Have you ever read Nine Parts of Desire by Geraldine Brooks? The whole book is basically about what she learned about Muslim women when she was the Cairo bureau chief for...uh, The Wall Street Journal?

Anyway, she talks a good deal about honor killings. Clitoridectomy, too. She was writing a decade ago, so the level of attention paid to the Muslim world in the media was a lot lower then, but her feeling seems to be that a lot of feminists just can't wrap their heads around what's going on. Not that hand-holdy multiculturalism doesn't play a big role, of course, but culture-bound thinking doesn't help, either. We tend to assume the murders of loved ones by savage methods are crimes of passion because in the West they usually are. It's hard to make the leap and see them as a purposeful part of a socially-sanctioned tradition.

Gender [sexist] feminists have always been gender feminists: those who replicate and epitomize the vile nature they attribute to others, and not only to men.

They are and have always been the grossest of controllist bigots.

Their Baby, the utterly sexist Violence Against Women Act should be forced to sunset.Its presuppositions and spawn are no better than those of institutionalized racism.

Sometime, remind me to tell you how I really feel about these repugnant vermin.

I should add that the nature of these gender feminists as controllist bigots has nothing to do with their sex/gender. Thus they have no natural bond with women or men, per se, so could care less about anyone else except, perhaps, as tools.

You said it all here, so much that I've been thinking for decades. I used to get into some pretty blood-boiling flame-wars in some of the Usenet newsgroups when I was called a Western Imperialist Warmonger, a fascist, a racist, etc., because I condemned female genital mutilation. That's when I really came to hate Political Correctness. You are right that Political Correctness (One Worldism, Collectivism, Neo-Communism, Left Totalitarianism) has swallowed up feminism, which used to stand for the freedom and dignity, the autonomy and power of Woman. Now, they say that "wymyn" are nothing but powerless victims of the Big Bad Dead White European Male and that bikinis are as oppressive as burqas.

Yes, Eric, you have touched another shameful secret of our time. Remember, feminists were either silent or outright hostile to the Afghan campaign.

Suddenly, as was the case for much of the left, feminists found themselves tacitly, or not so, siding with those who shot women in soccer stadiums for showing their ankles. In a sane world, this epidemic of killings in Europe would draw more attention and comdemnation. But the left has locked itself into a position where it cannot criticize anything. Except Bush of course.

Feminists were just starting to get a campaign together against Taliban abuses, when suddenly the US invaded Afghanistan, and the feminists APOLOGIZED to the Afghans, and dropped their criticism of the Taliban, because now it was suddenly part of US imperialist warmongering and cultural imperialism; and continuing the anti-Taliban campaign would have meant admitting that Bush's military action might not be entirely evil.

I totally support the basic ideals of feminism, that there should be equality - or at least "rough parity" - between the sexes in both public and private life. Too bad the "feminists" aren't with me on that anymore.

This is simply the latest chapter in something that's been going on for a while.

Remember the feminist silence over Bill Clinton? How Gloria Steinem weaved intricate and beautiful logic pretzels to explain why what Clinton did wasn't really harrassment? And they never cared in the slightest about the rape charge.

And the reason, of course, is that the leaders of modern feminism saw Bill Clinton as their key to power, and they weren't going to jeopardize that access for the sake of a few abused women.

Same story here--how does opposing genital mutilation or honor killings get Gloria Steinem invited to better parties?

Excuse me, byrd, but the harrassment charge AND the rape charge were both bogus. Lewinsky never alleged harrassment; Paula Jones' case went quietly down the toilet; and Supreme Clinton Basher Persuivant Ken Starr himself passed up Juanita Broderick's rape allegation. If Ken Starr himself says you don't have a case against Bill Clinton, then you don't have a case against Bill Clinton.

RB

You're joking, right?

Aside from some disagreement with your characterizations, I'm not talking about Ken Starr, I'm talking about NOW and other feminist organizations and individuals and their reactions (or lack thereof) to the charges.

There I agree: the "feminists'" hypocricy was in insisting that every woman who alleged rape or sexual harrassment had to be believed, without question, before any evidence was presented at any trial. Then they realized that even good men could be harmed by that presumption of guilt, and quietly started making exceptions.

Now if they could explicitly acknowledge that the presumption of guilt is inconsistent with basic notions of justice, they might regain some credibility...

Bee, the Paula Jones case did not go quietly down the toilet. Clinton settled for about $900,000, was found in contempt, essentially guilty of perjury, and was disbarred for 5 years, if memory serves. He was also impeached because of the Jones case, that is, by his attempt to evade its necessities = covering his Lewinsky antics.

And the Broderick case would have possibly come into play in the Jones case, although not legally sustainable on its own. [Not that I agree it should have come into play in the Jones case, but the law allowing it was also one Clinton himself favored!]

And Gender Feminists have not "realized" anything. It's simply not possible for them to realize anything regarding fairness or ethics. They have a different "thought" nature, controllist and bigoted against free thought itself.

You really ought to do your homework first. Honor killings have been discussed on feminist blogs from Ginmar to Echidne to mine over the past year.

Is this just sloppiness, or deliberately disingenous intellectual dishonesty? Before asking rhetorical questions, don't you think it's in order to make sure that your first premises are valid, even if it undercuts your melodramatic parliamentary flourishes?

There is also - and you'd think this would be apparent to those who claim a conservative/classical mantle - the small problem that one both has greater ability and greater moral responsibility to deal with those problems that occur in one's own family/organization/society, than in someone else's house/company/country.

And "They're worse than we are, so we shouldn't have to clean up our act" is hardly a respectable moral argument. I don't accept it from toddlers ("But HE took THREE brownies without asking and I only took ONE!") and not from self-styled arbiters of ethics, either.

--But I have long given up expecting any sort of ethical behaviour or intellectual integrity, let alone consistency, from Conservatives, which is why I no longer (after having voted for both Buchanan and Keyes in former primaries) consider myself to be one.

Was Eric talking about bloggers? I thought he was talking more about people who claim to represent feminism in the discussions that direct foundation money and the perceived PAC party lines. You can certainly debate whether that's the story that deserves attention, but that's a different issue.

J. Beden: Clinton settled the Jones suit for the same reason my insurance company settled a suit against me that everyone agreed was bogus: regardless of merit, settlement was less costly than a protracted court battle. Both were nuisance lawsuits whose merit was, at best, questionable.

Also, Clinton was impeached for answering with a lie a question that his prosecutors had no business asking in the first place, about in incident that nothing to do with Jones' allegations. It was wrong and stupid for Clinton to lie: he should have refused to answer the question on the ground that it was irrelevant.

bellatrys: I have a problem with your comment about "greater ability and greater moral responsibility to deal with those problems that occur in one's own family/organization/society." Taken to a logical extreme, this could mean that as long as our own country is imperfect, we have no right to criticize evil in other countries.

Are you saying that we can't criticize female genital mutilation, or the hanging of underage girls for harmless semi-amorous acts, until we've ended sexual discrimination at home?

And no one here is saying "They're worse than we are, so we shouldn't have to clean up our act." We're merely saying that "honor killings" and female genital mutilation are more pressing problems than ANY sexual discrimination American women suffer at home, and that US feminists should get their priorities straight.

And no, Eric was not talking about bloggers.

have you guys ever heard of the the movie 'the circle'; about women who teach other women how to read in IRAN, or the movie 'osama', about a girl under Taliban rule; or the book 'lolita in Iran' where a feminist writer took some 'classical' feminist texts into IRAN and wrote about her experiences teaching them to women?

There is a whole world out there you guys have never heard about.

I have seen articles in the past condemning and complaining about this and similar subjects. These articles had a short lifetime and there was little or no comment from various "feminist” groups like NOW. At the time I found the sound of silence interesting and a little disconcerting. Why would a set of clear anti-woman outrages go ignored by those who where fighting against anti-woman outrages?

Further research and observation brought the answer. The fight by the current groups of feminists in the Western Industrial Nations has nothing to do with fighting for woman’s rights and everything to do with empowering the group. One prime example is how NOW and others supported extreme philanderers such as Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy while calling clear victims of those people like Paula Jones “trailer trash”.

The hypocrisy of groups like NOW is so profound that any potential or real good they may do is lost in the noise generated by their hypocritical stances.

And it is a crying shame. While there have been significant advances in the USA and other countries since the early 1900’s when the suffrage movement succeeded in many countries, most of the world still severely oppresses women to the point of mutilation and even death.

But that is over there and we don’t care about them.

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