Cognitive Dissidents

Pamela Bone hits hard and makes points - after all she is a women who thinks that Western sisters (are) failing the fight

LET it be recorded that in the last decade of the 20th century the brave and great movement of Western feminism ended, not with a bang but with a whimper.

How can I not agree - I've long opined that the left betrayed feminism and gender rights as soon as they had no more use for them ..

The Beijing Platform for Action made many important statements about the equality of women, such as: "The human rights of women include their right to have control over and decide freely and responsibly on matters related to their sexuality, including sexual and reproductive health, free of coercion, discrimination and violence."

Sounds like commonsense to me - but then recently I have felt like an "exrtemist" for sticking up for the things I believe in - like women's rights ...

... but Pamela goes on - and nails it to the wall ...

Was it before or after September 11 that thinkers of the Left - for feminism was a movement of the Left - decided that racism was a far more serious crime than sexism? When did cultural sensitivity trump women's rights? Was it about the time that Australian feminist Germaine Greer defended the practice of female genital mutilation because, as she pointed out, Western women put studs through their nipples and labia?

Quite - a an elective practise of self-mutilation for fashionable purposes is not the same as non-elective genital surgery - but Germain Greer played the "cultural and moral equivalency card" here ...

Consider this: a struggling, screaming little girl is held down by several people (usually women) while another woman cuts through her clitoris and inner labia, with the intention of ensuring this girl will never experience sexual pleasure; and the world's most famous feminist, to whom much is owed, I don't deny, can compare this practice to adult women choosing, for whatever silly reason, to decorate their sexual parts with metal. The UN estimates that three million girls are mutilated every year. It has lately been warning against the medicalisation of the practice: as societies develop, it is being carried out by health professionals, which doesn't make it less of an abuse.

I hope you are following this - because the "medicalisation of the pratice" means more young girls are going to have their clitorises cut off - because there are no "health and safety laws" that prevent it.

For that reason it will become more and more popular amongst those communities that support the practice for cultural or religious reasons.

In Pakistan, the Prevention of Anti-Women Practices Bill, which would ban forced marriages and give women rights over property, is before the national assembly. In Syria, the murder of a 16-year-old girl by her brother, at her family's request, has prompted a national debate about the leniency shown to perpetrators of honour killings.

In Saudi Arabia, Bill Gates, addressing a recent business seminar, told the segregated audience - women, their faces and bodies shrouded in black, behind a large partition - that the country would not achieve its ambition to become an economic power while it failed to use the talents of half the population. "One side of the audience loved it," he quipped later.

Tags: pamela bone, women's rights, feminism, the silence of the left, the silence of the feminists, international women's day