This week, I read two different things about feminist initiatives. One was the website of ‘One Billion Rising‘, a global “day of action” in protest at violence against women. The other was Laurie Penny’s article for the Guardian about vigilante feminists. The juxtaposition of these two narratives provides a very interesting perspective on feminist activism and how it’s carried out. Let’s review, shall we? (Note: bolding emphasis is mine throughout)
One Billion Rising has lofty aims:
“ONE BILLION RISING will move the earth, activating women and men across every country. V-Day wants the world to see our collective strength, our numbers, our solidarity across borders.
What does ONE BILLION look like? On 14 February 2013, it will look like a REVOLUTION.”
Yes! Woo! Global feminist revolution has arrived! No more violence against women! I will get myself a gun and join you on the barricades!
“On February 14th, 2013, V-Day’s 15th Anniversary, we are inviting one billion women and those who love them to walk out, DANCE, RISE UP, AND DEMAND an end to this violence [against women]. One Billion Rising is a promise that we will rise up with women and men worldwide to say, “Enough! The violence ends now.”" {source}
…wait, what? We’re dancing? What about the revolution?
You see, One Billion Rising is a call to end the terrible violence experienced by women all over the world, and clearly this can best be achieved by having a worldwide dance-off on Valentine’s Day. Why dancing, I hear you ask?
“When One Billion bodies rise and dance on 14 February 2013, we will join in solidarity, purpose and energy and shake the world into a new consciousness. Dancing insists we take up space. It has no set direction but we go there together. It’s dangerous, joyous, sexual, holy, disruptive. It breaks the rules. It can happen anywhere at anytime with anyone and everyone. It’s free. No corporation can control it. It joins us and pushes us to go further. It’s contagious and it spreads quickly. It’s of the body. It’s transcendent.” {source}
‘It’s a series of positive-sounding buzzwords that were carefully tested on focus groups!’
The One Billion Rising initiative has great PR. Their website is smooth and sleek, with nice colour co-ordination and some wonderful ‘monologues’ by Eve Ensler (the whole thing was her idea, apparently). Participants don’t organise a local protest, they ‘stage a rising’. You can ‘experience’ these global ‘risings’ via livestreaming and YouTube videos. The text is full of meaningless buzzwords about ‘discovering solidarity’ and how we will ‘come to see what is possible’. Dance will achieve all these things, apparently. Seriously? What does “shake the world into a new consciousness” even mean? In practical, tangible terms? The answer is it doesn’t mean anything. These are just words carefully selected because they feel good and positive and active. Dance! Feel transcendent! Connect in solidarity! Don’t question whether this actually serves a purpose!
Photo: AFP/Getty
Yeah.
Women in Egypt protested against rising sexual harassment and violence against women whilst brandishing knives and clubs. Laurie Penny reports:
“I interviewed a rape survivor in her early twenties who told me that if anyone tried to hurt her or her friends again, with no rule of law protecting women, she was prepared to inflict pain.”
Yikes.
I read Penny’s article a few days before I checked out One Billion Rising, and putting them both next to each other shows just how stark the difference is between the sleek, co-ordinated dance campaign and the angry, grassroots protests in Egypt. From where I’m sitting, it reads a bit like this:
Western feminists: “Let’s dance to show solidarity, shake the world into a new consciousness and protest violence against women! Let’s feel the strength and connection! Let’s make everyone feel good about fighting back! Mother earth! Women power!”
Egyptian women: “LET’S STAB A RAPIST IN THE FACE.”
Follow-up question: what’s more ‘dangerous’ and ‘disruptive’, and has more potential to change attitudes – a global dance-party, or women brandishing knives and threatening bloody retribution on rapists?
Here’s the problem with One Billion Rising: it’s ultimately toothless. Apparently it’s a “refusal to accept violence against women and girls as a given”, but without any concrete steps by which this ‘refusal’ can be achieved. It’s ultimately a feel-good exercise. Natalie Gyte at Huffington Post calls it a ‘facade’, and goes further by exposing the White hegemonic undercurrents of such a campaign:
“Many campaigns have come before which, by way of seeking to be inclusive of men, refuse to name the causes of gender based violence. However, where One Billion Rising goes one step further is in its world domination international influence. One of the main hubs for the campaign is in the Democratic Republic of Congo…
“I recently listened to a Congolese woman talk in a speak-easy setting of radical grassroots feminists. She was radiantly and beautifully powerful in her unfiltered anger towards the One Billion Rising movement, as she used the words “insulting” and “neo-colonial”.”
Gyte spoke to an Iranian women with a similar viewpoint:
“Another woman at the same event, an Iranian woman who had demonstrated in the 70′s and seen female comrades beaten, raped, doused in acid, set alight, imprisoned and murdered, also used the word “insulting”. “Who is someone else to come to my country and claim to ‘help’ me by telling me to ‘rise’ above the experiences I have had?!” She went on to recount the numerous occasions when she’d been patronised by white, middle class, educated feminists who assumed that as an Iranian woman she lacked education and had lived a sheltered and oppressed life (only to be left open-mouthed by her exceptional education, theoretical knowledge and sharp gendered analysis).”
So much for that ‘global solidarity’.
One Billion Rising, the reaction to it, and the contrast it makes with knife-wielding Egyptian women all serve to illustrate a common weakness of Western feminism: too willing to appease and include, too shy to take any firm or forceful action. One Billion Rising falls short of excluding men, or blaming masculinity and patriarchy for violence against women; it doesn’t incorporate actual protest, either, preferring happy-touchy-feely-dancing instead.
This is hardly surprising: Western culture socialises women (especially White women) to smooth things over, appease and unite in every social context, not rock the boat or upset anyone too much, and to avoid confrontation. Hence One Billion Rising won’t blame men for all the violence inflicted on women, and will instead frame it as a ‘human rights issue’ and dodge any mention of gender. Western women (again, White women especially) are also socialised not to use violence, because men are violent and women are passive (although this socialisation is also mediated by things like class, race, social status etc.) Hence One Billion Rising dismisses shows of actual force in favour of metaphorical strength, resistance and power: dancing. Apparently Egyptian women didn’t get this particular gender-roles memo, which is why they pitched up to a protest with knives.
Why didn’t One Billion Rising call for rowdy protests outside police stations, courthouses and government buildings? Why didn’t Eve Ensler encourage women to arm themselves and literally fight back against sexual violence, in large groups? Is this the face of Western feminism now? Feel-good metaphors for protest in place of actually protesting?
The fact is that Egyptian women protest against sexual violence by wielding knives and threatening violence of their own against any man who dares assault them. In India, the Government had to intervene to prevent widespread rioting after a woman was gang-raped on a bus. When was the last time you saw White Western feminists threaten to riot over sexual violence? Don’t hold your breath waiting – they’re all too busy dancing.
Don’t be too quick to judge. There are different problems in different places, which call for different reactions and there is space for it all. I don’t think there’s any need to be dismissive of another’s approach to the problem.
The UK Government spent yesterday debating what can be done about violence against women and girls as a direct result of the One Billion Rising movement, within which there is very definitely mention of gender. (http://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?id=2013-02-14a.1082.0)
Anything that brings women together and makes them think more deeply about the problems affecting our gender can’t be bad. It’s better than having a bunch of women who don’t know and don’t care.
Although they may have mentioned gender in the debate, One Billion Rising’s own website fails to name the root cause of all this violence against women – i.e. patriarchy, entrenched power structures that benefit men, and outdated ideas about ‘masculinity’. They don’t want to be seen as ‘anti-men’ (I’m guessing), so they describe all this violence against women as stuff that just magically happens, rather than attributing it to MEN acting out violence against women (which most of it is, come on).
Even Stella Creasy, who spoke in that Parliamentary debate, denied that it was a ‘gender issue’ – even though IT CLEARLY IS. And although the debate was good in a way, it didn’t need to be attached to some sort of ‘dance’ pseudo-protest – it was something that feminists could have pushed for independently as part of something much more constructive. Actually I recommend Natalie Gyte’s article if you haven’t read it, she covers some of the more harmful aspects of OBR that I only touched on.
I maintain that it’s harmful because it’s a displacement activity. It detracts from actual, unglamorous hard work that needs to be done and I don’t think it’s an appropriate way of protested against violence against women.
I agree that OBR don’t specifically talk about patriarchy, but as far as I can see this movement is more about women and positivity. It isn’t celebrating violence against women but women’s strength of spirit. Dancing is a very healing activity and women coming together in solidarity over any issue is a good thing that doesn’t happen often enough.
Perhaps it is not the most hard-hitting approach and it certainly shouldn’t be the only feminist action ever undertaken, but I think there is a place for it as a non-violent activity that is more accessible to more people. I don’t think it will stop anyone, who is inclined to, doing the unglamorous hard work and I’m really not sure what we would achieve in England, for example, by taking to the streets brandishing knives, apart from getting locked up.
Whenever violence against women is discussed, I think there is an implicit understanding that it is mostly perpetrated by men, even what that isn’t spelled out. Of course woman on woman violence happens, too.
I see where the article mentioned Stella’s gender comment but I can’t find a source or the context of that quote. On the other hand, in the parliamentary debate, she says such things as “gender violence is gender violence” and “The fundamental problem is […] that we live in a society that is unequal” (between men & women).
Unfortunately, I can’t help but feel that the parliamentary debate wouldn’t have come about at all without OBR. Feminism has had a serious image problem in the West with few young women wanting to go anywhere near it. Thankfully, this seems like it’s beginning to change.
As such, I don’t think OBR detracts from anything. Contrary to your belief that without OBR, women would be focused on more direct feminist action, I think the reality would be more that many of them wouldn’t be doing anything even vaguely feminist.
The problem here is that, if the point of OBR was to get women who wouldn’t normally be interested in feminism to take part in feminist activism, then they are exactly the audience who *wouldn’t* automatically make the link between “violence against women” and “patriarchy/masculinity is responsible for this violence”. People who are already versed in feminism and active either online or on the ground will know about patriarchal power structures and the role they play in VAW. But what about women who’ve never taken part in such things before? Women who don’t even know about things like privilege? They’re not going to make that link, which is why I think it needs to be spelled out very clearly. Let’s not tiptoe around the problem with vague, non-committal statements. The majority of the violence against women we’re campaigning against is carried out by men and facilitated by patriarchy and male privilege. This needs to be stated clearly. That might be a bitter pill for some women to swallow – especially those who’ve learned to view feminism as The Evil Man-Hating Lesbian Collective – but that doesn’t mean we should give up on trying to get that message across.
My view of OBR wasn’t that it was about “women and positivity”, but rather a protest against VAW (this is how it was framed on their own website). Then when it came to describing the planned protest, the focus suddenly shifted to “celebrating” and “solidarity”, which I viewed as something of a bait and switch. If OBR had been marketed up-front as “a day for women to feel good about being women” then fair enough, but it very clearly was branded as a “revolution” and an “uprising”. Which it wasn’t. To be honest I would be a lot less leery of OBR if this positive, feel-good day of dance had been presented as a gateway activity; a way of getting young women interested in feminist activism via a fun, positive activity, but with a clear direction towards more serious, down-and-dirty forms of activism. As it is this one day of global dancing seems to be it. On its own it’s not enough to achieve anything, and I can’t help but feel that women who turned up for it because it was “feminism-lite” are not going to suddenly feel the urge to jump into full-on feminism now that they’ve danced the blues away. There’s no apparent way of capturing that one day of enthusiasm and transferring it into something more lasting, which is why I feel the day itself was pointless.
I should also point out that dancing may be viewed as a “healing activity” by some women (i.e. White, Western women who are relatively privileged) but there are plenty of women who don’t view it as healing. Some women do not dance in public for cultural reasons and therefore wouldn’t view it as “healing”. One commentor below points out her own issues with dancing. This is the problem with Western-led attempts at global unity and solidarity: they are ethnocentric and steeped in Western cultural assumptions. By assuming this “one size fits all” policy of organising global protests, the movement excludes any women who *don’t* feel that dancing is “healing” or “empowering” – and there are plenty of women who don’t.
Understanding patriarchy and privilege is definitely important, but I suppose you have to start somewhere. My hope would be that those who became aware of OBR would look into the issues further and, once you look into feminist theory, it isn’t long before these concepts come up.
Yes it would be good if had been more clearly translated into lasting action. Part of OBR is “The Pledge” where people involved pledge to do something to help end violence against women, but more could have been made of this aspect. Then again, it would be almost impossible, not to say inappropriate, for one overarching organisation to try and arrange grassroots efforts in all countries of the world.
I completely agree that some women cannot or would not want to dance. I sometimes fall into that category; I’m disabled and can’t always take part in physical activity. But I wouldn’t see that as a reason for other people not to. Just because everyone cannot do something is not a reason for no-one to do it. Women carried out OBR activities that felt appropriate to them in Afghanistan, Somalia, India and many other non-Western countries. Surely if they felt it was irrelevant and useless they would have bypassed it altogether.
Overall, I feel that much more good than bad will have come out of OBR.
I disagree with that commentary. You cannot command true and lasting respect by threatening violence, and respect is ultimately what we’re after. One billion rising is, at least to me, about empowerment. It’s about raising awareness. No, dancing isn’t going to change everything, and I doubt anyone who works there seriously thinks it will. But it could well serve as one of the catalysts, because at this point women need to know that they are allowed to stand up. I think it would be a heck of a lot easier to get people who have been marginalized and many of whom have internalized it to dance, rather than pick up a knife.
The article says One Billion Rising should have done armed protests. The degree to which, in my experience, that would not work in Western society is just laughable. How to be labeled as an extremist and not taken seriously in the western system: pick up a knife. There is already a huge bias (experienced in media coverage) against people who are simply protesting.
Dancing is new. Dancing is a celebration. It doesn’t turn people off and can get many more participants and coverage, from many more persuasions and walks of life (not all of those billion people even consider themselves “feminists,” let alone militant ones). Dancing is all-inclusive.
One billion rising is about visibility, it’s about getting people’s feet in the door, it’s about making people realize they matter.
The idea that that way of doing it is “wrong” is just, in my mind, extremely naive and typical of people new to the super left wing.
“Dancing is a celebration” is exactly my problem with OBR. We shouldn’t be celebrating violence against women but vigorously protesting against it. Dancing is a displacement activity that makes people feel good, that’s not the same as being empowering.
You can’t change an oppressive, violent, misogynistic system from within by playing it safe with cutesy dance “protests”. Civil disobedience is far more effective. OBR warranted a few articles in the media; it would have been front page news if a group of women had marched through London, stormed a police line and chained themselves to the gates outside Downing Street. The idea that we can’t adopt forceful and (mildly) violent methods for fear of being labelled “too extreme” is laughable. How do you think women in Britain got the vote? It wasn’t by organising a dance-athon, that’s for damn sure. Suffragettes chained themselves to railings. They got arrested. They went on hunger strike. They threw themselves in front of horses. You know, ACTUAL PROTESTS.
OBR is playing it safe and playing it nice, which is why it’s ultimately pointless. Far better to focus on actual grassroots programmes, education, projects like Everyday Sexism, organised marches and protests against VAW. And it’s absolutely necessary to name the cause of that violence as men, patriarchy, systems of oppression and ideals of masculinity, otherwise we’ll never get anywhere.
Don’t wish to appropriate this thread but just wanted to point out that the more extreme actions of the suffragettes may have done their cause more harm than good as it made them more easily dismissed as “hysterical women” who couldn’t be trusted with the vote. Women weren’t awarded the vote until after the war, once they had, in the eyes of men, “proven themselves” by taking over what had been men’s work, out of necessity.
why can’t you dance with knives?
I am in favour of all knife-based forms of protest.
The idea that a few white women dancing awkwardly in their cubicles for a few minutes while their male co-workers look on in puzzlement is any kind of “empowerment” and will make people think “deeply” about anything could only have come from someone who has never had a serious thought in their lives. I have never been impressed by Eve Ensler: getting famous, well-paid actresses to say “vagina” over and over isn’t going to make a significant change in a society that uses “cunt” as an insult, never mind do a thing for women in non-Western countries.
The truth is, Western women are coddled and babied all their lives by a patriarchal system that thinks women are less intelligent and significant than the family dog. I’ll bet you that if any entrenched-in-his-masculinity Western male even notices this “dance for vaguely-worded thing!” stuff he’ll chuckle and say “ain’t those ladies cute as all get-out” and go back to cleaning his gun or whatever it is such men do. Gen, you say you want “respect.” Well how are you going to get respect from someone who thinks your just a cute li’l ol’ gal and that your legitimate anger is just you being “feisty.” And that’s the good side of patriarchy. The bad side, of course, is men who have been brought up to think that they are entitled to see nothing but compliant, smiling, servile women, and any woman that doesn’t fit in this picture threatens his very being, and he will strike out with violence as he has been taught is the proper response to threats. So on the one hand women are disarmed by the nice-guys and their smiley-face act, and on the other they have women like you who disarm them by telling them they won’t get “respect” that way. Frankly I don’t want to be respected by either the patronizing, belittling nice guy or the violent thug. Getting the respect of people like that (AND their enablers) would make me feel unclean.
Nice bunch of sweeping generalisations there, and wrong on many counts. You seem to be under the impression that OBR only happens in Western countries, whereas this year 203 countries across the world took part. Most events are about groups of women coming together to dance in public, not “awkwardly in cubicles” and many men are involved with OBR.
I won’t list my academic, creative and career achievements here because your statement that anyone who thinks OBR is positive not having had a serious thought in their lives looks ridiculous enough all on its own.
“Nice bunch of sweeping generalisations there”
Wow, boring. And as for all the people that participated in this, so what? Lots of stupid, silly, useless things are popular with crowds. Heck, I hope all the fun they had makes up for the zero change that will probably result directly from this (as opposed to the actual hard work serious people are doing without much credit). Also, did you actually read Fatimah’s post? Did you get to the part where the woman from the Congo also criticized this sort of toothless “protest”? It’s not just white ladies complaining.
Gen going about “respect” is a problem. It smells of wanting to gain approval.
Oh no, women can’t be TOO proactive. Otherwise men won’t “respect” us! Men “respecting” us is the most important thing there is!
I wouldn’t be surprised if Gen voted for Obama.
Andrea – Yes, it’s *so* boring to expect debate to be well-reasoned and based in fact. In my experience, people who work for good causes do so to make a difference, not in order to get “credit”. White ladies are taking part. White ladies are complaining. Non-white ladies are taking part. Non-white ladies are complaining. Not quite sure what you think that proves.
A, the “tone” argument surfaces from the briny deep. So. Very. Bored.
But you know what, I’m nobody. I don’t even have a fancy degree to wave at people to let them know they should Respect Mah Authoritah. Go tell the lady in the Congo that her objections to this dance-off and other white liberal events like it should be “well-reasoned” and “based in fact.” Go try that whitesplaining “be polite or I won’t listen” act on her.
Interesting that you assume that I’m white.
I’ll leave it to you to tell other women how they should respond to OBR, you seem pretty fond of that.
You’re right, I should not have assumed you are white. The white attitude of cultural arrogance has unfortunately spread to many non-white cultures, even outside of the West.
Addendum: I feel I should explain further. When someone comes at me complaining about my “tone” in the fashion you have, and using their academic credentials in an attempt to cow me into compliance with said tone argument, I automatically assume I’m dealing with a white person, because that’s how so many of us roll. But as I said, white people aren’t the only ones who do that, as we have successfully exported this sort of thing across the globe.
The thing that bothers me with a lot of these protest movements is you must protest their way. You have to dance (this one) or you have to turn up wearing very little (thinking of another popular demonstration). And people will try to say it’s optional, but it’s not really. If I did turn up, they’d be constant pressure to dance, remove clothing or whatever else has been decided as the way to protest. I’d constantly be asked to explain why I’m not. There’d be that implication that I’m not protesting properly.
It especially bothers me when it all gets linked in to sex, because I’ve no interest in any of that. I don’t want to be sexual or look sexual, because I’m asexual. Being sexual shouldn’t be a prerequisite for equal treatment.
Given that feminism was supposed to be about giving women rights and choices, having protests where you must conform or not attend isn’t exactly hitting the nail on the head. The wording of publicity materiel needs to consider the range of people taking part. There needs to be room to adapt protests, both for individuals and for groups. Because if there isn’t that flexibility, it’s not for all women.
Yes! You make a really good and sensible point, and articulated something that has bothered me about Western progressive movements and their activities but I couldn’t really put into words. It’s the way so many things like this are basically designed by Westerners for Westerners, and a certain type of Westerner to boot: that is, uptight, upper middle class white people, who were raised under a particular type of repression and wish to escape that repressive mindset. Hence the calls to “let it all out” and the dancing and so on. That’s all very well for people in this cultural milieu, but the problem is Westerners tend to think that everyone in the world is like us, which results in a lot of us blundering around in other peoples’ cultures being rude and belittling when we think we are “helping.” And as you point out, even in the West there are people (like me!) who neither need nor want to “loosen up” just because others feel the need to do so.
And just so you know, forced dancing and singing and other communal activities are very popular in corporate circles. Anyone who has worked for a large corporation has at least one story of the big meeting where everyone had to dance, or sing a stupid “company” song, or do something else childish and humiliating because “there is no ‘I’ in TEAM!” The purpose of these exercises is the reinforcement of the group norms, because you can’t opt out of most of this stuff. One coworker went to a big meeting in another city, and at the meeting if you refused to dance with the rest of the people you had to get up on your chair and dance by yourself. Yep, there’s nothing like a little humiliation to keep the workers in line.
TL;DR, I just imagine a group of non-Western women and one white Western woman sitting around trying to plan a protest and after listening with puzzlement to the talk of what weapons are easiest to conceal from the police and who to arrange to take their kids to when — not if — they are arrested, the white woman pipes up with “We really shouldn’t be violent! Someone could get hurt! I know — let’s bake cookies for the opposition!”
[Mod note - changed that when/if for you, Andrea]
Yes, this is really good point and thank you for raising it. That pressure on women to conform to this one idea of a protest (in the name of “unity” and “solidarity”) isn’t helpful at all and ultimately ends up excluding women rather than helping them. And I’m reminded too of how swiftly things like ‘Slutwalk’ and other similar protests descended into Islamophobia and racism in European countries, with women seeing it as an opportunity to attack Muslim women for covering up. Sure, those women might have been in the minority, but it’s still enough for the movement to become exclusive and to push away any woman that doesn’t ‘fit in’ with this Western-centric way of doing things.
One of my biggest problems with OBR was the way it sought to enforce a “global” protest, using a very Western/White-centric idea of what that protest should be. It reeks of cultural colonialism, enforcing a global “brand” of feminism under the guidance of a privileged white woman. Eesh.
In regards to Slutwalk, as someone who has been into what has been called the “Left” I suspect that certain socially “liberal” advocates of things like “queer” rights make the mistake of framing the issue in terms of “loosening” “traditional” sexual restrictions which ends up grouping individuals who are non-CIS in with pedophilia-advocates such as NAMBLA or Hakim Bey as well chattel-polygamists, etc. who appropriate the rhetoric and hijack the issue.
The “One Billion Rising” movement is coming out of the American feminist tradition, and the American tradition is very strong against armed protest–it’s something that “other people” do (brown people, mostly, because they are all sad violent failures who for whatever reason can’t follow the positive examples of white history). There is a strong tradition of gun ownership, of course, but it mostly has to do with sports, food provision, or being a white male and protecting your nuclear family and personal property against brown intruders.*
Women especially are not supposed to be violent, but the American feminist tradition a la Eve Ensler also leans left, which in American terms means that they are anti-gun (and nobody in America packs a knife). This is probably not an issue in other countries, where weapons aren’t associated with, well, certain associations and certain political stances and are just tools for violence.
(It’s also a good excuse for all ages of women to get together and dance–dancing is for young, pretty women to show off how sexy they are and is supposed to stop when you’re around 35 at oldest, because dancing in itself isn’t supposed to be fun and women shouldn’t want to enjoy themselves once they’re ugly! They should only want to worry about how they’re old and have plastic surgery. So, One Billion Rising is a fun day out under the excuse of a good cause.)
* I know this from experience, unfortunately. Shut up about your stupid black-proof cabin in the middle of the woods! Go ahead and starve!
You don’t seem to acknowledge that the situation in Egypt is different from that in Europe and the US. The “no rule of law protecting women” problem in Egypt is not one Western feminists have to deal with on a daily basis.
I’m all for stabbing rapists when that’s the only method to deal with them. If, however, you can have the police arrest them instead, and there is a good chance they actually get convicted, why not do that?
As Hippocrates said: What medicines do not heal, the lance will; what the lance does not heal, fire will.
It’s not wrong to try medicines first. I agree that dancing doesn’t change anything, but that doesn’t mean we need death threats. We got voting rights without death threats, we got rape inside marriage made illegal without death threats. Don’t blame Western feminists for continuing what worked for them.
Are you aware of how difficult it is for women to report rape in Western countries? Or how rarely rapists in the UK actually go to jail? It’s not as simple as “having the police arrest them” and then just going to court. There’s actually *not* a good chance of the rapist being convicted either.
Check out this article in the Independent for some very recent figures:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/100000-assaults-1000-rapists-sentenced-shockingly-low-conviction-rates-revealed-8446058.html
“You don’t seem to acknowledge that the situation in Egypt is different from that in Europe and the US. The “no rule of law protecting women” problem in Egypt is not one Western feminists have to deal with on a daily basis.”
Women are exploited, coddled, and controlled in the West just as in Egypt. Patriarchy is in the West. Reducing this to the presence of the “rule of law” is a load of bul.
“I’m all for stabbing rapists when that’s the only method to deal with them. If, however, you can have the police arrest them instead, and there is a good chance they actually get convicted, why not do that?”
I didn’t know women should push to depend on the state as much as possible. I also didn’t know that all you needed to get rid of rapists was to call the cops, who are all saints out to protect the womenfolk.
“As Hippocrates said: What medicines do not heal, the lance will; what the lance does not heal, fire will.”
And?
“It’s not wrong to try medicines first. I agree that dancing doesn’t change anything, but that doesn’t mean we need death threats. We got voting rights without death threats, we got rape inside marriage made illegal without death threats. Don’t blame Western feminists for continuing what worked for them.”
If you are really going to go on about “voting rights” I suggest you read some Emma Goldman. Also, rape within marriages have still happened well after that law was came up with.
You come across as someone who spews the tone argument and reformism.
Honestly Fatihah, while the “Western” feminist movement has had women in it like Emma Goldman, it also has a history of having reformists, appeasers, and western chauvinists in it (like certain other movements) as you noted in the case of Slutwalk. Who whether they wanted to or not, did help out Capitalism.
I say that One Billion Rising is following a tradition.
Yeah I had a lot of problems with the movement and others like it. It’s not the first time something like this has happened.
Just found your blog. Nice! I did roll my eyes at the one billion rising thing too. We’re going to have to do something more than a little dance to get where we need to be. Wake me up when they decide what that is.
Hey, thanks for stopping by!