Overcoming Misogyny

In a society steeped in patriarchy, females are at great risk of abuse and violence. 

Campaigns To Stop Violence Against Women Don't Impact Figures

In India, on average, 20 women are killed every day just for bringing in insufficient dowries. That figure disregards so called honour killings of wives, sisters and daughters etc.

Some Don't Do Irony Do They?

Ruby Hamad is another Australian feminist, in something like the Germaine Greer model (although as Ms Greer is apparently 'gender advantaged within immutable white power structures', Ms Hamad may not like that direct comparison) .....

Germaine Greer The Original Aussie Feminist
Has Had Her Own Go At White Female Culture ...

..... But with the extra chip on her shoulder in that she identifies as an Arab/Australian.

Monsters Walk Among Us

In India, rape attacks have continued on a depressingly regular basis .....

Rape Protests In India Are An Annual Event It Seems ....

.......despite the outcries, and apparently undeterred by the changes in the Indian law.

A Woman's Place

The Arts Council of Pakistan has traditionally, like all other institutions in that country, been an all male affair.

Male Chauvinism Rules .... OK?

So when it decided to organises a discussion in November 2019 on feminism called Feminism: The Other Perspective, it did what it has always done and invited only an all-male panel. Oh, they did have one token woman, discussion host Uzma al-Karim, whose name featured at the bottom of the promotional literature.

Dirty Old MP?

Recently elected Tunisian MP, Zouheir Makhlouf and human rights advocate found himself at the centre of a #MeToo storm.

Explaining It To The Wife, May Not Have Been Easy ....

.... after a photo was taken of him with his trousers pulled down, ointment or cream on one hand, in a car outside a girls high school.

The Sins Of The Father

In a recent study it seems that Arab men are just as religiously 'conservative' as their fathers ... literally.

Gender Inequality - Everyone Agrees Where It Occurs ... Well, Perhaps Not Everyone.

The study by The International Men and Gender Equality in the Middle East and North Africa (IMAGES MENA), found that where their father had been a misogynist, patriarchal chauvinist, then the son also adopted the same views as well. The interviews were undertaken in Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco and the Palestinian territories (only one of which, Morocco, is comparatively 'liberal') - Lebanon of course has a Shia Muslim population in the South, but Christian North, and this will have impacted its responses. However that said, the study covered 10,000 people, including women.

Real Gender Inequality

Gender inequality is a common problem …. well according to the ‘wimmin of the left’ in the West. However they largely focus on the fact that if a woman takes career time off to have children, she sometimes doesn’t get promoted as fast as a male colleague when she eventually returns to the workforce. A fallacious argument at best, but one that has traction with women writers in the media and especially in the BBC.

However, there is in fact a form of gender inequality that is practised worldwide, outside of the West, which is birth selection. This has been exacerbated by the ability of doctors to tell prospective parents the likely sex of their next child in the womb ….. so in many cultures, if it’s a girl child, the child is aborted or killed. If you work with Asians at work gently ask around, you will be surprised how many of them have a first born son … far more in fact than the laws of chance would seem to predict.

This Is Not Necessarily An Innocent Scene ....

An example of this kind of mindset was seen recently in Pakistan, where a man called Umar Zaib, threw his one-and-a-half years old daughter into the river Ravi to drown ... when his wife tried to save the child, he beat her back with his fists. The wife later told the police and reporters that "Since our first daughter has born, he wasn't happy, he wanted a son. He said if I had another daughter, he'd kill our first child, Zainab. When, eight weeks ago, I did have another girl, he kept threatening more and more, then he did it."