Wednesday

International Women's Day - another year on.



If you are after the regular frivolity of posts that usually grace the frowning face of Indignant Rant - this isn't one of them.

Below is a post from one of my other blogs. Made one year ago (minus one day) in response to the sheer onslaught of social media madness that was at times supportive, at others nothing at all short of offensive when joining the chorus for International Women's Day.

This post is simply a reminder that waving our arms about is fine, but another year has passed and I fear that 'stuff' is not very different.



Even searching for a suitable photograph for this redux had me gobsmacked.

Try going to any commercial stock photography website and entering the search string "Imprisoned woman".

I am not a prude, nor am I at all conservative. If people have some need at a commercial level that requires hot-chicks-tied-on-bed, then fine - but perhaps it would be more appropriate to label the photos so that people searching for the perfect shot can get it by searching for "Soft porn, bondage, demure, wanton, desirous geek-will-never-get-close-to-anyone-as-hot-as-this-even-if-she-cant-run-anywhere" etc. (although there is an argument as to why these images are required for advertising too... whole other/additional argument)

Blisteringly-attractive-girl-tied-in-lingerie isn't what I had in mind for my search.

Indignant rant isn't specifically a stage for world change, so for those already up to their earlobes in seriousness - go and look at some LOL Cats and get your smile on.

For others here's the rant - I wonder how much has changed?


Indignant Ranter's desk: March 9, 2011.

International womens day +1 - a rant on how some people don't get it.

With international women's day run and done, please don't forget that as far as fair treatment and equality has come, there is still a long way to go.

It's probably taken me 10 minutes to think how to tackle this status update, which means that in another 10 minutes a women will be killed somewhere to protect her family's honour - in some instances for no more serious social infraction than that of speaking to another man.

For the sake of neat figures - if that woman were to die instantly (unfortunately not always the case - death is usually a protracted enterprise), in the preceding 20 minutes 133 other women were beaten, some of them to death, in America.

Globally

- 20 women were trafficked for reasons of labour and prostitution.

- 50 women contracted HIV. 34 died from AIDS associated disease.

The statistics mount up and up, and there's probably no end to sensationalising little gems that I could polish up.

Discussions could be had about the relative merit of each religion and dogmatic inequities based on social needs and requirements, centuries old, still enforced today.

The cause of this post?

Yesterday through various social networking streams I was inundated with positive and celebratory posts regarding events that were occurring around the world.

Social networking being what it is, I was also saddened by twitter folk posting things like “You’ve got one Ima gonna look at it #bootyappreciationday #dealwithit” its author also writes a blog containing a post that suggests that .. ‘any man who is in support of ‘feminists’ really only does so for one reason – don’t deny it.’ as one of the facts of life. (I am not making this up)

Facebook folk espousing that things were just fine with them, thus superimposing a ‘IWD misses the point, my world is awesome, so the rest of the world is awesome too’ attitude which itself is at odds with the spirit of the day.

How far have we actually come?

I do have some idealised view to how we should all treat each other, and have on many occasions shut down party discussions by being a ‘bleeding heart pinko lefty”– on one occasion a party goer suggested I should just kill myself if I thought the world was that f**ked up.

Not a practical solution, nor an effective one in the long run.

Take a look around, and if you’re lucky enough to NOT be part of the above statistics, perhaps you should take a moment and whisper thanks…

…but for the love of everything that’s good in the world -  don’t ignore the cries of those who suffer; there’s a high probability that that cry is coming from within earshot of where you now stand.

Andrew Webber is an Australian author living in the Middle East, his first book "Erasure" was released in June 2012 to critical acclaim. Available in Kindle and paperback on Amazon.com

7 comments:

  1. This is clearly God's fault.
    I read the bible once. I was incarcerated in a military stockade at the time and it was all they'd let me have, but that's another story.
    Many people have gotten carried away over the years with Bible II: the Jesus Years and ignore the fact that before he mythically took on the sins of the world, Jewish Chicks had already been actually doing it for centuries - The whole core premise of the bible is that everything was perfect until some toothsome bint f*cked it all up.
    For all of us. Forever.
    Apparently.
    Even after Bible II: the Jesus Years (Deluxe Canon Edition)went multiple platinum,after touring with Constantine and the Holy Roman Empires in the fourth century (supposedly explaining that the whole "Tree in the Garden" fiasco was smoothed over), people remained very much enamoured of the idea that God had reserved one half of his signature creation for hanging shit on and getting dinner together. The meme has remained popular for millennia now despite a long running campaign to blame the whole schemozzle on the jews and the odd stab at Homosexuality by the New Christian Right.
    Having just watched my wife gestate and birth my now six month old daughter (and that in collusion with a coven of midwives) I don't find it surprising that less enlightened men in less enlightened times might experience an awe verging on fear - it's one thing to run down an aurochs with nothing more than a stone axe and a hefty set of nullas, it's quite something else to watch your wife make miracle stuff from her boobs which your infant girl child then transforms into Three Dimensional Gorgeous.
    The only thing men can do of even remotely approximate profundity is war and war is pretty useless to anyone else except for the participants and even that only for fleeting exquisite moments which then eat our souls with bitter acid guilt for the joy we felt in destruction.
    Men will scream for their mothers in extremis knowing we can only destroy and only women create and nurture.
    so Men made up stories to comfort ourselves rather than confess aloud our fears to one another. Instead we cried on our Women's breasts and hated them for knowing our weakness.
    But I digress, perhaps. I don't know. This little box only shows about five lines of text...
    oh yeah, right.
    So here we are in the early 21st century, explorations into the nature of reality have gone sufficiently far as to prove that everything is pretty much nothing, and even the parts which aren't nothing aren't even always something depending on whether or not you are looking. You can even graphically illustrate the process using luminous CG balls for molecules in a gee-wizz three dimensional video display and people will still find it more plausible that an incomprehensible, omniscient, omnipotent single entity just spake it unto being and then chucked a wobbly when someone broke the 'rules' - even though he omnisciently must have known she would do that - we're not even a quarter of the way into the first chapter of Bible I and we hit this little logic loop. Yet people are still arguing about it at least six thousand years later. You can do an entire philosophical thesis on whether/why God hates Chicks and graduate from the same university where a little clique of "Firefly" nUrds are trying to make photoelectric paint and synthesise complex carbohydrates out of nothing but sunlight and recycled cardboard for less than the price of agriculturing it, and not be considered a hapless buffoon.
    Ridiculous. If aliens turned up right now we should be bloody well embarrassed. Unless the aliens are keeping all their females in closed cloth bags to spare themselves the inconvenience of having to constantly rape them. Even then I bet the female aliens would still get the same pay as the male ones.

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    Replies
    1. Best. Comment. Ever.

      ...and well spotted.

      You have me at a disadvantage, my 'enjoyment' of the Bible II, the Jesus years was impeded by all the begat-ing.

      Not that I mind the process of a good begat, but it entirely confused the issue. I'm happy with a family tree, but as anyone who has been subjected to the findings of a hobby genealogist - the information becomes convoluted and slightly boring after the first couple of generations.

      In hindsight one wonders how much of the begat-fest was mutually consenting.

      Delete
    2. ...it strikes me as likely that all the men of the tribe got together and mutually consented to telling all the women to shut up and get begatting. Outside of participating in begatàge and pinching fruit I don't think women got much of a mention up until Bible III: The DaVinci Code. And apparently that was Bollox too... according to the blokes I saw critiquing it.
      In all seriousness, All of the major popular religions pretty much keep the girls to the back of the bus it seems. I'm pretty sure even the Dalai Lama has to be a man. It's faintly baffling; my own experience has been that women are on the whole Very Useful and, as mentioned in my earlier demi-rant, frequently Awesome - having to endure the constant inane chatter and flatten all the recycling yourself is a very small price to pay for the myriad enrichments women bring to men and mankind. If it's Us who ends up visiting another planet first I hope captain Kirk is a chick.
      You only get one chance to make a first impression.
      ;)

      Delete
  2. Indeed.
    Just on the Dalai Lama (much prefer spelling Llama with double L, even if it doesn't make sense) in Tenzin Palmo's book "A cave in the snow" she is pretty disparaging about the role of women in the religion.

    To paraphrase: She mentions something about the difference between Monks and Nuns as primarily a role based enerprise; Monks do the holy work. Nuns clean and seep the holy bedchambers and clean the holy cooking implements after cooking the holy food.

    Think that was at least some of her motivation to become a full Monk, rather than simply sign on for cleaning duties...

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  3. the east isn't much better than the west. so many aeons of theosophical enquiry and nobody came up with the observation that women are a full 50% of the equation until last thursday. Maybe they never bothered to think about it?
    Primary neo-pagan theology (lol) says that male-centric traditions rose up as a reaction to the preceeding aeons of goddess and Mother worship.
    Personally I like Zen. There's no gods for starters, it's rooted in Taoist dualism and is utterly nonsensical in a much more purposeful way than all the other major traditions.
    Hey, I wonder how Scientologists treat their women?

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  4. Indeed... again.

    Not sure about the scientology approach to begating.

    Although I suspect that all the auditing that it seems to concern itself with might get in the way of anything near a romantic interlude.

    Unless of course the begattee and the begatter have a deep and shared love of anything to do with a spreadsheet...

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    ReplyDelete

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