Today on Woman's Hour (first item) they were discussing Disney making over Merida, the red-haired heroine of Brave, into something sexier and more feminine for merchandising purposes. Little girls were angry that Disney has spoiled Merida, as Disney does most things it touches.
"I like Merida because she likes wearing loose-fitting dresses so she can aim properly when she's hunting. And I also like her because she's not one of those pink girly princesses who is always flapping around looking for boyfriends."
Going by the pictures, they've changed a quirky kid with a bow and arrows to a hot babe, who spends her time in the hair-dresser's rather than on the archery field.
The mothers on Woman's Hour were annoyed as well, as Merida is a gutsy princess they like their daughters to admire, as any decent mother would far rather their daughter had a pin-up of Jessica Ennis (achievement, drive) than of Kate Middleton (expensive teeth).
The little girls favoured Merida's penchant for dress suitable for active pursuits. One of the worst films I've ever seen in my life was Van Helsing. Among its general badnesses was Kate Beckinsale playing Anna Valerious who was constantly pursued by evil winged vampires. If a family curse had me being pursued by evil winged vampires I'd wear a loose top, jogging bottoms and trainers, or the nineteenth century equivalent, not a corset and high-heeled boots up to my thighs. I'd also tie back or even cut my hair, however tumbling and curly. Throw her to the vampires.
What not to wear when chased by evil vampires
I can understand why the little girls were so furious with the Disney makeover. If you love a character, you hate them being messed around. When I was little I adored Emma Peel, as played by Diana Rigg, in The Avengers. She raced about in a Lotus Elan, wore cat suits and karate kicked the baddies. I'd have been raging if she had appeared in a frilly dress and stilettos, and had waited to be rescued.
Emma Peel was replaced by a less fighting woman, and the show fell out of my ratings.
The Michael Philpott case is terrible, of course. I saw a couple of documentaries about it last night and his friends, neighbours and his wife's family were staggered and distraught.
Michael Philpott had the following characteristics:-
If his women folk were disobedient, he beat them. They had to get his permission to go out. He controlled all the finances. The sole object of his womenfolk were to be his slaves and bear his children. He had a total contempt for women, or "bitches" as he usually called them. He liked to have sex with very young girls - early teens, preferably.
He should have lived in Saudi Arabia, where he would have been a blameless, in fact, an exemplary citizen.
Also, his womenfolk are described as "damaged" or "vulnerable." Plenty of cultures, including our own once, would describe them as showing good wifely virtues, like patience, forebearance and obedience.
I like this title so much I have to write a post to go with it.
Naomi Wolf's Vagina: A New Biography has been panned by Zoe Heller, Laurie Penny, Katie Roiphe, Suzanne Moore and Neuroskeptic (a neuro-scientist who questions Wolf's science bits). (Entertaining quote mine here.) The book outlines Wolf's quest for the transcendental orgasm that she had mislaid somewhere. Suzanne Moore describes it as a "self-help" book. So I've decided not to read it - it sounds very American and earnest, and as for searching for the transcendental orgasm, I have trouble enough locating my keys and spare pair of specs. As for the power of the vagina that she extolls, mine won't even charge up my moby. Laurie Penny groans, "Has feminism come to this?" Quite.
Putting "Vagina" in a title does make a book sound more exciting and feministy, so I am jazzing up titles of books I'm reading, or have read recently:-
The Curious Incident of the Vagina in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon In the Shadow of the Vagina by Tom Holland Vagina's End by Ford Madox Ford Letters to Vagina by Philip Larkin We Need to Talk about My Vagina by Lionel Shriver The Lonely Planet Guide to the Vagina A Vagina for Mr Biswas by V S Naipaul The Vagina of a Provincial Lady by E M Delafield Changing My Vagina: Occasional Essays by Zadie Smith The Vagina Stain by Philip Roth The Odd Vaginas by George Gissing
This heavy solemnity about sex - Wolf, it seems, thinks her vagina is a "goddess" and chaps should cover you with rose petals before you go transcendental on them - does bring out the Vagina Wood in me.
Update:- commenters came up with more suggestions for vajazzled titles here.
I have been away on holiday, and have only now got the time to write a piece about Camille O'Sullivan's performance of The Rape of Lucrece, which was part of the Edinburgh International Festival’s main programme. O'Sullivan has formerly appeared on the Fringe doing her cabaret numbers by Brel, Weill, and more modern song-writers, so this new departure shows that the talent she deploys to enact a song can take an audience through a long narrative poem from the sixteenth century.
I didn't know what to expect but I am a big fan of O'Sullivan, so I went to see the show, and it was a memorable evening. There was a pianist in the corner, some piles of papers and a bit of scenery but otherwise she stood alone on the big stage at the Lyceum and narrated, sang and acted out the poem. In a black coat she was a menacing Tarquin, the princely rapist, in a white shift Lucrece, the trapped victim. She used her flexible voice to tell the story, then growled and lamented, and she sang some lines over and over, especially those about Lucrece's beauty. The theatre was full, attentive and she received a standing ovation.
My only cavil was that the music that accompanied the lines she sang was dull.
I saw The Rape of Lucrece at a time when there was much noise about rape blasting out - and a good deal of the noise showed an ignorance about the subject which needs some correcting. So for the unreconstructed chauvinists I'm thinking of running a course on Basic Feminism. Here are some questions and answers from Module 1
1. Lucrece is the perfect rape victim- discuss.
Lucrece’s feminine beauty – her azure veins, her alabaster skin – is much dwelt on, as is her supreme married virtue – both of course make her desirable to Tarquin. She is chaste; she is forced by Tarquin who threatens not just to kill her but to make it look like she was in bed with a slave when he did so, thus dishonouring her family. In shame after the rape she kills herself in front of her chief male protectors – her husband and father – and they take her bloody body to Rome to rouse the citizenry against Tarquin. She is the soft white lamb menaced by the totally ruthless wolf. She is the patriarch’s perfect rape victim – her relations with Tarquin have been formal and proper and she was never given to doubtful behaviour. Her womanly virtue is stressed again and again.
2. In the light of Camille O'Sullivan's portrayal of her, how does Lucrece compare to the heroine of another performance by O'Sullivan, the woman who sings In These Shoes. If that woman was raped, what would be the reaction?
We are not told what the woman In These Shoes looks like - she's subject rather than object. She takes and leaves the males that come her way on her own terms. If one of the chaps in that song – one we'll call Riderman, the fellow who offered to take her for a ride – tried it on again, and she said, or indicated, “No way, Jose”, and he kept trying and succeeding by force or subterfuge an old tradition of males would say – well – you have been putting it about a bit, including with Riderman. So what did you expect? A smaller sub-group would first of all have to investigate whether Riderman had pissed off the USA before pronouncing on his culpability. They might even let Tarquin off, if he had really good anti-imperialist credentials.
3. Please expand on the following definitions in the context of the following texts:-
"Reactionary feminist" - a woman who states that rape is a crime
"Misandrist" - a woman who states that rape is a crime
"Male stooge" - a man who agrees with a woman who states that rape is a crime
"Brazen groupie" - a woman who may be raped with impunity.
Camille O'Sulllivan playing a perfect rape victim
Camille O'Sulllivan playing an imperfect rape victim
This course of Basic Feminism will not just be an examination of texts. I intend to stage a little agit-prop opera at the end of it, with singing, dancing and speaking parts for everyone.
( From the flies a hook appears, scooping Asange off the balcony)
All right - it's just a few jottings but I'm sure in a few improv workshops we can come up with something.
Reading the muck emanating from George Galloway et al put me in pure female (not necessarily feminist) fury. But the satirist in me took over - as it did with Hadley Freedman and Deborah Ross - both light, satirical woman writers.
Satire is normally the voice of common sense and decency against the crazy and outrageous - and of course one era's outrage is another era's normality. The idea that women could appear in Parliament was once a cause for automatic hilarity. So it was a sign of great gains made by the nineteen seventies new wave feminism that it is considered a crime with chances of conviction if a man rapes a woman who had been his willing sexual partner - that "brazen groupies" like other once rapable beings (wives and prostitutes) are not a special category of no questions asked access women, but just women. That if the bedroom door closed, inside it wasn't a small dictatorship with full sovereign territory ceded to the strongman. Believing this has become mainstream common sense and decency. Those wriggling about this have been derided and scorned - which is heartening.
*A nasty little commenter on this thread - see Comments 123, 160, 173
So leave the flat I own - and no man had to countersign my mortgage, as would have happened before the 1970s. Thank you feminism. Go to work where they can’t fire me without jumping through a lot of hoops - so here’s to you employment legislation and trade unions that pressed for it. Hang out in the pub with male friends - there you go, changing social customs. I’m grateful to a good state school system for my education - my parents both left school at fourteen.
So when this African immigrant chambermaid went to her employers and the New York police because, she says, a rich important white man had assaulted her, what forces lay behind that action. The civil rights movement for black equality. Rights of employment. Feminist consciousness raising that put about the notion that a woman’s body is her own possession. An idea that in the USA everyone, high or low, is supposed to be subject to the law. Perhaps even the knowledge that Barrack Obama, president of the USA. is of recent immigrant stock (so recent, that his enemies insist he wasn’t born in the USA at all).
This makes people like Bernard-Henri Levy with his indignation that his superior friend, Strauss-Khan, should be treated like other people and Jean-François Kahn and his "Why all the fuss? It's merely a bit of hanky-panky with the help” seem to be from a very ancien regime - the age of chivalry, say, where you‘d parade your romantic devotion to a grand lady and then think nothing of raping a peasant. To the tumbrils, both of them.
One very important fact has been largely absent from the coverage of the sexual assault case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and, until latterly, leading candidate to be the next president of France. The hotel housekeeper whom he allegedly assaulted was represented by a union.
The reason that this is an important part of the story is that it is likely that Strauss-Kahn's alleged victim might not have felt confident enough to pursue the issue with either her supervisors or law enforcement agencies, if she had not been protected by a union contract. The vast majority of hotel workers in the United States, like most workers in the private sector, do not enjoy this protection.
Read the whole article and follow some of the links eg here:-
Housekeepers and officials with the main hotel workers union, Unite Here, said that housekeepers were often too embarrassed or scared to report incidents to management or the police. Sometimes they fear that management, often embracing the motto “the customer is always right,” will believe the customer over the housekeeper and that the worker may end up getting fired.
Ms. Babbington said a co-worker once encountered a naked guest who chased her around the room. “She was just panicking,” Ms. Babbington said. “She was very new in the country and she demanded to talk to the police. Her manager sat her down to calm her down and told her not to call the police, that it wouldn’t be good for the hotel.”
I do remember when I was young working as a waitress and customers thinking it was all right to stroke me, as if I was a pet cat. I'm sorry I didn't spill their food all over them.
Amnesty International condemns the detention of several people, including two women wearing the full-face veil, who were protesting against the law banning the wearing of any form of clothing concealing one's face in public.
The law came into force today. Police said the people were detained for joining an unauthorised protest in central Paris.
Amnesty International’s Europe and Central Asia Programme Director John Dalhuisen said:
“Women in France have the right to freedom of religion and expression. They must also be free to protest when this right is violated.
Amnesty is quite right of course. This ban is ludicrous, not to mention sinister. The ludicrousness is what strikes me most.
We're public guardians bold yet wary And of ourselves we take good care To risk our precious lives we're chary When danger looms we're never there But when we meet a helpless woman Or little boys who do no harm We run them in, we run them in We run them in, we run them in We show them we're the beaux gendarmes.
Actually the women haven't been that helpless and have been flagrantly breaking the law. Penalty:- a fine and citizenship classes. If any law was pointlessly bossy, this one is.
Frenchwomen used to wear veils, e.g. Madame Bovary:-
Then some hundred paces farther on she again stopped, and through her veil, that fell sideways from her man's hat over her hips, her face appeared in a bluish transparency as if she were floating under azure waves.
This clip is my favourite piece of Black Swan, the melodrama that‘s doing the rounds at the moment. When I saw it one part of my mind or perhaps my gut was gripped with suspense, the other part, the feminist critic part, was saying, is this for real? Frightening things approach you in basements, subways and behind doors in a claustrophobic apartment, which works very well on the suspense level, the acting is good and so in spite of the crude stereotypes of character and story which date from an earlier Bette Davis age than from films like Carrie, Hallowe‘en and the slasher stable it keeps you thrilled in your seat. But those few minutes, of a woman dancing and turning into a swan are real film magic. (My favourite bit of Billy Elliot, which is a run of the mill film about the outsider finding his true role is the final scene when the grown up Billy Elliot jumps across the stage in Swan Lake. It‘s such a great effect, the mechanics and cogs backstage then the dazzle of performance, and Tchaikovsky’s crescendos and climaxes can‘t help but exalt you).*
A tyro feminist critic could watch Black Swan and observe:-
1. The oppositions, on the Madonna vs. Whore, Classic vs. Romantic lines. So here we have the pale, frigid perfectionist versus the dark sexy let-it-all-hang-outer. Nathalie Portman plays, with believable intensity, Nina, an ambitious young ballerina who is a natural for the White Swan in a production of Swan Lake but is too cold, too repressed to play the Black Swan. She has to learn to “feel” the part by finding her own sexuality. This all-powerful magic token she unearths by biting the director, masturbating and having Lesbian wet dreams about her rival, Lily (Mila Kunis, managing to look voluptuous with her heavy black eye-liner, even though voluptousness is not what you expect in classical ballerinas). Lily of course is not so technically proficient as Nina but dances effortlessly and gropes her partner’s crotch, representing wild abandoned sexiness. Nina, the perfect White Swan, must learn to become the dangerous and erotic black swan, Carmen in a tutu.
This pale virgin versus the dark sexy piece is an old theme. It appears in Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819) with the figures of Rebecca and Rowena. Maggie Tulliver in The Mill of the Floss (1860) chucks aside a novel when the insipid blonde heroine appears who she knows will defeat the dark interesting woman. I would have thought feminism had come into the mainstream to the degree that someone in the production must have recognised this, but evidently not. The film is done straight.
For thematic purpose Lily and Nina have to appear together in many scenes but it makes Lily’s motivation puzzling. Is she after Nina’s role, or is this in Nina’s mind? Otherwise why does a likable young woman pursue the friendship of a frigid unpopular priss like Nina after several rebuffs? Is her warmth assumed, covering malice? It’s not made clear.
2. The controlling stifling mother (Barbara Hershey). She isn’t as batty as the mother in Carrie, but getting there. Nina’s bedroom is sugar pink and full of stuffed toys, which an eleven year old would find too much. Three felt markers on a placard:- “Infantilised young woman dominated by disappointed mother.”
3. The idea the dedication to an art and ambition are basically bad for a young woman's womanhood and lead to neurosis.
4. The Svengali figure - the man who can make and break the dependent female. He’s the director of the ballet, an excitingly attractive Frenchman (Vincent Cassel) with a crooked nose. Like the hero of a Georgette Heyer novel he can read Nina’s mind and know exactly what’s wrong with her.
5. The dangers that the city holds for solitary young women. There are apprehensive shots of subways and of the practice rooms in the basement of the ballet studio. Nina, sitting in the carriage of the subway, is confronted by a pervert who jiggles his tongue at her while touching his crotch.
6. The ageing woman (Winona Ryder) who after being thrown out of her primadonna role goes mad and stabs her own face.
The film taps into particular female fears - the menace of the streets and public transport, the fear of their own bodies, the fear of being unattractive, the fear of ageing and being discarded, the fear of sex and men Nina’s body attacks her, by getting odd rashes and marks on her skin. Finally she accepts her body and her own power but in her moment of consummated perfection she throws herself from a great height and dies. Pure romantic, pure Gothic.
Of course a classical ballet dancer does horrible things to her body to make it do things that a human body is not designed for. Classical ballerinas get eating disorders and break their toes. I went to Black Swan with a friend whose daughter had done classical ballet but when the daughter got older she didn’t encourage it, having by then met crazed dancing teachers who were crippled with arthritis. She says she now finds the shapes and angles that classical dancers get into ugly. Mind you, the daughter, who is beautiful, walks like a princess.
*I was once on holiday in Estonia, staying in a town on the Baltic called Haapsalu, which had been a resort for Russians and where Tchaikovsky had often stayed. In the evening we were walking in a park beside the Baltic and sat down on a park bench, then leaped up with shrieks as the bench struck up Swan Lake. Behind the bench was some kind of music player with a sensory device. In a holiday mood by the tideless Baltic which was covered with wild fowl the Tchaikovsky played as if by ghosts was the icing on the cake, being both beautiful and absurd.
If you want to read serious and considered analysis about the group formerly known as the Revolutionary Communist Party, have a look at a piece by Bob over here.
The RevCommParty members are band sluts who play in outfits like Libero!, London International Research Exchange, Transport Research Group and a festival line up of others as well as getting together for all stars performances at the Battle of Ideas while being the house band at Spiked (producer, Brendan O‘Neill, the hands-on head of the record company, Frank Furedi). They are the punk rockers of the left, who love to outrage the progressive dinosaurs, and their set list contains numbers like Dead Polar Bears - Who cares?; Melt the glaciers! and Speech Free, Markets Freer. After a while their riffs become predictable and their intellectual progression sticks at three chords but with their glossy production they get gigs all over the radio and the press.
One of their favourite themes is Piss off the Liberals (Any Way You can) and how they tackle that is best described here (scroll to August 22 - for some reason can’t do a proper link to it.)
This is the work of the Furedification Machine
1) Open a newspaper; grab the dumbest media spaz-out in it as your subject material, then put pen to paper.
2) Lay out the entire, sorry episode, making it entirely clear that it's an electorally-driven spankathon confected out of bugger all by insane right wing bigots for political purposes, with the support of dupes and cranks.
3) Concede that liberal criticisms of said spankathon are essentially correct in every major aspect.
4) Suddenly announce that the real issue is not the confected right wing spankathon, but is instead the fact that condescending Yankee liberals think they're so bloody clever.
5) Waffle at length about how out of touch with, like, working class concerns and shit the libs are by pretending that belligerent stupidity is a class issue.
6) Round it all off with a spurious declaration about how, if only those godawful libs weren't so obsessed with political correctness, they would somehow magically squash the controversy by focusing instead on some unrelated horseshit.
You can see the above method in action here. The Tea Party, you understand, is all the liberals‘ fault.
Liberal activists’ dismissal of the Tea Party as ‘insane’ only shows how cut-off they are from the American masses.
The masses, working class and sturdy proles are useful bricks which Spiked always keep at hand to hurl at the dismissive liberals. I haven’t yet come across a piece about the liberal fear of and contempt for the EDL only shows how cut off they are from the English masses, but it must be out there somewhere. The history revisionism wing of Spiked is working on very short monographs with the following sub-headings:- “Liberal dismissal of lynch parties as “outrageous and murderous bigotry” only show how cut off they are from the Southern states masses” and going back to the nineteenth century, “Abolitionist dismissal of slavery as “vilely unjust” only shows how cut off they are from the secessionist masses.”
So when I heard about the London Anti-Street Harassment Campaign I was waiting for Spiked to come out with an article that this was just a middle-class attack on sturdy proles. Sure enough when I was listening to Weekend Women’s Hour a few weeks ago there was an item covering the campaign and the BBC’s obligatory dissenting voice was from Spiked's editor Brendan O’Neill (fast forward 15:41 minutes here). Brendan O’Neill regards street harassment as a freedom of speech issue and describes guys shouting “Nice tits” as “interchange” or “banter”. Then the sturdy prole moment came:-
BO: What’s really going on [very Spiked that, the “what’s really going on“] is that a really old style Victorian attitude is being rehabilitated because the idea that women are fragile and easily victimised particularly by working-class men really comes from the Victorian era when women would never go out. .
Women’s Hour presenter - It’s not just working class men
BO: This is the implication. When you read these discussions, when you read the newspaper reports it is often the implication, dustbin men as we heard in the earlier report.
The answer to that of course is that 1) those are the men who work outside and so the ones you encounter in the streets:- 2) it’s only some men, not all or most; 3) men who work in the City can be total sexist bullying jerks as well but they’re tucked behind their glass walls.
BO goes on:-
Feminism used to be about liberating women and now feminism has become about policing men. Policing men in the workplace Policing men on the streets. Policing men’s speech. Policing men’s thoughts and attitudes. This is actually what you’ve called for. I think it is a great tragedy that feminism has sunk from demanding liberation and equality for women which I 100% support to demanding the closer policing and the authoritarian control of men.
As no-one on Women's Hour pointed out a big part of feminism was getting the crime of rape to be taken more seriously and rape victims not to be sorted out into the chaste and unchaste. Another part of feminism was getting domestic violence to be treated as a crime, not a private family matter. In short, quite a lot of feminism has been about policing male behaviour when it is criminal. Also, the women on the programme were asking for policing against actual intimidation and for the rest thought education and campaigning were a good idea - which is not “policing thoughts and attitudes” but influencing them.
Anyway, that was the editor of Spiked in action calling for female empowerment, which, for a woman trailed by a gang of blokes in a car shouting remarks at her, could only come if she was armed with a Kalashnikov (something many women would like to have folded in their handbags at such times). Very Spiked, very predictable.
Spiked are libertarians and lay great stress on not stifling individualism. You could reasonably expect that this would be shown in the Spiked writers’ quirkiness and sudden, surprising opinions along with a highly idiosyncratic and distinctive expression. When it comes to wide cultural range, wit, and richness of expression the Spiked stable should out gallop Howard Jacobson, Christopher Hitchens and H L Mencken. They may of course be producing brilliant prose and original ideas but before any of these are published, they go through the special Spiked software MediOcs. MediOcs, as well as filtering out any dissension from the Spiked political line, puts the style through a word blender. Designed with advice from Tony Parsons MediOcs flattens any sparkling cascades into the bright shallowness of the overflow from an air-conditioning unit. and the result is the universal tabloidese that arrives at my in-box every Friday.
I do read Spiked, and find their freedom of speech absolutism meets my mood when the last government was passing its anti free speech laws and when some idiots are arrested for burning Korans. They are a funny lot though - a trained squad of contrarians who march in unison carrying the standard of individual self-development.
I’d like to see a day when I don’t have to worry about having obscenities yelled at me or disgusting gestures made out of car windows when all I’m doing is walking to work or going about my business. I am sick and tired of being told this is all ‘harmless fun’ – it is not: it sends a worrying message that aggression towards women is acceptable and even desirable.
. . .
Street harassment is so normal and pervasive (it’s everywhere) that we don’t even register it many times when it happens – but it’s there and it’s eroding our sense of safety, self and what we believe is possible. How many women feel safe walking home after a night out? We should.
That’s from a thread over at the London Anti-Street Harassment campaign (here). The women express those familiar feelings of fear, intimidation, and the impotent, boiling rage of those harassed and bullied by men who think it’s amusing to shout out “nice tits” or whatever to some woman who is out in public. What makes you furious is that you have no effective come-back. Swearing or fuck off gestures usually attract laughter or escalated abuse or an amazed huffiness. When seeing a cluster of blokes hanging around outside a pub (the smoking ban has made this worse) or a gang of guys walking along the pavement, women will cross the street or make detours to avoid passing them, for fear, at the very least, of being embarrassed and humiliated.
Recently I wrote a post which among other things dealt with men who think they are entitled to intimidate random strangers - if the random strangers are female. The example I gave was of a Muslim woman who was spat at by co-religious males because they didn’t approve of her cycling and the clothes she wore. This looked to me like yet another way of keeping women down and I thought at the time that a Reclaim the Streets! like the Reclaim the Night! movement was needed, and then I read this in the Guardian:-
Vicky Simister, a financial analyst, . . has found street harassment particularly problematic since moving from Ireland to London for work. "I was walking down a busy road in the middle of winter," she says, "wearing a huge jacket, when these two guys slowed their car down to pay me 'compliments' about my appearance. This escalated into sexual comments. I eventually lashed out in frustration, and they got out of their car and ran after me, physically assaulting me. The police were called, but I wasn't happy with their response. One said: 'They said they were following you, but only to say nice things.'"
After this, Vicky set up the London Anti-Street Harassment campaign (Lash), to lobby MPs and journalists, and begin a serious debate. "I want women to put their hands up and say: 'We don't want to be treated like this,'" she says, "and I want men to realise the impact their words and actions have."
It's often suggested that street harassment is inevitable. But, as May says, while it might not be considered "as serious as domestic violence or sexual assault, street harassment is on the same spectrum of violence against women." The fact that it is so often just accepted by people suggests women's bodies are still considered public property – an attitude the anti-street harassment movement aims to change.
(Actually from what the women on the thread are saying, street harassment is particularly bad in London, so no, it‘s not inevitable if it varies from city to city. Some think it has been getting worse in recent years.)
Right on, sisters! I wish you all the best for this campaign.
There has been a meme going around on whether Western feminists have been slack at showing solidarity with women oppressed in other countries or even solidarity with women living in the same country but from a different cultural background for fear of being branded as Orientalist, aggressively Western, insensitive, being part of a pro-imperialist agenda etc. (Links to arguments for and against). I can’t give a verdict on the behaviour of Western feminists, but I came across a scene from an allegorical drama, when the king of anti-Orientalism, Edward Said, met the queen of international feminism, Simone de Beauvoir.
Beauvoir was already there in her famous turban, lecturing anyone who would listen about her forthcoming trip to Tehran with Kate Millett, where they were planning to demonstrate against the chador; the whole idea struck me as patronising and silly, and although I was eager to hear what Beauvoir had to say, I also realised that she was quite vain and quite beyond arguing with at that moment. Besides, she left an hour or so later (just before Sartre’s arrival) and was never seen again.
. . .Beauvoir had been a serious disappointment, flouncing out of the room in a cloud of opinionated babble about Islam and the veiling of women.
Beauvoir’s “patronising, “silly“ and “opinionated babbling” on the veiling of women was presumably something like this:-
"We have created the International Committee for Women's Rights (CIDF) in response to calls from a large number of Iranian women, whose situation and whose revolt have greatly moved us…We have appreciated the depth of the utter humiliation into which others wanted to make them fall and we have therefore resolved to struggle for them."
This was in response to events in Tehran on 8 March 1979, International Women’s Day.
On that day, Iranian women activists and their male supporters demonstrated against an order for women to re-veil themselves in the chador worn in more traditional sectors of society. The demonstrations continued for five days. At their height, they grew to fifty thousand in Tehran, women as well as men. Some leftist men formed a cordon around the women, fighting off armed attackers from a newly formed group, the Hezbollah or "Party of God." The demonstrators chanted "No to the Chador," "Down with the Dictatorship," and even the occasional "Down with Khomeini." One banner read, "We made the Revolution for Freedom, But Got Unfreedom," while others proclaimed "At the Dawn of Freedom, There Is No Freedom." For their part, the Hezbollah chanted "You will cover yourselves or be beaten," but their response was mainly nonverbal: stones, knives, and even bullets.
Kate Millett from the U.S. and Claudine Moullard from France attended the demonstration to express their solidarity with the women marching.
I don't suppose Edward Said ever called Westerners showing support for Palestinians “patronising and silly”.
