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Divina -> RE: Saudi rape victim gets 200 lashes.... (11/20/2007 6:18:51 PM)
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In answer to Politesub53
Of course it's not. We are not in disagreement. But it is more than speaking out. The issue is raised firstly on a cultural level. There are women of African tribes for example, that are beginning to adopt male rituals, thus claiming social standing they didn't previously have. Once tradition is questioned, people's mentalities will begin to change, and the confrontations with all kinds of authorities will be less sharp. The social conditions will be ripe for changes in the legal system or vice versa. It is a process where each variable affects while affected.
To return to your point, in the west, the women can indeed speak up...but there is a lot of distance to be covered. I don't want to start issues over abortion, or priesthood for example, I simply want to point out that seeming freedom of expression is not all it takes. Mentalities have not quite changed yet...even in the west. We are in the beginning of the process. I will give you a hint of what I am talking about in the words of Adrienne Rich (of Woman Born, 1986):
"The masculine imagination has had to divide women, to see us, and force us to see ourselves as polarised into good or evil, fertile or barren, pure or impure. The asexual Victorian angel-wife and the Victorian prostitute were institutions created by this double thinking which had everything to do with the male's subjective experience of women...The social institutions and prescriptions for behavior created by men have not necessarily accounted for the real lives of women...The experience of maternity and the experience of sexuality have both been chanelled to serve male interests. Behavior which threatens the institutions, such as illegitimacy, abortion, lesbianism is considered deviant or criminal. Institutional motherhood revives and renews all other institutions.... Physical motherhood is merely one dimension of our being. The fear and hatred of our bodies has often crippled our brains. We must convert our physicality into both knowledge and power. I am really asking whether women cannot begin, at last, to think through the body, to connect what has been so cruelly disorganised...The repossesion by women of their bodies will bring far more essential change to human society...we need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body. In such a world women will truly create new life, bringing forth not only children, (if and as we choose), but the visions, and the thinking necessary to sustain, console, and alter human existence- a new relationship to the universe. Sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy will develop new meanings; thinking itself will be transformed.
This is where we have to begin."
When women become aware of their bodies and take full control of them...this is the key concept...(In both Saudi Arabia for instance where the victim's body suffers out of her control, or in the west, where it is still unthinkable for some to question the practices of institutional motherhood)
...but first they have to realise it is their right to do so.
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