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By Iftekhar Sayeed (about the author)
Become a Fan -- Page 5 of 5 page(s)
Long term effects:
-- Victims of marital or date rape are 11 times more likely to be clinically depressed, and 6 times more likely to experience social phobia than are non-victims. Psychological problems are still evident in cases as long as 15 years after the assault.
That's not a pretty picture for any society, especially one that claims to be the universal conscience, with the ability to tell right from wrong. Why should a society that respects women as individuals, unlike (remember) Muslim society, why should such a society present such awful statistics?
I will let Andrea Dworkin speak on the subject of western man's perception of western woman.
"The skin of white women has a meaning in pornography. In a white-supremacist society, the skin of white women is supposed to indicate privilege. Being white is as good as it gets. What, then, does it mean that pornography is filled with white women? It means that when one takes a woman who is at the zenith of the hierarchy in racial terms and one asks her, What do you want?, she, who supposedly has some freedom and some choices, says, I want to be used. She says, use me, hurt me, exploit me, that is what I want. The society tells us that she is a standard, a standard of beauty, a standard of womanhood and femininity. But, in fact, she is a standard of compliance. She is a standard of submission. She is a standard for oppression, its emblem; she models oppression, she incarnates it; which is to say that she does what she needs to do in order to stay alive, the configuration of her conformity predetermined by the men who like to ejaculate on her white skin. She is for sale. And so what is her white skin worth? It makes her price a little higher. (http://www.voxygen.net/cpa/speeches/dworkintxt.htm)"
What Andrea Dworkin had to say about women being objectified in western society cannot be easily denied: and one does not have to go as far as pornography to see it. Advertisements routinely use women; there are women's pageants still; the diversity of lingerie that western, consumer society has dreamt up - and which is almost totally missing in a place like Bangladesh - can leave little room for doubt that women are meant to be gazed on - consumed - by men; I may not agree entirely with Andrea Dworkin, but she, and others like her, have a way of looking at western society in terms of which The Economist would thoroughly disapprove.
And, above all, her thesis explains the violence against women we have seen itemised by the Teen Care Center: "....among college-aged males, fraternities encourage both heavy drinking and the sexual exploitation of women." The large number of women raped on the campuses of American universities should give pause for thought as to what values are transmitted to young people, especially given the fact that most of the rapes are not reported; almost as if, there is an expectation of rape.
The Not-So-Great Republic
As for democratic practice, that fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, a second expert opinion is all I shall offer in this lengthy article: that of Howard Zinn.
"We must face our long history of ethnic cleansing, in which the U.S. government drove millions of Indians off their land by means of massacres and forced evacuations.
"We must face our long history, still not behind us, of slavery, segregation and racism.
"And we must face the lingering memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki."
Indeed, seven paragraphs in his article are devoted to articulating how president after president lied to the nation about going to war. (http://progressive.org/media_mpzinn030806)."
It has been estimated that the United States has attacked, directly or indirectly, some 44 countries throughout the world since August 1945 (index.php-context=viewArticle&code=WAD20070128&articleId=4610).
Today, it is easy to explain why the West obsesses over the demonization of the Muslim world - even where other civilizations exhibit the pathologies that are supposed to be peculiar (if they are at all real) to Islam. That no criticism of Indian democracy will be undertaken by the western media in its usual blitz of propaganda can be taken for a certainty now that India is America's ally; but this blindness to the shortcomings of Indian society and civilization, as measured by a western yardstick, antedates the recent love affair with India.
After the Cold War, and well before 9/11, the West knew that the Muslim world would now turn its attention to domestic concerns. The propaganda machine began to work overtime - and one result of this frenzied activity was the incoherent survey of Islam and the West served up, for instance, by the Economist. Propaganda, as all good propagandists know, need not be coherent: just persuasive and repetitive.
And Socrates has long ago told us that democracies are better at rhetoric than logic.
Become a Fan -- Page 5 of 5 page(s)
-- Victims of marital or date rape are 11 times more likely to be clinically depressed, and 6 times more likely to experience social phobia than are non-victims. Psychological problems are still evident in cases as long as 15 years after the assault.
That's not a pretty picture for any society, especially one that claims to be the universal conscience, with the ability to tell right from wrong. Why should a society that respects women as individuals, unlike (remember) Muslim society, why should such a society present such awful statistics?
I will let Andrea Dworkin speak on the subject of western man's perception of western woman.
"The skin of white women has a meaning in pornography. In a white-supremacist society, the skin of white women is supposed to indicate privilege. Being white is as good as it gets. What, then, does it mean that pornography is filled with white women? It means that when one takes a woman who is at the zenith of the hierarchy in racial terms and one asks her, What do you want?, she, who supposedly has some freedom and some choices, says, I want to be used. She says, use me, hurt me, exploit me, that is what I want. The society tells us that she is a standard, a standard of beauty, a standard of womanhood and femininity. But, in fact, she is a standard of compliance. She is a standard of submission. She is a standard for oppression, its emblem; she models oppression, she incarnates it; which is to say that she does what she needs to do in order to stay alive, the configuration of her conformity predetermined by the men who like to ejaculate on her white skin. She is for sale. And so what is her white skin worth? It makes her price a little higher. (http://www.voxygen.net/cpa/speeches/dworkintxt.htm)"
What Andrea Dworkin had to say about women being objectified in western society cannot be easily denied: and one does not have to go as far as pornography to see it. Advertisements routinely use women; there are women's pageants still; the diversity of lingerie that western, consumer society has dreamt up - and which is almost totally missing in a place like Bangladesh - can leave little room for doubt that women are meant to be gazed on - consumed - by men; I may not agree entirely with Andrea Dworkin, but she, and others like her, have a way of looking at western society in terms of which The Economist would thoroughly disapprove.
And, above all, her thesis explains the violence against women we have seen itemised by the Teen Care Center: "....among college-aged males, fraternities encourage both heavy drinking and the sexual exploitation of women." The large number of women raped on the campuses of American universities should give pause for thought as to what values are transmitted to young people, especially given the fact that most of the rapes are not reported; almost as if, there is an expectation of rape.
The Not-So-Great Republic
As for democratic practice, that fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, a second expert opinion is all I shall offer in this lengthy article: that of Howard Zinn.
"We must face our long history of ethnic cleansing, in which the U.S. government drove millions of Indians off their land by means of massacres and forced evacuations.
"We must face our long history, still not behind us, of slavery, segregation and racism.
"And we must face the lingering memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki."
Indeed, seven paragraphs in his article are devoted to articulating how president after president lied to the nation about going to war. (http://progressive.org/media_mpzinn030806)."
It has been estimated that the United States has attacked, directly or indirectly, some 44 countries throughout the world since August 1945 (index.php-context=viewArticle&code=WAD20070128&articleId=4610).
Today, it is easy to explain why the West obsesses over the demonization of the Muslim world - even where other civilizations exhibit the pathologies that are supposed to be peculiar (if they are at all real) to Islam. That no criticism of Indian democracy will be undertaken by the western media in its usual blitz of propaganda can be taken for a certainty now that India is America's ally; but this blindness to the shortcomings of Indian society and civilization, as measured by a western yardstick, antedates the recent love affair with India.
After the Cold War, and well before 9/11, the West knew that the Muslim world would now turn its attention to domestic concerns. The propaganda machine began to work overtime - and one result of this frenzied activity was the incoherent survey of Islam and the West served up, for instance, by the Economist. Propaganda, as all good propagandists know, need not be coherent: just persuasive and repetitive.
And Socrates has long ago told us that democracies are better at rhetoric than logic.
http://iftekharsayeed.weebly.com
Iftekhar Sayeed teaches English and economics. He was born and lives in Dhaka, Bangladesh. He has contributed to AXIS OF LOGIC, ENTER TEXT, POSTCOLONIAL TEXT, LEFT CURVE, MOBIUS, ERBACCE, THE JOURNAL, and other publications. He is also a (more...)
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