Reflections Of A Good Nazi

[poliphilo]

It's only a hundred years or so since men in the West stopped regarding women as property.

Of course I'm talking Law here. In private lots of men still do regard women as property. We've learned to be shocked by slavery, by genocide, but the overwhelming horror of a set-up where one sex dominates and abuses the other hasn't quite hit us yet. We're recovering, we're in denial. The thing is too huge and we're all pretty much incriminated.

So when we sail into third world countries and beat them up for not being like us, we tend not to put women's rights very high on our agenda. Damn it all, you will have a democracy! But the burkha, female circumcision, forced marriage, the denial of education to women- these are all cultural phenomena and maybe it would be a little racist and imperialistic to criticise.

Where women are concerned all men are nazis. Some of us, perhaps, are good nazis.

Comments

[sorenr.livejournal.com]

I don't reckon I carry more guilt than a female in a comparable setting and of a comparable age and up-bringing. Women too can become unwilling constituents of the Western male logos, and while I do not claim to be entirely blame-less, I certainly do not find that I should carry any blame on account of my mere gender.

I think the age difference is rather crucial; my school had mainly female teachers (as is common in most European countries, I believe?), and they had all been educated in the 70s and 80s, so I do believe that feminism was a rather strong undercurrent in the environment I grew up in . (Am not even going to go into the family...)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

That's fair enough. I was sent to all-male schools and educated almost exclusively by men.

It's true that women share in the guilt. They have often been the worst offenders in the suppression/repression of their own sex. I didn't have these freedoms, so I'll be damned if you will.

[sorenr.livejournal.com]

I didn't have these freedoms, so I'll be damned if you will.

I am not sure that is a satisfactory representation of it; surely the fact that the male logos pervades society to this day, thus encorporating itself into the mind-frame of even the most feministic of women, has more to do with it than the personal unconcsious does.

I think it is rather a structural than personal matter, both when it comes to males and females. It is not the individual attitudes, but the general discourse in society that are the source of the on-going repression of these issues. The 70s did a lot to change this, but obviously this movement has [a] changed its manifestations and "tools" (Women camps no longer seem to have any greater merit towards a goal of universal emancipation) and [b] slowed down as it no longer appears to be the most pressing social and political issue to women.

The question is where any new move might originate. In the West at the moment the only men concerned with gender roles are people such as ourselves; righteous and (according to ourselves) reasonably informed; and it seems many women these days are not concerned about it either, focusing only occasionally on the issue of equality when it touches on their everyday lives (i.e. equal pay, job-security in relation to child birth and so on). So should third-world female emancipation originate in the third world? To say that it can only be triggered by the West brings up Said's Orientalism-debate, but on the other hand it seems unreasonable to expect women in, say, Afghanistan or Egypt to obtain emancipation on their own. It seems impossible either way, but that is obviously not a possible attitude. I can't work it out.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I don't know the solution either. One thing I'm fairly sure is that you don't liberate people by sending your army in.

I place my hope in what we're doing now. The Web allows us to talk across cultural boundaries and circumvent censorship as never before.

[sorenr.livejournal.com]

I agree with the army bit. (With obvious exceptions; we apreciated good old Monty dropping by in '45...)

The Web allows us to talk across cultural boundaries...

Yes, but it still demands a certain affluency in that you cannot access the Web without certain hardware and a connection which might not be the top priority in a small budget... The Web mainly ties together well-off westerners!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

That's true- but access is spreading. A website that had a huge impact on me (pre 9/11) was the one belonging to RAWA- a women's group that documented the doings of the Taliban from inside Afghanistan.

I haven't visited it in years (shame on me) I really need to go see what they're talking about now.