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i am: 40...a capricorn / moon in pisces / libra rising...an old soul with a young spirit...older than i look...contemplating my 3rd tattoo...NOT a web designer...a lesbian...working things out with the g.f....a native iowan...a graduate of cornell college and ohio state...a critical reader and thinker...really rather shy...agnostic...an ardent feminist...a bleeding-heart liberal...a pacifist...and so not your average white grrl...
e-mail me
feeling generous? *grin*
Who Links Here
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February 07, 2002
another way to look at iteveryone who knows me knows that i hate all this patriotic, flag-waving shit...that it pains me to stand up during the national anthem at basketball games...and that i'm well aware that everyone in this country is NOT "free". however, when i think about those americans who aren't, i'm usually thinking of people of color. dream hampton reminds me that i'm not really free, either.
WOMAN HOOD
March 2002/© VIBE Magazine
The women of Afghanistan have lived under one of the cruelest regimes in history. dream hampton wonders what American women might learn from their struggle.
My summer wardrobe staple last year was a pair of white Gucci hot pants. So I cannot fathom what it was like to live under a regime like the Taliban. They stoned, hanged, and lashed women for offenses ranging from prostitution to exposing an elbow in public. But I, too, like my veiled sisters, have always lived in a nation that says a woman’s life is worth less than a man’s—although not in language as coercive as the Taliban’s.
In 2000, women in Afghanistan committed suicide by self-immolation to protest the Taliban’s brutality. The torching of bras, a symbol of resistance to sexist oppression employed by my mother’s generation, seems an empty gesture in comparison. Meanwhile, my generation’s contradictory postfeminist messages of sexual empowerment and liberation don’t come close to the clarity of the statement women in Afghanistan were sending to their oppressors: freedom or death.
I am no patriot. I think America’s global policy is guided by paternalism. And though we may choose to wear hot pants in America, we are hardly free. An American woman suffers domestic abuse every 15 seconds; we make 76 cents to every dollar a man earns, and are more likely to live in poverty than a man. One in four of us is molested by age 18, and one of every six of us will be raped in our lifetime.
When the war in Afghanistan began, American media became obsessed with the constrictive burka, and brought attention to the public lashings, wife beatings, honor killings (murder by male relatives for a perceived infidelity), and routine rapes—but they never drew parallels between the suffering of women in Afghanistan and the truth of women’s lives in America. It is this kind of cultural imperialism (the idea that what Muslim women really want and need is a bikini) that is responsible for much of the international resentment directed at Americans.
A world revolution that will end the global oppression of women can only come from women. There is no guarantee that a U.S.-backed government will abolish the human-rights abuses against women in Afghanistan. In order for the U.S. to make those kinds of demands on another country without being hypocritical, we would first have to deal with our own statistics. And for America to do that, American women should have to frame their oppression as such. The problem here is that no matter how many women’s advocacy groups plaster billboards with the dismal number of human-rights violations perpetrated against women in America, too many of us believe we are truly free. As if we knew what that felt like.
12:01 PM
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