will be rethinking my knee-jerk “well get yourself out of that situation” reaction I callously employ when reading these accounts.
Watching that man grab the girl’s body and drag it off leaves me feeling violently ill.
I watched it. I can’t imagine what drives men to these acts. I wonder if they just loath themselves so much that they turn it on women…They loath their desires. I had to sit through this godbag open mic night at work one day, and there was this guy singing about women and how when he opened the door he was bombarded by all these sexah sexah women, who were punishing him by dressing scantily and that it was somehow their fault he was lusting after them. So maybe I can imagine…but it’s still pathetic. These men are pathetic but most men are. Right now I’m just disillusioned with the whole lot of them. Because even the best men I know still don’t seem to get it. Pathetic.
The Daily Mail content is plenty blameworthy, too. Consider the passive voice the journalist used in the lead paragraph:
“A 17-year-old girl has been stoned to death in Iraq because she loved a teenage boy of the wrong religion.”
A more accurate lead would be, “A mob of 8 or 9 men stoned to death a 17-year-old girl in Iraq, because the men claimed to object to her love of a teenage boy who believes in a different religion.”
Further down, there’s more telling use of the passive voice:
“It is feared her death has already triggered a retaliatory attack. Last week 23 Yezidi workmen were forced off a bus travelling from Mosulto Bashika by a group of Sunni gunmen and summarily shot dead.”
So, “it is feared”? Feared by whom?
Again, the journalist makes it sound like the stupid girl, who stupidly got herself, has in death killed stupidly caused in the summarily unfair shooting of innocent Yezidi workmen.
Girls. They are a menace to society, you know.
I admit, the first thing I thought when the camera pulled back to display her half-naked young body was, “Right, I wonder how many men are going to jerk off to this tonight?” Depressing.
The next time someone tries to argue that atheists are immoral and religion makes you a better, more moral or ethical person, I’m going to forward them this video. There’s your religion, right there - a woman murdered by a hysterical mob for thinking she had the right to behave like a human being. There’s no better tool on this planet for inciting violence, murder and genocide like a ‘holy’ texts.
Aaron, you are numb. Your detachment speaks volumes.
I can’t watch this video, because it might trigger PTSD symptoms. For those of us women who have previously been abused, this is not merely an academic discussion.
God. Well, I watched it, blogged it and managed to keep my lunch down. I just don’t have any words for this.
You KNOW that women are stoned to death for daring to make decisions on their own ALL THE TIME? Then my question for you is: Why the fuck aren’t you doing something about it?
.
That was, numb or not, an incredibly callous statement on your part. It does, indeed, speak volumes.
1) The headline. That’s been covered.
2) Calling her a ‘fellow human’ == denying the patriarchy exists, which
3) –> Denies that grown men stoning a 17-year-old female had anything to do with her being female.
.
Blameworthy, all.
And thank you, lawbitch. I was debating whether or not to watch the actual video, but the very blurry pictures from the Daily Mail article were enough to trigger me, enough that I stopped looking. Watching this woman being dragged from her home and killed in this way would have have sent me into very dark places.
.
I, of course, BTP.
I think the spamulator are my earlier comment. This is incredibly revolting, and it instantly reminded me of the souvenir photos white folks used to take at lynchings. The technology for recording the atrocities is better today, but the behavior of the patriarchy is as bankrupt as ever.
H, I had the same thought you did. If the girl weren’t dead I’d assume it was a gang-rape video.
I won’t watch it. Thinking about it caused a connection to form in my mind. The patriarchy is jealous of men’s ability to bring death. Death trumps life. Killing and fantasizing about killing makes them feel godlike. No wonder they don’t want women in the military to usurp their power. No wonder they don’t want women to be able to abort, it usurps their power. They are jealous of the only power they have, to kill.
I could barely take in the headline when it came across my newsfeed yesterday. I noted this latest assault on womankind, put on my armor to protect myself from being triggered and falling into a pit of black dispair, and shuffled along as usual knowing what we all know in our hearts. Men the world over – men sitting next to us in class, at work, on the bus – would do the same to us under just slightly different circumstances.
When I saw that Twisty had posted about it my reaction was, “oh, no” and a sickening sense of dread pulled at me. But I watched as much of the video as I could and reminded myself of the reality of this girl’s life and death. I owe her that. I owe all women that. And that is a personal decision – not a global call for everyone to do the same. It is triggering and if you need to protect yourself from that, you have the absolute right to do so.
Thinking all that, I asked: Does it serve any purpose for Twisty to post that video knowing how triggering it is, knowing how sickening and horrifying it is, knowing that it’s just one more link in a long, long chain of degradation. And I sat with that.
And I remembered: We must have the people who shout in public. We must have those who sound the alarm in the ways that are the most in-your-face. I have been that person at times and been cut off at the knees. Twisty reminds yet again: we have to sustain this yell as long and as loud as it takes to save women’s lives.
I can’t even contemplate watching this. I don’t want to run the risk of desensitizing myself to the horror of it.
And reading the article’s title has given me the thought that often “any man but me” or “any man I didn’t choose for you” is “the wrong man”. And then I thought, can it really be wrong to love someone? IBTP.
Lest we be lulled into thinking that violence against women only happens far away, I quietly remind everyone that violence against women exists here. Unfortunately, some of the regulars on this blog have been victims of abuse/violence, myself included.
Survivors have not only a right but a duty to protect themselves against triggering material. Instead of being denial of the existence of violence, it’s evidence of the devastating effects of surviving abuse.
With hugs to all those who struggle with such personal experiences and with hope for healing!
The men who stoned her will all have been male relatives, probably led by her brothers. Today was the birthday of one of my brothers. I couldn’t wish him happy birthday on the phone, I had to e-mail. It was terse, because. I’m not Iraqi. I survived past 17. He didn’t use stones. And I’m alive.
My stomach and psyche are not strong enough to actually watch the video, but Twisty your coverage of her brutal murder helps to rescue her life and worth, and casts the blamer’s gimlet-eyed view on the ever present misogyny at work in the world.
Now let one freaking neocon iterate the bullshit line that the U.S. military is there to protect women.
And I’m just never going to understand why people think women’s rights is an outdated agenda.
Now let one freaking neocon iterate the bullshit line that the U.S. military is there to protect women.
For my post I pulled a quote from neocon Reuel Marc Gerecht from August 2005. It’s with respect to voting rights and the then-impending Iraqi constitution, but it speaks volumes about the priority placed on Iraqi women:
“I mean, women’s social rights are not critical to the evolution of democracy. We hope they’re there. I think they will be there. But I think we need to put this into perspective.”
I have to go wind down now or I’ll never get to sleep tonight.
H claims that this was caused by religion. It’s not. People use science to slowly kill women, especially women of color, too (think of the encouraged and even enforced sterilization of women of color here in the U.S….). This all has to do with patriarchy, with misogyny. And misogyny comes in very many forms.
Anyway, I certainly cannot even try to watch the video, it’s making me excessively depressed and disturbed just thinking about it.
And it’s so true that, believe it or not, there are some guys out there using this video to wank off too…..
saying it here makes even me feel wretched…
IBTFP
H claims that this was caused by religion … This all has to do with patriarchy, with misogyny.
Religion is and always has been the chief and most successful form of promoting and entrenching patriachy.
Science is not an institution. It is merely a method. What people do with the information gained from science - nuclear bombs, human rights- infringments in medicine, the politics of Big Pharm - may be a problem. Science in and of itself is not. Contrast this with religion, which seeks to cling onto old, often provably wrong ideas about everything from astrophysics to gender roles to how one should dress oneself and what one should do with one’s uterus. Then threatens to kill, maim or disnfranchaise one if one should disagree.
Science as a method teaches one to question everything. Religion obliges one to accept outstandingly wrongheaded ideas - particularly misogyny - without question, or suffer the consequences.
did anyone else cry after they saw the video? I did. I don’t usually cry. I’m well aware of the horrors done to women around the world and here. I thought I was pretty numb. I guess I’m not as numb as I thought. still I’m glad twisty posted it and I’m glad I watched it. because if I didn’t watch it I’d kick my self for turning a blind eye to it. and if people like twisty don’t shout it out deaths like these will be forgotten and other people who would willingly turn away from it so they don’t have to cope with how horrible the world can be, would turn away. its horrible but the world needs to see what’s horrible or it can never get better.
I also noticed in the video several men’s hands taking pictures and recording vidoes. were these men journilists? or passers by thinking ‘crap! a terrible crime I should get pictures to show the police!’ sadly I think not. I can feel my dinner rising in my throat as think of what they really want the video for.
I can feel my dinner rising in my throat as think of what they really want the video for.
Taking home and making their own daughters watch it while they glare at them and tell them THIS IS WHAT AWAITS YOU IF YOU DO ANYTHING I DISAPPROVE OF IN ANY WAY, EVER. The “nice guy” fathers will do it “for their own good.” Their mothers will say nothing, knowing that the same will be meted out to them if they so much as open their mouths.
I am shaking this makes me so mad. I am fucking shaking.
For the fact that I watched this snuff film, this lynching in ice-cold blood, with no emotional reaction, I reproach myself.
And blame the patriarchy.
A better person whose sense of injustice had been less blunted over the years would have recoiled in horror and emotional outrage at seeing this mob murder.
To Lara and H:
I think both views can be reconciled. William James puts best the argument that science is also a religion–whether it’s a “good” or “bad” religion is an entirely different matter–in “The Varieties of Religious Experience.” He’s also remarkable (in the sense that men writing don’t often do this) for actually taking serious the emotions of both male and female religious figures.
WOW. THE Bewildreness: that is one of the most profound insights into what links ALL these “issues” (abortion, women in the military, etc) I have read anywhere. I always have wondered. “If they are so upset about abortion, then why aren’t they upset about X?” (fill in the blank: innocent black men being executed by the state, the carnage of war, cancer-causing pollution). Now I can see that they are specifically upset about abortion because abortion is something that WOMEN DO.
Nightgigjo: I think you may be taking out your rage against the Patriarchy on Aaron. Why do you assume she doesn’t “fucking DO something about it?” DO you actually really know exactly what Aaron may or may not do to further the cause of Feminism?
I think what made you angry is that Aaron is of a detached frame of mind about such atrocities. Clue: Aaron is PROBABLY older than you. When you have been seeing this shit all your adult life, you kind of have to take a step back emotionally or be destroyed.
Watching the video and getting all upset is not actually DOING anything (I mean other than getting upset). Don’t assume that people who are able to maintain some distance are unfeeling. Such people often end up doing the lion’s share of the work, while others are effectively crippled by their own compassion.
No, science is not a religion. It has nothing in common with the institution of religion whatsoever. Do I have to get the whiteboard out and make a fucking chart?
Again, science is a method as opposed to a belief system. It is method based upon rigorous testing and actual cold, hard proof as opposed to rank superstition, wish-fulfillment fantasies and a penchant for clinging to obsolete social mores.
Religious folks often like to bleat defensively about science being a religion (much as they like to try to brand atheism as a ‘belief system’ when it is precisely the opposite, a LACK of belief) but that is simply because for the most part, they’re half-educated twits who haven’t the foggiest clue what science actually is and what it isn’t.
“Taking home and making their own daughters watch it while they glare at them and tell them THIS IS WHAT AWAITS YOU IF YOU DO ANYTHING I DISAPPROVE OF IN ANY WAY, EVER. The “nice guy†fathers will do it “for their own good.†Their mothers will say nothing, knowing that the same will be meted out to them if they so much as open their mouths.”
yes you are probably right. it still makes me sick…
on another note. someone once told me ‘honor’ killings are rare….compare with other crimes. one is more likely to be rape, mugged or murdered for other reason. (still an atrocity is an atrocity weather it happens once or 100 times) they also said it happened less in place like egypt, iraq, turkey and more in places like saudi arabia, afganistan, ect. so what I’m wondering is if the rate has gone up in iraq since american invade and gave iraq ‘freedom’
Oh my god. I’m shaking and crying. And to think that outside my sheltered bubble, shit like that happens to women every second.
I am a medic who sees industrial accidents and some pretty gruesome stuff. But I serve as a medic in a peacetime civilian setting. I see injuries from bar fights, stabbings, and industrial machinery, but I haven’t ever had to witness torture. I have had corpse duty (putting them in the body bags and locked coffin for transport to anchorage for the medical examiner) and I’ve had to suction dudes’ airways after fights so that they don’t choke on their own blood… but I’ve never had to deal with a woman who’s been victimized.
I suspect that I will have a very hard time dealing with it, when that day comes when I’m faced with trying to help a female victim of violence. I’m actually very surprised that I haven’t had to do that yet, because Alaska has one of the highest rates of rape, sexual assault, and domestic violence. It makes me sick. Those evil men will have to pay for their crimes. It likely will not come in a court here on earth, but that girl’s death will be avenged.
I have not been able to watch this. Earlier today I found it on another blog and started to download it. My connection is slow so it was in the background as I was looking at posts about it. I read reactions on this “political” blog. I read posts from what can only assume are men, asking what was the context, how will this effect the administration, etc. and then the sound kicked in. I heard the men yelling in a language I don’t know. But I knew the tone, I knew the feeling behind the words. I couldn’t look. I felt the vomit rise as I read the “reasonable” responses from these men whose politics I generally share. They did not express horror or acknowledge the gender issue at all. I listened to the voices and read the words and it was horrible. The people I would like to think of as allies don’t get it at all. Reading their responses while listening to her death was, I don’t know how to say. I know I am not expressing this as well as I want, but it was truly horrifying in so many ways. Count me in with the religion is fucked up vote. I am done with cultural relativism, that has got to be the most evil bit of thinking ever concocted.
So there are multiple records of the crime. The killers can be identified.
So you can add your signature to the petition to have the criminals prosecuted.
After all, the US brought democracy to Iraq, which implies openness of process and justice for all Iraq, including Kurdistan.
http://www.petitiononline.com/kurdish/petition.html
Some thoughts: the Daily Mail is a nasty racist, misogynist and reactionary rag. In case anyone doesn’t know that, bear that in mind when reading it.
Their articles follow a rough rule of: only report vile deeds when committed by slags, feminists or dodgy foreigners.
Of course even the “liberals” routinely ignore systemic and
institutional misogyny both at home and abroad, excusing vile men as occasional, one-off, usually not connected to any wider culture problems (unless it seems that those cultural problems can be laid at the feet of patriarchs and misogynists considered to be less deserving of sympathy).
The upshot in either case tends to be that men, and the actual patriachal systems they continue to engage with, are not held responsible for their vile behaviour towards women and children.
Also, just scanning the Daily Mail page, look in the right-hand side column. A series of stories about celebrity women and their “silly little girl” behaviour (including how Paula Radcliffe has turned from marathon runner into a proper real woman by having a baby), then men being manly by being involved in the serious stuff of men’s sport and business.
PS I’m in the didn’t watch the video camp. Don’t need to. Experience and imagination are more than enough to know just how disgusting this sort of thing is.
Kanea: did anyone else cry after they saw the video?
Yes. I cried. I cried and I couldn’t stop and if I wasn’t already disillusioned with the world (at 22), then I am past disillusioned now.
KMTberry: Watching the video and getting all upset is not actually DOING anything (I mean other than getting upset). Don’t assume that people who are able to maintain some distance are unfeeling. Such people often end up doing the lion’s share of the work, while others are effectively crippled by their own compassion.
Call me a bleeding heart. I’d rather a bleeding heart than no heart at all. If anything, this video has spurned my burning desire to ACT ACT ACT from the blazing bonfire it already was into a mushroom-cloud inferno.
I will be forwarding this blogpost of Twisty’s to everyone I know with the following introduction:
Watch this. If you can still tell me that feminism has happened, that it’s been and gone, then you do not value life in any way, shape or form.
(Yet this still does not express my thoughts sufficiently).
IBTFP–we all should!
How can the world be so utterly different, so completely unfeeling and cold when, growing up, my view of the world was so sunny?
It fucking pisses me off that I am only now able to think clearly, to think for myself and to actually understand how fucked up this is. It is not worth protecting innocence, when that protection is what makes innocence so vulnerable. I’d rather know than not.
Why is it so hard for people to feel any shred of anything about this horrific video? Why is it okay to blame her of her own torturous end? To not WANT to think of her as HUMAN!!
Because HUMAN=MAN. Because WOMAN=NOTHING.
Is it so hard to see? Is it? Because it’s fucking clear to me.
I think that my site at stophonourkillings.com was the first to print news on this on English: I’ve been getting lots of information from Kurdish sources on this. Thanks to Gertrude Strine above for sharing my friend Houzan’s petition. There were demonstrations about this in Arbil last week and there will be more including here in the UK. As for the boyfriend, as someone above asked, he’s only 17 years old himself and has been put in prison for his own protection. The father did not approve this murder and has been carrying out interviews to brag about his late daughter’s unruptured hymen. Yezidis are fleeing mixed cities to the safety of their enclaves as Islamist groups try to expliot Du’a’s AFAIK entirely fictional conversion to Islam. I have myself not just this video, but seven different versions. And I feel dead inside.
In fact as I was posting this I was just told there is a demonstration for Du’a in Kirkuk right now.
SIGN THE PETITION!!!
Can’t speak, only cry. (again and again and again)
Candice Morgan,
It’s clear to me. It’s been clear to me since before I started kindergarten. All my life, I have been grieving.
If I was murdered, I wouldn’t want a whole lot of people who I didn’t know watching me be killed again on video. Whoever took that video probably approved of what was being done, or at the very least didn’t try to help the girl being KILLED by those men.
Do people really need to watch this to understand the horror of what they did to her? Isn’t a description of her being stoned to death for half an hour enough. Can you imagine the agony of that? I don’t think it’s got anything to do with PTSD (although that obviously figures for some people), it’s about basic humanity and the respect for the suffering of another human being. Once you become a viewer at some level you detach yourself from that girl and what she experienced.
I’ll take that back if whoever took the video filmed the murderers and what they were doing, but my bets are that he focused on the girl and her torture and death. He did that because he and the men that did that get off on this.
Delphyne, it wasn’t a single person filming this: it was many, they are all pushing each other out of the way to get better shots. And the reason in my opinion is that the footage formed souvenirs and warnings to other women. This clip is just one of many: as I say I have seen seven myself. Clearly visible in some are the participation of police men and a young boy as spectators. It was important for us as activists for women’s rights to see these. I have been told that the videos have been released on the internet by Islamist groups who wanted to benefit, and who paid the participants for their footage (warning, this is a rumour).
However, this footage has sparked outrage on a scale not yet seen in Kurdistan: there have been 2 demos in Arbil, one in Kirkuk, a meeting in Sulemaniya in the next few days, meetings of Iraqi and Kurdish women’s rights groups in London planned for this week. “Honour” killings happen a lot amongst Kurds and the particular gruesomeness of this, and how public it has become may hopefully be a catalyst for activism and change. Remember that long before this piece of video came onto the Anglophone web it was bluetoothing its way across the mobile phones of Kurdistan, leaving a wave of revulsion in its wake.
It’s probable that Du’a didn’t want her death to be seen by millions. But it has. It’s possible she wouldn’t have wanted marches and meetings in her name. But they are happening. There’s a chance that she wouldn’t have wanted her name to become a byword for the brutality of “honour”; a rallying cry for Kurdish and Middle Eastern women. But it could be.
I don’t agree it is necessarily desensitising to view these films: my Kurdish colleagues have also seen them, and for them it was much harder than it was for me. They cried, vomited, had nightmares. This sort of murder is outside my experience, I am distanced from it, but they aren’t. Many of them have first-hand experience of “honour” as it affects themselves and the lives of their contemporaries.
I’m sorry but I just don’t buy the idea that you need to watch the video in order to be outraged by what was done to this girl. The fact of what was done to her and that her murderers made souvenir videos is outrageous enough. And I’m not talking about people in Kurdistan, I’m talking about Westerners here on this thread who are already at a remove from the culture where honour killings are an issue. It reminds me a lot more of rubber-necking at an accident. If you can’t help look away, and say a prayer for the victims.
While I am no expert, and while we seldom label them as “honor” killings, women and girls are murdered in the US remarkably often by male family members for similar justifications–a recent killing near me was a father who shot his daugher, her lover, then himself just as an example. I would therefore advise against believing somehow Westerners are removed from it. IOW, Twisty’s right: it’s universal, and it’s about hate, and you can dress it up in culture or religion if you want to, but it’s hate/evil/depravity.
Candice Morgan,
I’m signing the petition– and I’m sending it to everyone in my email book.
I implore everyone else to do the same.
kcb said: it instantly reminded me of the souvenir photos white folks used to take at lynchings.
Yes, well, it was a lynching. Serves the same purpose of maintaining a repressive social system through terror. And just as the lynching of Emmett Till, another young and sympathetic victim, mobilized action and outrage against racism in the 1950’s, maybe the murder of Du’a Khalil Aswad can become a catalyst for change.
Thanks to Galloise Blonde for the update on actions being taken by Kurdish women and others to protest her murder and stop these crimes. Honor killing is an especially virulent expression of the patriarchy, but it’s the same brutal animal we face everywhere.
Hi Chaser. I’m hoping to write a piece on HK for an academic journal and it’s my position that the difference between this kind of crime, and the one you are talking about, comes from the extended kinship structures which don’t pertain in more individualistic cultures. Any woman risks abuse and murder by a (normally singular) male relative; but classic HK is performed by a conspiracy of male relatives acting in collusion.
http://www.whas11.com/topstories/stories/042707whasmjdTopFrankLeeColvard.14978d05.html
Twisty sometimes we all need a little good news. I thought you might be interested in what happen recently in one of our courts. Was just announced today.
I gotta take the kids out of town today so I will comment on this post later.
delphyne: “Do people really need to watch this to understand the horror of what they did to her? Isn’t a description of her being stoned to death for half an hour enough. Can you imagine the agony of that?”
Yes. People need to see this. Because we (society) cannot imagine it and hearing about it is not enough–in one ear and out the other, as they say. And yes, we should not HAVE to watch it in order to feel for her or to understand the atrocity her death and the circumstances of her death are. Unfortunately, the majority of the world is not as enlightened as we feminists are.
I have never seen the likes of this video ever before–perhaps that’s actually the problem (I would, of course, rather that such attacks never happen, that we would never need a video of it in order to understand its horror, but utopia our world is not), perhaps what allows most of us to be ‘distanced’ from such disgusting inhumanity is that we are never exposed to it above words on a page or out of a tv anchor’s mouth. We, as a society, are desensitized to words, and increasingly to such images. But this is one image that needs to be seen. And, as is evidenced by Galloise Blonde, it is having the effect it should have. In an ideal world, everyone would be so outraged.
I understand the women who’ve experienced abuse and trauma akin to this in their lives and the difficulty they find trying to watch or in choosing not to watch the video at all. I respect you. But for those of us fortunate enough not to have had such horrible experiences, its the closest I can come to comprehending the horror before it is a real experience. I wish it were not so.
That her story is being told around the world and that people are acting in response to her death is a small victory for feminism–too often such stories are swept under the rug. This is patriarchy staring us in the face and I want to shine the reflection at the world to force people to acknowledge these daily, unnecessary atrocities.
Excuse me, perhaps my heart doth bleed too much.
“But for those of us fortunate enough not to have had such horrible experiences, its the closest I can come to comprehending the horror before it is a real experience.”
Did you watch the Iraqi beheading videos using that same reasoning?
It was a real experience, it was a real experience for that girl. Human beings have the capacity for imagination and empathy in order that we don’t need to gawk at someone’s suffering to understand it and know it’s terrible. Especially when the film of that suffering was made by one of her tormentors for entertainment and the joy of being able to relive the torture that was inflicted upon her. He probably thought it was *fun*.
Twisty says in her initial comments that this video is for people who don’t believe that men hate women. I think most people here are well aware of that fact, so I’m still not seeing a good reason to watch it.
Candice Morgan, I agree that violence against women is usually swept under the rug. It’s like the car accident we avert our eyes from, tragic but inevitable.
This is because, under patriarchy, violence against women IS an inevitable part of the social order. That’s also why outrage at the perpetrator is replaced by a focus on the female victim’s transgression.
H, science is not a religion. Religion has been historically oppressed scientists. No one is disputing this.
That said, scientific institutions (university departments, medical schools, research institutes, etc.) in our culture are created and run by men. These institutions have not magically escaped patriarchial mores. One who is well-informed knows that women are under-represented in academia (scientific and other fields). IBTP.
Unfortunately, scientists cannot exist in the patriarchy without being effected by it, regardless of testing hypotheses.
Thanks for the respect, Candice. Support groups are filled with women telling their stories about how men (fathers, grandfathers, brothers, uncles and trusted family friends) have beaten and/or raped them. We go there to tell the stories too awful for others to hear. I grieve for the women who are killed so that they cannot tell their stories as survivors.
I found and read this blog post, and watch the video, last night after coming home from dinner and a discussion of much the same thing: to watch or not to watch.
I think people should watch. Women MUST begin to understand that misogyny is not just a curious imbalance that happens in the minds of a few psychopaths. It is so deeply inculcated in human culture that to those men standing around photographing and videotaping the torture and murder of that girl, it made perfect sense not just that she was brutally killed, but that they should have a videotape of it.
My dinnertime discussion, with my husband, was about a film that I had just viewed. I’m sure others here have seen it: The Aristocrats. It’s a “documentary” about a particular joke supposedly known to all comedians but too shocking to be told, except in this film, apparently. The film presents dozens of comedians, including well-known men like George Carlin, Bill Maher, Jason Alexander, and many more. There are also a few women, including Whoopie Goldberg and Sarah Silverman.
In truth, what the comedians perform is not a joke; it is an excuse to allow the woman-hating filth that lives in their minds to pour out. The viewer is treated to stories of brutality and child-rape; then the punch line is delivered. The point–insofar as the film has a point–is that “transgressive humor” shows the dark side of the comedian’s mind.
It’s not the film, though, that I wanted my husband to watch. I wanted him to see a little clip that’s in the DVD’s Extras section. The directors are interviewing one of the comedians (Gilbert Gottfried), whose version of the joke has to do with a large man sexually assaulting his small daughter until she bleeds. Off-camera, the interviewer chuckles, “that story made my cock so fucking hard!”
The men who stood by videotaping the stoning and murder of a child have a message for us. It’s the same message we get from most male stand-up comics. Or from most entertainment, for that matter. The message is that women are worthless. It’s important to grasp that, and sometimes you have to look right in its hideous face to fully grasp it.
That’s what I believe, anyway.
KMTberry said:
This is true. In retrospect, I should have waited to respond until I was no longer that affected by the horror of what I’d just read. Aaron, if you’re still reading, I apologize for taking out my anger on you inappropriately.
I can understand that. *ignores the old teenage impulses to get defensive about age and sits back to listen*
I think that had something to do with my anger, actually — the feeling of abject helplessness when faced with even the *idea* that this sort of thing happens within a system that supports and promotes the killing of women by their closest relatives because they dared to think for themselves.
The terror that this feeling of helplessness invokes… well, that’s part of the dark place I mentioned earlier. Anger/rage is how it manifested itself this time.
I do have to remember that all people are people (read: individuals) and that resemblance to the patriarchy in my knee-jerk reactions != supporting the patriarchy.
I’ve jumped to conclusions a time or two during my feminist education, but this is the first time I’ve done so publicly. Doubtless this will help me not do so in the future.
Thank you for calling me out on my shit. I don’t like it, and it hurts, but it’s something I expect friends to do. Thank you for acting like a friend.
“No, science is not a religion. It has nothing in common with the institution of religion whatsoever. Do I have to get the whiteboard out and make a fucking chart?
Again, science is a method as opposed to a belief system. It is method based upon rigorous testing and actual cold, hard proof as opposed to rank superstition, wish-fulfillment fantasies and a penchant for clinging to obsolete social mores.
Religious folks often like to bleat defensively about science being a religion (much as they like to try to brand atheism as a ‘belief system’ when it is precisely the opposite, a LACK of belief) but that is simply because for the most part, they’re half-educated twits who haven’t the foggiest clue what science actually is and what it isn’t.”
Thankyou for that, much needed, though I agree that
A) evo-psych is bullshit
B) women’s are under-represented in the sciences and this is a problem.
I am done with cultural relativism, that has got to be the most evil bit of thinking ever concocted.
I totally agree with you, I don’t like the word evil, but that’s as close as you can get, as if someone can lose their basic humanity and self interest because of anything, this is one of many ways in which one can be racist and society will let you get away with it, you friggin well know that never having an orgasm or being forced into an unwanted pregnancy would horrify you, you know that stoning someone to death is despicable and it stabs at your conscience, why on earth are you defending it, you idiot…
delphyne I can understand your concerns why one should not watch the video, but some people really need to see this to get a clue on what’s going on. Imagination is one thing that works well for some people, but for others imagination might not work, people are different and some might rather run away from their imagination, because it is so horrid. Such videos force them to accept these
things are true, that the patriarchy is really, really true.
It helps that these things get visible. That the video is filmed by those guys for ‘entertaining purposes’ makes the whole thing even uglier and shows at the same time how advanced the decay is. I don’t have a real answer on how one ideally should deal with such videos, but if there is something won out of all this harrowing behaviour is that her story is made visible, the plain brutality of it and that no one of those who filmed it gave a shit. Because, like others say so often violence is made invisible and that makes it so very difficult to fight against it. And from such a visible video one cannot abstract, one cannot escape, it wants you to form an opinion on this, a reaction. It forces you to look and to accept that this shit is happening everyday, only, everyday we don’t see such a video, everyday we only read the little anouncement in the newspaper: “wife (45) killed by husband (46) after divorce.”
Delphyne.
I agree with you. Utterly, actually. I apologize for my inarticulate post.
What I did not make clear is exactly that, that the people who need to see this video are the ones that don’t believe that the partriarchy exists, that men don’t hate women.
I let my personal outrage at seeing it colour my comments. That perhaps others would feel it as intensely. Sometimes an image can speak louder than words. (Again, I wish this were not so!)
Yes her experience is real. That is why I am boiling with rage. If I could undo what happened to her, I would. But I can’t.
IMHO, as a young woman living in today’s pornification of everything, it is my fellow young women who seem unable to comprehend their own oppression and who express their ‘empowerment’ through, as Ariel Levy so succinctly put it, becoming ‘female chauvanist pigs’; who don’t care about or understand the implications should Roe vs. Wade be overturned (how long would it take for the few rights we do have to be taken away in such a scenario), among many other things. But I digress.
In simple terms, the video of her (does anyone know this girl’s name?) MURDER should not HAVE to be seen in order to spark empathy. I agree.
And, in simple terms, the video is not useless. That’s all I wanted to say.
Thanks for helping me clarify–language is a dangerous tool.
antonia, thank you for saying what I had difficulty expressing–that some people need to see things like this in order to believe them.
Why do they call it an honor killing instead of a lynching? Dragged from her house by a mob of men and killed in the street? She was lynched.
Her name was Du’a Khalel Aswad.
I won’t watch the video but I’ve signed the petition and sent it on to 136 people. Thanks for publicizing this, Twisty. (Thanks also for “that putz Nietzsche,” a long-overdue commentary.)
Sorry Galliose Blonde, in my hasty reading and posting I failed to recall that you had already given us Du’a’s name.
But thank you all the same for posting it again.
On the science V. Religion debate, I don’t think it is useful to make direct comparisons between religous belief and science. I think the reason that belief in science is often compared to religious belief is that so many people do not question what scientists say or produce.
Science as a method is hugely problematic. It is based on creating theories to explain evidence. Those theories are not made up in the sense that they do offer explanations for real phenomenon but they shouldn’t be taken as absolute truth. Almost every scientific theory has a huge debate that surrounds it, but certain theories gain cultural dominance and become ‘true’. The general public are often not aware of the debates that surround these theories and do not question that ‘truth’. That is why for many people science is a form of religious belief.
Look at some of the debates that have taken place on this very blog surrounding scientific theories. Some scientists investigate where people place their eyes when shown pornography… suddenly women are worse ogglers than men. The gut reaction from most us is to point as say ‘Oh BAD science’. Look at the nine-hundred ways that we can undermine that experiment. The truth is that pretty much every experiment you care to mention can be undermined in 900 different ways. Science is not a truth, it is a way of investigating the world and offering explanations for phenomena. Those explanations are never perfect and entirely open to corruption from the researcher and their preconceptions. Good science is science where the researcher acknowledges his or her bias and the problems with the experiment, not science without bias or problems.
This is why it is so easy to find scientific theories that undermine women and their human rights, and until we as a society recognise that science is not truth, it is just a bunch of theories, science will be used to undermine feminists. IBTP.
And thanks for the link as well.
I posted and suddenly felt very callous for having a debate about science v. religion on a blog entry dedicated to such a heinous act. I would like to add my absolute condemnation and disgust of such horrendous cruelty towards a fellow woman and human being.
I would also say to Galloise Blonde that you are doing a great job in promoting this issue and thank you. I also think that you are right that honour killings are particular social evil related to a particular form of kinship network, but I also think that the root cause of such behaviour is actually incredibly similar to familial killings in Western society. It’s all about ownership of women, male frustration at their inability to fully possess their female relatives and an act of possession and power.
It doesn’t make it right, of course, but if she KNEW this could happen if she dated a guy from a different religion, she should have avoided that situation all-together by not dating him in the first place.
The video I saw from the link provided above, was not the actual stoning, but filmed AFTER she was dead. The disgusting part was the fact that in addition to the person filming, you can see a bunch of other people, probably all men, filming and taking photos, also. D-I-G-U-S-T-I-N-G!
I will NEVER understand how anyone could stone to death a family member whom they are supposed to love. To most of the world, dating someone of a different religion is nothing compared to the dishonorable actions of those men. What THEY did is dishonorable to me, not what she did.
Bystanders don’t intervene because they would be killed, also…unfortunately. The security forces that were present should be disciplined, also. Not making any attempt to stop it is just as bad as participating.
I realize different countries have different views and customs, but vigilante death, which is basically what it is, is still murder.
Gay Male,
She wouldn’t be the first 17-yr-old, male or female, to take horrendous risks with her own safety.
We see this with a car full of wildly drunken teenage boys that veers off the road, and all the kids are killed.
A lot of kids that age seem to think that they are immortal.
In the case of this girl, she may have had no direct experience (knowing a victim) of “honour” killings. She likely found it hard to believe that a whole group of men would want to kill her, *and do so*, simply because of her feelings about another teenager.
When I was her age, I had already survived years of sexual abuse by my father, but I had no clue, no clue at all, how much I was hated by the rest of the male world simply for being female. Much less did I imagine any of them killing me for any reason whatsoever.
What a sickening tragedy. The pure hatred, the pure vengeance against an innocent child is what haunts me about this.
And A MALE proves that having a dick means blaming the victim. Oh, I’m sorry, did I OFFEND you? Well, guess waht, dickwad? Blaming a dead girl for her own death is PRETTY FUCKING OFFENSIVE.
Dear A MALE, apparently being gay hasn’t separated you from your sense of male entitlement. You’ve just callously used the “she was asking for it” argument. This negates your credibility and the integrity remaining part of your post.
Were all of us raped by our fathers/brothers/relatives were asking for it, too? Or, did you not bother to read those posts above?
Silly me, I calmly typed a logical response. Just for grins, I’m going to use ginmar’s approach:
A MALE, you’re the patriarchy’s whipping boy for being gay, but that doesn’t stop you from shitting on the people on the next rung down the ladder–the women–does it??? Fuck you!
*regains composure*
I feel better now.
A MALE,
You’re not just wrong, you are dead wrong.
In fact you are repeating patriarchial propaganda.
Four times a day in this country a child is abused to death. This child was stoned to death. The idea that we should all choose submit, when the question is submit or die, is heinous.
This is not the place for you. We are grieving, you are blaming the victim.
Fucking murdering bastards. Filth. Vile doesn’t even begin to cover it, but there aren’t words awful enough. I hope that they all rot in the deepest hell my enraged imagination can come up with.
IBTP.
That should have been four children a day in the US.
And another thing, A MALE, how can you possibly admit to being gay, and go around being gay, when you know perfectly well you could be killed for it? How can you not see what bs you are spouting.
“she should have avoided that situation all-together by not dating him in the first place.”
That’s a disgusting way to begin your analysis.
All of us who’ve been children, and some of us who have them, understand that being young is about, and should be about, experimenting. Most of our experiments lead to a sprain or a grounding. If you haven’t, and I am sure you haven’t, grown up female in a country where punishments for being female and experimenting are death, you have no ability to make any judgments whatsoever about what you, or anyone, would have done in this situation.
i don’t think i can watch it. but a project for anyone interested would be screen grabs of all the men participating, standing around, and filming. then post them everywhere. they should be in prison.
Makes me wonder whether the human race is worth preserving, especially the male portion. And especially anyone who would rationalize this hideous event. If it had been a bunch of rats, you would go eeew! rats! But of course rats don’t have cell phones, do they?
Oh, how my heart aches. And aches and aches and aches for this girl and her family - it’s almost too much to bear. I just keep thinking “peace, salaam, shalom” (http://www.pathumphries.com/WE_BELIE.MP3).
And I’ll try not to feed the troll, but Gay Dude needs to hush.
IBTP.
A Male:
I guess then that the other thousands of women killed for ‘honor’ because they were raped, because they tried to leave a man who beat them bloody, because they wanted a divorce, because they were emotionally and sexually abused by their husbands, because their families hated their western lifestyles, because they thought that living in a democratic western country meant they were entitled to full human rights under the law to choose their own partners and destinies, means they ’should have known better’ too, right? RIGHT?
I mean, when it comes to women, they should ‘know better’ than to try to live as a human being, right?
Thank god a man strolled in to let us all know:
- women bring violence on themselves (tsk, tsk)
- the exact nature of the content of the video (he’s been studying carefully and is now an authority on it)
- his version of exactly what Twisty already said (but now it has the full weight of male authority behind it)
- how truly interesting this is vis a vis families and dishonor (let’s chat about something else other than the simple hatred of women on full display here)
- exactly what is going on with bystanders and security forces, because, you know, he has a dick so that makes him an expert
- what should happen from here (dick = expert redux)
Go away fuckhead.
Candice Morgan:
“SIGN THE PETITION!!!”
Yes! Please! But don’t forget to write a letter (a real letter) as well. We all know how easy it is to ignore electronic submissions.
If 10,000 people sign an electronic petition, that might get a bit of attention. If 10,000 well-written, rational letters (that’s about 10 full mailbags) show up on someone’s desk, that WILL get loads of attention.
Address(es)? C’mon. This is the Interweb Thingy.
I have signed the petition and will be sending a link to this IBTP post to everyone I know because, as Candice Morgan said, people do need to see this because patriarchy has done a superlative job of destroying the imagination of “men.” I believe they also need to read what the blamers here, who see the truth, have to say about this horror.
There are, unfortunately, many, many women who absolutely should not watch it. They already know the violence, up close and personal and should not watch anything that would trigger their trauma, which seeing this footage would do big time.
My dream is that this will be the “shot” seen ’round the world (forward the video and petition to everyone you can think of), the un-ignorable, in-your-face awakening of the deniers of the fact that men hate women. Also, this act illustrates perfectly the necessity of making misogyny THE numero uno focus for one and all, for no other atrocity will end until this root evil is eradicated. Those boys stoning this young woman understand only too well what is necessary to maintain the “purity†of their particular he-man woman-hater club.
As a mother, I am haunted by the image of a mother, left to cower, powerless in her prison/house with her hands over her ears for thirty minutes, still able to hear the suffering of the child she had borne and nurtured for 17 years, tortured to death; forced to hear the hateful yelling and sick laughter spewed from the mouths of some mothers’ sons killing her child; knowing her own sons and family members led the way. Terrorism truly does begin at home. Why in hell do they continue to have children for pity sake? Oh, that’s right, forgot there for a sec: Because they have no choice.
“The patriarchy is jealous of men’s ability to bring death. Death trumps life. Killing and fantasizing about killing makes them feel godlike. No wonder they don’t want women in the military to usurp their power. No wonder they don’t want women to be able to abort, it usurps their power. They are jealous of the only power they have, to kill.†bewilderness
This is the pathetic truth of the matter. The tragic flaw in patriarchal “reasoning†is the inconvenient fact that death does not trump life. Life will continue, with or without human beings, despite the insanity of boys hell bent on destroying that which they cannot control.
“He falls, in my opinion, into that classification of one who will always reoffend,†said John Heck. “Because he has a sexual interest in children.â€
This sentence in the article about that Louisville monster is chilling on so many levels, Loosely Twisted. While I’m thrilled to see an appropriate outcome for this patriarchy-produced mutant, it’s disheartening that his impotent quest for power over others via violence is still considered just one more, albeit unfortunate, sexual interest, merely a preference such as “gentlemen prefer blondes†or “I’m a leg man.†The patriarchy has so perverted boys’ sexuality by conflating it with violence that they don’t even know what sex is. It is no wonder the viagra is flying off the shelves.
“I can feel my dinner rising in my throat as think of what they really want the video for.â€
Yes, kanea. It is knowing just how badly the boys have been twisted that keeps me from dealing with them in any way other than what it takes to get the signature on my paycheck, my car fixed, my groceries checked, etc. Other than that, I really don’t want to get any on me so I keep my distance.
“I think the reason that belief in science is often compared to religious belief is that so many people do not question what scientists say or produce.”
Yeah, I was thinking that up-stream in the comments. Science is irrefutably governed by its own set of metaphysical pre-suppositions. Like I think you point out by the end of your comment, depending on how you tease them out, those presuppositions can be fairly patriarchal.
For example, the unquestioned dichotomy between subject and object, scientist and object of inquiry, has its direct corollary in more conventional patriarchy, respectively with male and female. From an ecofeminist stand-point though, they probably converge to the point that they’re practically the same. Theodor Adorno makes a similar connection in his critique of Enlightenment rationality (in the 1940s, by the way) in the first chapter of “The Dialectic of Enlightenment.”
A Male - Why the hell should she choose her lovers and friends around what a bunch of prehistoric arseholes think is acceptable?
I am disgusted, dismayed, even hurt by what I have seen in this video.
Candice Morgan:
“IMHO, as a young woman living in today’s pornification of everything, it is my fellow young women who seem unable to comprehend their own oppression and who express their ‘empowerment’ through, as Ariel Levy so succinctly put it, becoming ‘female chauvanist pigs’; who don’t care about or understand the implications should Roe vs. Wade be overturned (how long would it take for the few rights we do have to be taken away in such a scenario), among many other things. But I digress.”
I think the issue here is slightly more complicated. I am a 21 year old female who grew up watching very little TV, didn’t get a computer/the Internet until I was 14 - and my time on the computer was limited. My life revolved around my studies and the two sports I participated in. I took classes in school that allowed me to get the broadest experience of the rest of the world, and I didn’t play my first video game until I was 18. Raised by an underpaid chemist mother and a father who was a lazy slug and hasn’t had a job my entire life, I developed a liberal bias fairly early on. I definitely paid the price for my (undereducated) outspoken beliefs in feminism, and was amply rewarded with harassment, nearly total lack of close companions, lack on various degrees of intimacy with males, and ridicules from females who thought I was rocking the boat.
The reason I am giving this mundane background information is because I needed to see that video to begin to fully understand. I’m not sure where I went wrong growing up, or what I could/should have done differently, but I nonetheless am a product of pornification. I have read countless written reports of abuse, both at home and abroad, and usually go out of my way to avoid graphics of such abuses, and yet, I am quite the ideal product of the patriarchy when it comes to making the connection between abuses perpetrated and the reality faced by the victims.
This may disgust many, but I do not intend it to be offensive. As I mentioned in my first comment, I knew I did not want to watch this video, but ultimately I realized I didn’t truly understand the gravity of the situation merely from words. I had no idea what “stoning” actually meant - that sounds stupid: it is to kill another person by hurling rocks at them - but I couldn’t comprehend how/why the victim would allow herself to meet this fate. Couldn’t she run away? Couldn’t she dodge the stones? Couldn’t she throw them back? Obviously, none of these are real options, but in my naivete I had no idea what this meant.
I wish it were not so, and it disturbs me to realize that there are probably other women like me - not women who would normally be considered “chauvanist pigs,” but who, like me, do not understand. I am not advocating people immerse themselves in this filth until they are completely desensitized, but I also believe that something is very wrong with my generation if we cannot identify with the pain, fear, and sorrow this woman undoubtedly felt.
Oh. My. Holy. Goddess.
That was a horribly disgustingly grotesque video to watch. But I agree with much of the commentary here already; that watching the footage really brought home the reality of the situation to me. I had heard something very briefly in the news but had ignored it, because I didn’t want to know. Knowledge is power, I hope. I am glad that the video is stirring up rage in the global community.
IBTP for the despair that has settled inside me today.
I’m never numb, but this video has made me numb for the last half hour.
The bewilderness says: “The patriarchy is jealous of men’s ability to bring death. Death trumps life. Killing and fantasizing about killing makes them feel godlike.” I would add to this analysis, which hits the nail on the head quite soundly already, and say that men as individuals and men as a group covet violence, detachment, emotional distance and the ability to kill because they are jealous of women’s ability to give life. To me there is no other explanation why women in groups work and build and communicate and nurture while men in groups kill and beat and destroy and revel in it. I believe many men do not have this feeling as a driving principle foremost in their consciousness, but I believe it is there.
I just finished Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s book, “Infidel.” If I could recommend one book as being one of the most important for feminism and international politics right here, right now, it would be this book. It describes in detail and from experience the life that millions of women are forced to live because of the men and their beliefs. Not to say that in Westernised countries women don’t suffer because of men’s beliefs, but the concepts of honour killings, sanctified rape, genital cutting, stonings, hajib, arranged marriage, threat of death, rape, or torture if you dare show an ankle: it’s fucking sick. Patriarchy is a disease, with stonings and burqas on one end of the symptomatic spectrum and snuff porn on the other.
By the way, where I live, the biggest contributing factor to ill-health and death for women aged under 45 is the fact that men hate them. Truly, we live in empowerful times.
For those who are interested/ not totally depressed already:
http://www.vichealth.vic.gov.au/Content.aspx?topicID=115
I blame, oh yes, I blame.
“A MALE…but I’m gay, so it’s ok”
I had to read that name twice to really soak it in. No, its not ok and how dare you impose the supposition that it is without asking anyone first.
Being gay doesn’t get you a “get out of the blame trap FREE” card. You are a man and if you are a white man, you are doubly cursed with your complicity and thus cluelessness. Unless and until you disclose your sexual identity, you are safe. You are free to work within and be successful within the patriarchy.
We don’t have that privilege, cause we’re women, the ‘other’ that you so cavalierly assume you understand.
Read the FAQ on this site and I’d also recommend you work on developing some empathy for women and their suffering, something I frankly often see lacking in the gay male community.