Four minutes of feminism

The culture section of today’s International Herald Tribune features an article titled “Under Fiona Apple’s spell.”

It’s no coincidence that the artist referred to is a woman (after all, could we imagine the same headline with a male artist’s name?) Casting spells and being capable of enchantement seems to be something only women do. It’s an old metaphor, one that suggests women have some kind of magical power that is unaccessible and incomprehensible to men.

Spells, of course, are linked to witchcraft, and only women are ever witches. (The closest male equivalent would be the wizard, but note that there’s no negative connotation associated to wizards).

Witch hunts spanned more than four centuries (from the 14th to the 17th century) and affected countries from Germany to England. The vast majority of these ‘witches’ were healers. Many of them are thought to have been midwives or women that had specific medical and obstetric knowledge. That they were persecuted shows two things: one, deep fear of women’s mastery and control over medicine, and two, male incomprehension and fear of pregnancy and childbirth.

It’s not hard to imagine that men, faced with the fact that the biological ability to give life was a uniquely female capability, saw it as something supernatural. Childbirth was an aspect of life men had no clear control over, and was often guarded from their gaze. So it’s little wonder that men would suspect the midwives that assisted women in labor of possessing magical or supernatural powers. After all, these women were capable of performing miracles.

What’s interesting is that four centuries later, we’re still using metaphors that insinuate women are predisposed towards witchery. A man who finds himself under a woman’s spell (really, it’s rarely the other way around), is incapable of reason, logic and control. Fear of helplessness and of surrendering power are insinuated. As such, witchcraft metaphors can be read as just another incarnation of society’s fear of women with power.

Men’s Health excels at seeing women through a purely sexual lens. It’s pretty hard to find one fully clothed woman in any given issue, and women are almost always spoken about in relation to men - specifically, on how men can seduce them and ensure that women pleasure them.

June’s Singapore issue, however, introduces a second reading of women: the raging, hormonal one. In a spread called “Chemistry Class”, writer Sonia Sandhu explains to men that “Your woman’s hormones don’t necessarily have to be your worst enemy. Here’s how to deal with them.”

This “five-minute survival guide”, masquerading as authentic because penned by a woman, is accompanied by a drawing of a furious, stomping female giant, terrorizing and grabbing tiny men on the streets.

Ah, yes. The irrational, uncontrollable, larger-than-life woman, the man-eater who instils fear in the hearts and minds of all men. This rhetoric is accompanied by military-tinged vocabulary: PMS is a “monthly battle you can’t win” - rather than, say, a normal biological occurrence.

Underneath all of this lurks the fear of patriarchy going under, of women taking over the world, of women confiscating men’s power.

The sexual filter is never far away, though, as if to reassure men that women ARE the quintessentially sexual beings that heteronormative culture tells us they are. The author is quick to explain that “one ‘happier’ result of hormones is that it makes us horny. Very horny.” Clearly, in the Men’s Health world, sex is the most important thing women have to offer, and as a (presumably heterosexual) man, you are supposed to want more of it all the time.

These ideas about women and men are both restrictive and damaging. It’s possible to imagine men’s magazines that don’t polarize and restrict gender roles so much - but which magazine is going to show the way?

With Mother’s Day around the corner, retailers and advertisers are (unsurprisingly) eager to get us buying gifts for our mothers.

But what some advertisers forget is that moms are not only moms, but also women and well, regular human beings.

Take the “Gadgets Mom will love” piece recently published by the Business Times of Singapore, which features items that would apparently be ideal Mother’s Day’s gifts. These include cameras, a cooker and… a vacuum cleaner.

“Choosing the right camera to snap pictures of young children is tough,” the (male) journalist explains. With one of the cameras, “moms can take static snapshots to keep on their phones if they catch their children in especially cute poses.”

(Of course, if a woman wants a new camera, it’s to take pictures of her kids, not of, say, nature).

Meanwhile, the steamer and blender recommended by the paper is reportedly a “godsend” for “moms of babies getting started on solid food.” The assumption here is one of a mom being responsible not only for cooking, but also for taking care of her and her partner’s children. And it’s also one of women that would be delighted to receive household appliances as gifts.

But the stereotyping of motherhood doesn’t stop there. The same journalist tells us that “many career women have to worry about how their children are doing at home.” (Worryingly, this phrase is used to promote a surveillance camera which mothers can use to keep an eye on the kids when away from home). Again, it’s the mothers who have responsibility for parenting, and it’s the mothers that should be worried about their kids while they (selfishly) are out making a living.

Notions of mothers sacrificing themselves for others are all over this type of narrative. This kind of vision of motherhood narrows motherhood down to narrowly defined gender roles - instead of recognizing that moms, like dads, are also full-fledged, independent human beings that exist outside of these roles.

This Mother’s Day, let’s buy our mothers gifts that celebrate them as people.

A recent New York Times portrait of French presidential hopeful François Hollande talked about the various monikers the Socialist Party leader has been given. They apparently range from ‘Flanby’, the brand name of a wobbly French pudding
to the ‘Living Marshmallow’ and ‘Couille Molle’ (literally, wet balls).

But the portrait also mentions that he has been called Mr. Royal, after his (now former) wife, Ségolène Royal, who is a minister and former French presidential candidate herself.

This is apparently meant to be insulting. Detractors are trying to portray Mr Hollande as a softie, and one way of doing that is to call him by his wife’s name. Never mind that Ms Royal defeated her own husband to become the Socialist Party candidate in the 2007 French presidential elections. Even with a wife as competent as this, who almost became the nation’s president, it would still be insulting to insinuate that she is the one that wears the trousers in the couple.

It’s pretty safe to presume that if Ms Royal was ever called Ms Hollande, it probably wasn’t because anyone was out to insult her.

It’s a tiring reminder of how society constantly pits masculinity against femininity and tells men that they are not manly enough.

This manliness is measured through their commitment to distancing themselves from behaviors potentially viewed as ‘feminine’ or ‘effeminate’. Men are meant to be controlling, assertive, aggressive - certainly not soft.

It’s also measured through the control they have over women. Giving in to your wife, for example, is a demonstration of submissiveness, therefore not manly. Men are supposed to head families and be the decision-makers in their marriages, right? So any insinuation to the contrary would be an insult their manhood.

Last week, the BBC revealed undercover sterilizations taking place in Uzbekistan, mostly by doctors secretly performing hysterectomies (removal of the uterus) on women who had just delivered via C-section.

People were rightly horrified by this news. Population control has taken many forms over the years and sterilization has been one of them. One example that immediately came to mind is what happened in India during the Emergency under Indira Gandhi - though India sterilized both women and men, and some of it was on an incentive-based program (offering money in exchange for ‘voluntary’ vasectomy).

In Uzbekistan, women found out what had happened to them by consulting a doctor for either unusual pain and bleeding or because they found they could no longer get pregnant. The response they got was that they already had children, and why would they need more?

Public outcry on the subject is completely justified. A woman should be allowed to have children if she wants to, right? But by that token, a woman should also be allowed to not have children if she doesn’t want to. There is no reason to believe that forced pregnancy is any less emotionally distressing than forced sterilization.

A woman who is denied access to contraception and carries a child she does not desire, did not plan for, cannot care for, or cannot afford is essentially in a situation of forced pregnancy.

So why are we horrified by forced sterilization, and not by forced pregnancy? Parallels between forced sterilization and forced pregnancy essentially boil down to control over women’s bodies. Both imply that someone other than the mother (a state, a religious institution, patriarchal cultural or social norms) is dictating what the mother should do with her body.

There is once more a notion of distrust of women - the idea that a woman cannot make the right decision for herself and her family, and that she shouldn’t be trusted to do so.

There is also an archaic idea that the role of women is first and foremost to become mothers, that they are in this world to act as reproductive beings. Motherhood, women are told, is what fulfills us. We should all want to be mothers, and we should question, look down on and even pity women that choose not to become mothers. They are clearly missing out on something. They clearly feel incomplete.

This is why we are so shocked by forced sterilization. Sterilizing women prevents them from fulfilling their ultimate goal in life, which is reproduction. Forcing a woman to reproduce, by this logic, is not nearly as morally wrong as preventing them from doing so. Pregnancy is ultimately always a good thing, right?

But equating women so closely with their reproductive power (and insinuating that reproduction is their duty) detracts from women as individual actors in society. It detracts from women as human beings that can achieve fulfillment independently, without having to necessarily rely on marriage and motherhood to feel complete.

Trusting women with critical decisions about their own bodies is essentially emancipating them. The freedom to make reproductive choices without state or religious pressure is crucial in achieving a conception of womanhood that sees women primarily as independent and individual human beings - and not first and foremost as reproductive beings.

Sign the petition to demand the US Secretary of State impose sanctions on Islam Karimov’s regime until forced sterilizations in Uzbekistan stop.

There’s been talk recently about the overt sexism Air Asia, the low-cost Malaysian airline, has been promoting through its ads. (Thanks to the Fly Air Asia? Not me blog for starting the discussion).

Ads like the one at right would probably be struck down by advertising authorities in European countries, but in Malaysia, they still fly. And it goes far beyond advertising - entire PR campaigns are devised around sexist messaging. When Air Asia arrived in Singapore, it called itself “the new girl in town”.

Sexual fantasies of the flight attendant (“stewardess”) are still alive and well, as Sean Paul’s “She Doesn’t Mind” clip nicely demonstrates. (It features a chubby Sean Paul surrounded by gyrating flight attendants whose skirts all ride up to reveal sexy stay-ups. There are some bewilderingly sexy female security officers at the airport too, which seems to be some kind of hybrid of the flight attendant and female police officer fantasies). There’s also the quaint World Stewardess Crews blog, which invites readers to “navigate beautiful stewardesses around the world”, which can be done according to airline, costume or airport (yes, there are nude photos, too).

Sexism has been a stalwart of the airline industry since its beginnings. A lot of it seems to have to do with the gendered division of labor in the industry, which traditionally consisted of men as pilots (in the powerful role) and women as flight attendants (in the submissive, service-oriented role). There are definitely power dynamics at play here, not just between pilots and attendants, but also between attendants and passengers, who are served by the attendants.

The sexism in the industry is so deeply engrained that companies are still defending sexist hiring policies. Korean Air was asked last year to stop banning male job seekers from applying for flight attendant positions, but refused to comply. Some airlines have discriminatory hiring criteria based on physical features, while others restrict service in business class (overwhelmingly patronized by men) to women only.

Needless to say, these kind of policies only reinforce destructive attitudes to women working in the airline industry. It’s no surprise then that female flight attendants experience high rates of sexual harassment, discrimination and assault.

Less tangible but perhaps even more pervasive is the danger of internalizing one’s own objectification, as when female flight attendants play up their sexiness to fulfil the role that the industry has cast for them.

Luckily, some people are taking action. The International Transport Workers’ Federation, for example, has launched a campaign against sexism in the airline industry. But until women represent 50% of pilots and men 50% of flight attendants, it’s likely sexism in the industry will continue.

This piece originally appeared on Gender Across Borders.

In early March, a shocking video of Ethiopian domestic worker and mother of two Alem Dechasa being beaten in front of her embassy in Beirut by her Lebanese employer began circulating on the web.

Dechasa later committed suicide by hanging herself with her hospital bed sheet. Netizens were outraged: a petition was created to stop the abuse of migrant domestic workers in the Middle East and a crowdsourcing website was set up to map occurrences of such abuse.

Sadly, this is not the first time such blatant abuse has occurred.  In 2008, Human Rights Watch found that  Lebanon’s domestic workers were dying at a rate of more than one a week, a situation that has prompted the UK magazine The Economist to note that domestic work in the Middle East is “little better than slavery.”

Migrant domestic workers have been working in Middle Eastern countries since the oil boom of the 1970’s, doing anything from cleaning, to cooking, to caring for children, the elderly and pets. There are currently an estimated 1.5 million migrant domestic workers (MDWs) in Saudi Arabia, approximately 660,000 in Kuwait and 200,000 in Lebanon. Other Middle Eastern countries with large numbers of MDWs are Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain. The remittances that these workers send back to their home countries account for a high share of the GDP of developing countries such as the Philippines and Nepal (11% and 17% respectively).

Despite these important contributions, domestic work has historically been undervalued and often not recognized as legitimate work – a depreciation that has been intimately linked to its gendered nature. But domestic work is crucial to sustaining capitalist and consumerist societies, which rely on its performance to support professionals working outside of the home.

Read the rest of the article here.

The New York Times ran a story in its sports pages this week about the engagement of Olympic swimmers Annie Chandler and Tom Grevers. It mentions how Chandler’s father was “not quick with his blessing” when Grevers initially called him up to “ask for his daughter’s hand.”

This tradition - of a man asking his girlfriend’s father for “her hand” - certainly isn’t specific to Chandler and Grevers’ case. But it’s worth discussing, because traditions around marriage and other ceremonies of importance evolve slowly, and often tend to reproduce outdated gender roles.

For example, there’s the notion of a father (and not a mother or other relative) having authority over his daughter. This includes decision-making power: a father that does not feel the suitor is a good fit for his daughter, as was the case initially in the above story, in theory has the power to refuse the union.

This in turn suggests strongly that the daughter, if left to her own devices without fatherly guidance, may be unable to judge the viability of her relationship herself and as such may be prone to making critical mistakes about her future. The son, on the other hand, is assumed to be making the right decision about proposing on his own (he does not, for example, formally seek his mother’s authorization before proposing). The underlying assumption is one of the distrust of women and of women’s ability to make good decisions.

Besides men making decisions on marriage in the absence of the fiancée concerned by the proposal, there is also the relic of the idea of women as property: they are essentially passed on from one male guardian (the father) to another (the husband), if the former permits the union. Nothing symbolizes this more than the wife-to-be changing her last name from her father’s to her husband’s, a phenomenon which has - oddly enough - grown strongly over the past 20 to 30 years.

Engagement rings and the fact that they are only ever given to the fiancée are also highly symbolic. Strategically repopularized by consumerism and a certain jeweler with the cunning slogan ‘a diamond is forever’, it has come to be expected in most British, Canadian and American engagements. Indeed a woman that is engaged is expected to wear this visible proof of her status as ‘unavailable’, ‘taken’, ‘promised’, etc - whereas the fiancé is not expected to outwardly display such status.

It’s also of course a reminder that wealth has historically been in the hands of men, and that they are still meant to be able to afford such lavish gifts. Traditionally, it was proof that the fiancé was financially stable enough to wed - because, of course, the wife was meant to live on his salary. Today, an expensive engagement ring can still be used by a man to display his wealth to his and his future wife’s social circles, within the remasculating context of the recreation of traditional gender dynamics.

So beyond the matter of distrust, there’s also an element of infantilization: women in essence need to be taken care of (at least financially), guided, protected. They are vulnerable and in need of male protection.

There are few people that today would realistically agree with that last statement. So why do our traditions around marriage still insinuate such things?

Luc Besson’s latest film is a portrait of the Burmese opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. A voice for democracy worldwide, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate makes for a fascinating subject, not least because of Myanmar’s recent opening up and the upcoming elections.

The beginning of the film is indeed promising. We witness the assassination of Suu Kyi’s father, and then her experience witnessing the Burmese student riots in 1988.

But this opportunity to showcase female leadership in the developing world is transformed into a family drama. Almost half the film is dedicated to showing Suu Kyi’s husband Michael Aris, a British scholar in Oxford, and their two sons coping with her absence. We see Michael clumsily getting his sons ready for school, attempting to cook for them (burning the rice) and then finally hiring a maid. The film then turns into a string of real and attempted family reunions, filled with hugs, kisses and I-missed-you’s, leaving Suu Kyi’s political activities as a mere backdrop to her family life.

The movie essentially ends at Michael’s death in 1999: the 8 years that precede the 2007 Saffron Revolution (during which she was under house arrest) are skipped over completely. So it’s unsurprising that IMDB called the movie “an epic love story” and a tale of “devotion”.

It’s possible that Suu Kyi herself requested that the movie not focus on the political aspects of her life. Nevertheless, the film - like most movies - is sorely lacking in female characters besides Suu Kyi herself, and the portrayal of these female characters is questionable. Her mother is only shown as ailing on her deathbed; there is no mention of the fact that she was the Burmese ambassador to India and Nepal, and as such very likely an inspiration for Suu Kyi’s political involvement. The three other female characters are all maids and helpers.

Suu Kyi is described as an “Oxford housewife” before her decision to get involved in Burmese politics; there is no mention of the fact that she worked at the UN for three years and that in 1985 she earned a PhD at the prestigious School of Oriental and African Studies in London. When she is approached by a group of Burmese scholars in 1988 to lead a movement for democracy, she seems hesitant, putting her arms around her sons and explaining that her hands are already quite full. She is also shown as giving Michael permission to go his own way if he ever got fed up with her absence at home.

It’s unlikely a male opposition leader would have been portrayed this way, silently criticized for his absence from the family, and indeed shown first and foremost as a husband and father and not a political leader. Though it shines light on personal aspects of the Lady’s life that otherwise we might not be familiar with, it falls into the trap of portraying women through their relationship with men, and not as the independent figures they are in reality.