on modern feminism in america and beyond

According to a report on the global gender gap released earlier this week by the World Economic Forum, women and men in the US are 72% equal — a bit of a weird-sounding statement, but it’s based on a quantitative index incorporating measures of economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, political empowerment, and health and survival. In the US (and in most of the world) men and women are essentially equal in terms of health and education (in fact, in the majority of the world’s countries, women outnumber men at institutes of higher education). Economically and politically, though, women lag far behind men no matter where you look. Even in Norway, the country with the smallest gender gap (the report quantifies gender equality there at 82%), women only enjoy 78% economic equality and 53% political equality. (For a detailed breakdown of how these values are attained, check out the full report.)

The US ranks 27th on a global scale of gender equality; it is somewhat above average in economic equality (75%, compared to a global average of 59%), roughly on par in health and education, and slightly below average in political equality, with a score of only 14% (the global average is 16%). None of these values are exactly inspiring, but it’s the political inequality that interests me most.— the question of what it takes to be a woman and be elected to high office, because the political viability of female candidates speaks directly to national cultural attitudes toward women, which are, predictably, heavily sexualized. A friend of mine recently declared that we needed not to treat women less like sex objects but to treat men like sex objects more; after all, we all ARE sex objects when it comes down to it. This is true, I suppose, but speaking with the authority of bisexuality, it is a LOT easier to sexualize Sarah Palin’s candidacy than John McCain’s, and I don’t think that’s just happenstance.

As a self-identifying feminist, I’m offended by the fact that sex appeal seems, if not vital, enormously important to most female politicians’ success; at the same time, I’m disgusted with those who attribute the accomplishments of a smart, savvy, and sexy woman in government entirely to the last of those qualities. (I’m even more disgusted when I feel they may have a point.) But these barriers are nothing in comparison to the aptly named global gender gap. Women the world over are still in a state of subjugation, from Afghanistan to Eritrea, and to ignore their economic, social, cultural, and, yes, political plight is far more heinous a crime than to make a few lewd remarks about Sarah Palin’s boobs.

dangerous dissidents

Fourteen Burmese activists arrested for organizing anti-government rallies last year had their sentences handed down today: 65 years in prison each. Surely, you might think, some violence took place at these rallies — a stone thrown, at the very least. Sixty-five years in prison for peaceful protest? Unheard of.

As it turns out, the 65 years break down as follows: four counts of illegal use of electronic media, 15 years each; one count of forming an illegal organization, 5 years. The rallies in question were protests against drastic rises in fuel prices last August. The facts speak for themselves.

Burma’s recent history offers a stunning display of black-and-white morality: cruel, mindless, and dictatorial junta versus peaceful protesters (often monks), including Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, who has spent thirteen of the last nineteen years under house arrest. The protesters who were sentenced today were part of the 88 Generation Students group, named for a 1988 massacre of protesting students in Rangoon. It’s hard to imagine a more clear-cut case of right and wrong, or at least to my sensibilities, and I think to those of most breathing, feeling human beings. However, Burma is of little importance on the global geopolitical map (unlike, say, Iraq), so the chances of the junta feeling serious international pressure to shape up anytime soon? Not so great.

educating and integrating the roma

The Roma, otherwise known as the Gypsies, are an ethnic group derived in India and widespread in eastern and southern Europe. Historically, they have faced a great deal of discrimination from white Europeans, notably during the Holocaust, but even now, the divisions between the Roma population and the sedentary white Europeans are large and problematic. Roma are seen, and probably not without reason, as a threat to the order of society, and many Europeans perceive them as parasites of the welfare system, relying on government housing and support not out of desperate need but out of preference. (This sort of problem, as far as I can tell, is widespread in the welfare states of Europe and not unique to the Roma; in the US, where it’s far more difficult to survive off of government support, it’s less well known.) Roma also have a reputation for crime and general social maleficence (all right, I just wanted to use the word maleficence there). Furthermore, the Roma, after so many generations of persecution, aren’t exactly interested in reaching out to white Europeans and assimilating into their lifestyle.

All this is coming to a head due to a landmark court decision last year ruling that the Roma could not be segregated into “special schools”, in many of which Roma children might lag many years behind their mainstream school counterparts. Many of these special schools have simply been renamed and carried on as before, though, and the Roma unwillingness to send their children to mainstream schools with very few other Roma children and the likelihood of discrimination hasn’t helped the situation. Many people also blame Roma parents for placing little value on education, thus not providing their children with the background they need to succeed once they enter the school system.

Much of the segregation has been justified by (often bogus) diagnoses of Roma children as mentally retarded or afflicted by other learning disabilities. As the big sister of a special needs kid, I have to say that even if these children are mentally retarded, they belong in a classroom with normally functioning peers. Otherwise, they never stand a chance of catching up or even coming within shouting distance on the educational front. And the prejudices on both sides of the Roma divide will never ease so long as the two groups are kept happily separate and continue to demonize one another.

world happiness

I’m a little slow on the uptake with this one, but the National Science Foundation published a report earlier this month that ranked the world’s nations by overall happiness. Denmark, as it turns out, is the world’s happiest nation, and its negative counterpart (surprise, surprise) is Zimbabwe.

The second and third slots, somewhat surprisingly, went not to other affluent, industrialized nations, but to Puerto Rico and Colombia. The US slots in at number sixteen, although if not for Baby Boomers, it might rank considerably higher. Ronald Inglehart, the University of Michigan political scientist who conducted the survey, says that the data generally suggest that happiness, while certainly impacted by economic conditions, is most directly reliant on personal freedom.

challenging yemeni child marriages

Last Monday, Yemen’s Jibla Primary Court granted a divorce to Arwa Abdu Mohammed Ali al-Shahli from her husband Khalil Mohammed Abdullah al-Furas. Arwa, currently nine years old, was married to al-Furas last year and after frequent rapes and beatings fled to a hospital last month. She was the second Yemeni victim of a child marriage to request a divorce in as many months, and like her predecessor, ten-year-old Nujood Ali, she won her case. Furthermore, the two girls have set off public outcry against the inhumanity of child marriages in Yemen, where girls in rural areas are on average married off between 12 and 13, a practice that feeds the cycle of poverty and frequently has devastating effects on the girls who are its victims.

Yemen’s legislature has repeatedly struggled with legislation limiting the age at which girls may marry but has no concrete provision in place. Shada Nasser, the human rights lawyer who took on both girls’ cases, has since Nujood’s divorce received a number of calls about young girls trying to escape child marriages; according to her, the tide of popular opinion in Yemen has turned definitively against the practice. Nujood’s was the first child marriage case to be dealt with in a court of law rather than by tribal sheiks, and Arwa’s the second.

For more on Nujood’s story (and a little on Arwa’s), see this Sunday’s New York Times article.

“gay india does exist”

On Saturday, for the first time ever, three Indian cities held major gay pride parades. Nearly 1,000 gay activists and supporters took to the streets of New Delhi, Bangalore, and Kolkata in the biggest gay pride demonstration in India’s history.

Homosexuality is illegal in India under the colonial-era Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which outlaws sexual activity “against the order of nature” with a penalty of up to ten years in prison. Other former colonies have repealed similar laws, but India’s remains in effect. The Delhi High Court is set to hear a case this week filed by human rights groups that wish the provision to be repealed for consenting adults.

Anti-gay societal pressures play an enormous role in Indian life, and joint suicides by desperate gay couples are not uncommon. The best known recent case is that of Christy Jayanthi Malar (38) and Rukmani (40), both married women, who immolated themselves in May due to the reactions of their families to their relationship.

responding to zimbabwe

The Nation published an interesting piece yesterday on a resolution Obama propelled through the Senate just over a year ago condemning violence on the part of Zimbabwe’s government, citing said resolution as evidence of Obama’s foreign policy savvy. I certainly agree with them that Obama’s actions were more inspiring than Bush’s or McCain’s at the same time, but I find their praise somewhat excessive. They hail Obama as a leader who sees what others don’t about world affairs and does something about it, as if it took a carefully trained eye to tell that Zimbabwe was in (excuse my French) deep shit. Thing is, it didn’t. I remember reading as a sixteen-year-old about Tsvangirai’s trials at the hands of Mugabe’s government and thinking that someone ought to do something about it. And the Congressional resolution, while certainly praiseworthy in intent, doesn’t seem to have gotten much done.

I’ve heard people saying that there are two people out there who could really make a difference in the Zimbabwean situation: Mandela and Obama. That’s all well and good, but what, exactly, is the difference they could make? Convince Mugabe to hand over power? Not happening. Get the African Union to take a harder line against him, perhaps, but what would that do? Mugabe is firmly entrenched in his position, and he’s not going to depart from it unless forced. Personally (and bear in mind that I have hardly the expertise of a cockroach in this manner), I feel that there are two plausible steps that might improve affairs in Zimbabwe: some kind of a power-sharing deal, which might be brokered with firm support from within Africa, and international pressure on Zimbabwe to open up to foreign aid. Democracy is pretty difficult to manage when the majority of your population is focused on surviving from day to day, and a greater aid presence could help stabilize the lives of Zimbabwe’s people enough for an effective regime change to eventually come to pass. In either case, though, the primary pressure on Zimbabwe canot come from Western nations, as Mugabe plays anti-imperialism as his trump card in nearly every dispute; African leaders must unite to get Mugabe into line. That, I think, is the reason Obama and Mandela both have such potential as players in this crisis. They both have the African credibility and international respect required to get the leaders of a continent rallied around one cause.

[previous zimbabwe posts here]

gay athletes

The first gay male athlete in a team sport to come out during his career, soccer star Justin Fashanu of Britain, committed suicide eight years later, in 1998, when he was accused of sexual assault by a 17-year-old in Maryland (the allegation was subsequently dropped by the police due to lack of evidence). Ed Gallagher, an offensive lineman for the University of Pittsburgh from 1977 to 1979, jumped from a dam in 1985, twelve days after his first sexual encounter with another man. Glenn Burke, the first MLB player to be out to his teammates and team owners during his career, was traded from the Dodgers and eventually driven out of professional sports due to prejudice and died of AIDS complications in 1995, having spent the last few years of his life drug-addicted and homeless.

On a more positive note, a survey last year found that 72% of heterosexual Americans’ opinions of their favorite professional male athletes would not be negatively impacted if said favorite athletes came out as gay. However, 72% also believed that others’ opinions of their favorite athletes would suffer.

scalia’s dissent

If you’ve been living under a rock for the past 48 hours or so, you might not know that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that prisoners at Guantanamo Bay have the legal right to appeal their detention as enemy combatants in U.S. civilian courts. This is a huge deal; it renders the whole point of Gitmo utterly moot. If being somewhere outside of U.S. soil doesn’t exempt detainees from U.S. legal rights, who cares about having a special place outside the U.S. to hold them?

One of the Supreme Court justices, Antonin Scalia, wrote a dissenting opinion that the New York Times characterized as “apocalyptic”, predicting increased American casualties as a direct result of the Court’s ruling. His reasoning is as follows: previous cases have existed in which the military released detainees who were being held at Guantanamo due to lack of evidence that they were enemy combatants, and they have subsequently proven unequivocally that they were, becoming involved in terrorist activities and killing Americans. If the military didn’t have enough evidence to keep enemy combatants under lock, then how on earth can they prove detainees’ enemy combatant status to America’s civilian courts?

I have to say, I find it interesting that Scalia, as a member of the highest court in the land, seems out to stifle the judicial system itself. If the correct and legal processes that exist in America are not capable of handling all of America’s activities, is the solution to simply suspend the correct and legal processes?

The full text of the court’s decision is available here.

zimbabwe’s bleak outlook

To say that Zimbabwe has issues is a gigantic understatement. Set aside for a moment the blatant political violence and state suppression of human rights, and to say that Zimbabwe has issues is still a gigantic understatement. Zimbabwe doesn’t have issues, Zimbabwe has issues. Unemployment is at 80%, inflation — wait for it — at over 165,000%, and all the while the government’s wandering around banning aid agencies from giving food to starving rural communities?

I had it in my head this morning to do a post on Morgan Tsvangirai, Zimbabwe’s opposition leader, maybe to dig a little deeper than the headlines: what does he stand for, other than a regime change? Then I did a little research and figured out that in Zimbabwe, regime change is a full-fledged agenda in and of itself. Tsvangirai’s party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), seeks first and foremost to get an incredibly terrible political leader out of office.

Robert Mugabe took power in 1980 as a national hero following Zimbabwe’s independence and subsequent civil war, and he has remained in power ever since, vilifying all who criticize or oppose him as “born again colonialists”. However, there’s no real way to characterize Mugabe’s administration as anything but absolutely appalling. He’s violated more human rights than you probably knew existed, and he’s stifled all opposition through election rigging, unjustified detentions, and violence (just last year, Tsvangirai was arrested and tortured, and the cameraman who smuggled out footage of his injuries was later abducted and killed). As for his economic policies, the aforementioned statistics might give you a hint as to their success rate. As recently as 2000, he’s disrupted agriculture by throwing the majority of white farmers off their land and failing to see to that farmland’s upkeep, and he’s dragged his country into a costly participation in the Second Congo War (1998-2003) — both of which, of course, have plenty of objectionable qualities outside of their economic ramifications. And don’t even get me started on Mugabe’s views on homosexuality, which according to him is “sub-animal” and merits immediate arrest.

So really, getting rid of Mugabe is cause enough for Tsvangirai’s party, at least for the moment. The question must remain, though, of whether he has the ability to fix things once in office. The MDC’s website has a series of pages outlining its agenda but offers few concrete plans to effect it, and many of the promises therein read like empty pipe dreams in light of the present reality: “No one will ever be hungry in Zimbabwe again,” one slogan declares. I’m hardly saying I would cast my vote for Mugabe, but I have to wonder whether Tsvangirai will still look as good without a devil there for contrast. I can hardly imagine his administration floating in amongst clouds of butterflies and promptly setting everything to rights.

According to the Human Rights Watch, though, the question is unlikely to be an imminent one. Although Tsvangirai recently beat Mugabe by a few scanty percentage points in the March general election, he did not achieve a majority of the votes, and the upcoming runoff election is, in light of the government’s “campaign of violence and intimidation”, unlikely to swing his way.