ninme

Steyn Online - THE WEST’S TWO-TIER SISTERHOOD

At the time Ms Faludi was detecting patriarchal oppression in my NR prose, the Bush/Blair patriarchal phallocracy was busy liberating Afghanistan, a country where women were forbidden by law from feeling sunlight on their faces. When I used to point that out in speeches, huffy western feminists would object that the Taliban were a particularly vile regime but a long way away and not especially relevant. Okay. But all that’s happened in the last six years is that we now know that that distant evil on the fringes of the map has embedded itself in the heart of every western city. There are forced cousin marriages in Muslim communities throughout the developed world: In 80% of New York Pakistani families, the parents determine whom and when you marry; 57% of British Pakistanis are wed to a first cousin, with daughters as young as 11 being sent abroad to marry. The Province of Ontario gives polygamous men welfare checks for each of their wives, and Canadian immigration recognizes arranged marriages performed over the telephone. There are “FGM resource coordinators” in Australian hospitals. In the Netherlands, Muslims account for the vast majority of those taken in to battered women’s shelters. There are “honor killings” in Germany and Scandinavia, and Toronto and Dallas.

When they’re sufficiently hectored by the likes of David Horowitz, Ms Faludi and her sisters can be temporarily roused to express some pro forma objection to “honor killings” and the like. But only for a moment, and then it’s back to the usual dreary myopic parochial preoccupations: Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women had to be retitled for the paperback edition The Undeclared War Against American Women lest anyone whose pieties hadn’t been gathering cobwebs since 1969 might carelessly imagine that a leading feminist might have something to say about the “war” being waged against her Muslim sisters in Dearborn and Portland and Montreal and London, Melbourne, Amsterdam, Oslo and Berlin.

I appreciate that to Ms Faludi I will always be as revoltingly patriarchal as a 1950s sitcom dad. Yet there is something not just boring but grotesque in western feminists’ inability to prioritize. They seem implicitly to have accepted a two-tier sisterhood, in which white upscale liberal women twitter about NR columnists’ appalling misogyny in criticizing a female Bush Administration official, while simultaneously the women of the fastest growing population group in the western world are forced into clitoridectomies, forced into burqas, forced into marriage, forced into psychiatric wards, forced into hiding – and, if all else fails, forced off the apartment balcony by their brothers and fathers to fall to their deaths, as has happened to at least seven Muslim girls in Sweden recently. This is the real “war against women” being waged across the western world, but, like so much of the left, a pampered and privileged sisterhood would rather fight pseudo-battles over long vanquished enemies.

Yeah!

Btw, now white liberals in New York are stranding women in rightless and invalid polygamous marriages too.