"Women and children on Monday in Mazar Dara, Kunar Province, where male rescuers would not pull women from under rubble or tend their wounds, witnesses said".Credit...Wakil Kohsar/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Excerpts from a report in the New York Times:
The first rescue workers reached Bibi Aysha’s village more than 36 hours after an earthquake devastated settlements across eastern Afghanistan’s mountainous areas on Sunday. But instead of bringing relief, the sight of them heightened her fears; not a single woman was among them.Afghan cultural norms, enforced even in emergencies by the ruling Taliban, forbid physical contact between men and women who are not family members. In the village of Andarluckak, in Kunar Province, the emergency team hurriedly carried out wounded men and children, and treated their wounds, said Ms. Aysha, 19. But she and other women and adolescent girls, some of them bleeding, were pushed aside, she said.“They gathered us in one corner and forgot about us,” she said. No one offered the women help, asked what they needed or even approached them.Tahzeebullah Muhazeb, a male volunteer who traveled to Mazar Dara, also in Kunar Province, said that members of the all-male medical team there were hesitant to pull women out from under the rubble of collapsed buildings. Trapped and injured women were left under stones, waiting for women from other villages to reach the site and dig them out...
More at the link.
When feminists stumble in trying to prove that America is a patriarchy, populated by misogynists (as opposed to a plutocracy, where rich men and women oppress the lower classes, composed of men, women and children), they run to articles like this one..."Well, women are global victims!"--even as this is clearly irrelevant to what's happening in the West.
ReplyDeleteI can't defend superstition of the sort we see in religions, across the board. This being a particularly ugly example. But, we ought to remain a little cautious when imposing our values on traditional cultures we really don't fully understand. (I hated "Three Cups of Tea" well before it was exposed as a fraud.)
Here's an article that might bring some nuance to the discussion: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/9/10/it-is-time-we-remember-afghan-men-are-also-victims-of-this-war
@ Stan/removed remark: I feel safe to say that while Crowboy and I disagree on a lot, neither of us is gonna defend the "Leave them under the rubble" position......
DeleteOne of the key elements of being woke is that you recognize people as complex beings that can be multiple things at once. They are brilliants with multiple shiny, sparkling facets. Usually this is focused on proverbial and caricatured minorities, but it applies to patriarchal, misogynist, plutocrat nazis as well. Those people are not brilliants, but pyrite. Still some sparkle, but disappointment and stench are close by.
/poured petrol on subject, lit the match, leaves the scene.
https://giphy.com/gifs/cartoon-explosion-cigarette-PqSbSRO7n97na
https://giphy.com/gifs/myspy-stx-my-spy-3olJ3EZqQ19kgCumCJ
"One of the key elements of being woke is that you recognize people as complex beings that can be multiple things at once."
DeleteI think of "woke" as being a newly minted word, as you are defining it. Like ten years old? And yet there were so many thousands of years of human history preceding this moment of enlightenment. Are you implying that humans, seen as "complex beings" is a new thing? If not, we have to get into the weeds of what's changed. Like specifically.
IMO, "woke" is dead in the US. It's too heavily identified with identity politics, which pits people against each other on the basis of imagined, exaggerated and fetishized grievances. It's more psychological than political at root. Politics as psychotherapy has been a disaster.
The left is emitting a stench, no doubt. And the right is making hay. Stay tuned. It's not impossible for Americans to wake up and find some new version of working class unity that's actually useful in improving the lives of the disabled, the poor, the working working poor and the working class. Bernie 2.0.
But don't hold your breath.
If you fish, and if you're serious about fish "husbandry", an unfortunate word, you will tend to release caught female fish to ensure the species survives. You need a few males, but many females, to have a healthy population.
ReplyDeleteI guess no-one told the Taliban that men aren't all that important, and they should be doing everything they can to keep their women alive. Although, honestly, that's a message everyone should listen to.
DISGUSTING ... there is no excuse for this ... no way to justify
ReplyDeleteAs a woman, I'm not interested at all in what crowboy thinks about any of this. It's not an academic exercise. I may be lucky enough to live in a place where men will pull my body from the rubble in an emergency, but I still experience, every day, the disregard that society has for a woman's life. But as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said "when you are cold, don't expect sympathy from someone who is warm"
ReplyDeleteNot only will men pull your body from the rubble, men will risk their lives for women at every turn. That's our cultural norm. And it's another example of female privilege.
DeleteThe idea that we live in a society that disregards the welfare of women is patently ridiculous. Unless my part of California, where women are more privileged than men, is somehow very different from the the rest of the US.
The most interesting thing, sociologically, is that women--especially affluent women--continue to see themselves as victims. As with many examples in human history, belief need not be fact-based. The belief has utility in and of itself.
men will risk their lives for women at every turn. That's our cultural norm.
DeleteIt is objectively not. It is men who are legislating the rights of women away and let them die in child birth. It is men like Andrew Tate , Epstein, Sean Combs and Weinstein who trade and abuse women. And to step away from current American affairs, there are millennia of men doing the same.
Not nearly all men......
I don't know any men involved sex trafficking. Never met one in almost seventy years. But, pretty much every man I've known would "jump in that river" to save a woman or a child. (Not to mention the fact that men, in my experience, are just about universally dedicated to helping women thrive in every arena.)
DeleteNow, to the subject of abortion, which you've broached.
I think it's pretty simple minded to make access to abortion a question of misogyny, though it's often presented as such. The only way to make abortion a matter of misogyny is to make the position of those who oppose abortion 100% meritless. That is to say, they can't be serious about the welfare of the unborn, so this must be a way to hurt women by arbitrarily preventing them from terminating pregnancies.
I don't agree with the arguments made by pro-life proponents. But I can't dismiss those arguments as simply vacuous. Pro-lifers, mostly faith-based, believe abortion is murder. This very large percentage of the US population is about half female. This pro-life constituency will make the point that unborn females are aborted/murdered, and this makes them the champions of the rights of the female half of the population; in this case, the right to be born.
I think the left has made a mistake in dogmatically dismissing and ridiculing pro-lifers. But, it's all part of the drive to make a certain brand of dogmatic feminism dominant on the left end of the spectrum. As I've said many times, I think this brand of feminism has been toxic to working class solidarity (cohesion among those with common economic interests)--among other objections.
Abortion rights have been returned to the states in the US. Is this the end of the world? I don't think so for the simple reason that majorities in some states will limit access to abortion for reasons that, though I don't concur, I also cannot dismiss--or ridicule.
Is this any basis for thinking US women are under the boot of a patriarchy? Experiencing some kind of reign of terror? No. I see the opposite as being true. Women are, on balance, less oppressed than men in 2025. After listing all the reasons I believe this to be true, I would then point to class-based politics as the only path forward.
Well put, @Anonymous.
ReplyDeleteI'm thinking about the scale. Gaza. Our money spent burying 50,000+ people in rubble. No rescue attempted. (Since this subject is gender-loaded, let's not forget that feminist icon Kamala Harris had no real objection to this holocaust.) Almost makes the Afghans look saintly by comparison--perverse as they may be.
ReplyDeleteFunny, isn't it, how the men do most of all that 'loading'?
ReplyDeleteIn the Israeli army, plenty of the "loading" is done by women. Now that war (war often promoted by female politicians) is fought on video screens, US women are no longer able to claim it's men who are responsible for all the world's violence. Apparently, this will be exponentially more true.
Delete