We don’t like women. We don’t want to "play nice." Last month, we killed two young girls for filming themselves dancing happily in the rain.
“Surely,” you say, “we’re not all like that! That was in barbaric Pakistan! They oppress women over there! That’s their backward culture!”
That’s true. It is backwards. It’s definitely more sophisticated to oppress women by brainwashing them into buying things they don’t need in order to look like something they can’t.
Either way you slice it, we don’t like women. We oppress them for being sexual. We oppress them by making them sexual. We sexualise them to the point of commodification, diminishing their senses of self-worth by imprisoning them in a shallow cycle of perpetual consumerism.
“Oh, come on,” you say, “we’re not that bad!” That’s true. It’s not all society’s fault. Mary Wollstonecraft– that famous 18th-century British feminist– points out that women are complicit in their own subjugation because they rely on the "arbitrary power of beauty."
While men are out there getting educated, she says, women are obsessed with trying to make themselves pretty. Buying into the notion that their only source of power is sexuality, they likewise buy into a cycle of subjugation.
Sure, you say, that was a long time ago and women didn’t have access to education. Things are different now. Women don’t still believe that their sexuality is their only source of power. But a glance at pretty much any female pop star (and, sadly, role model) might show otherwise. Typical here is that old ditty: "I’m a Slave for U," which, like many of its pop music counterparts, promotes both female sexuality and subjugation (as well as poor grammar, obvi).
It was the fear that they would soon become like those sexually voracious pop stars on the telly – one supposes – that instigated that boy in Pakistan to murder his stepsisters and their mother. That modern fear of flagrant, American-style sexuality. That ancient fear of sexuality’s power.
There is something to be said, perhaps, for a society that tries to limit flagrant sexuality. Modesty is a virtue, after all. But, as with all things in life, a balance must be struck. It is equally jarring (for people of any gender) to walk down a street filled with barely-clad over-sexed women, as it is to walk down one filled with fully-covered identity-concealing women. These fictional streets – and these fictional yet paradigmatic women – typify the modern conundrum: the battle between runaway individualism versus communitarian concern.
Ostensibly, that boy in Pakistan was only concerned for his community’s welfare, put in obvious peril by the dangerous combination of girls, dancing, precipitation, and mobile telephony. But, he was in Pakistan, a country defined in many ways by its Muslim-ness. He should have known better.
In Islam, women are revered. Did not their Prophet tell them: "Paradise lies at the feet of the mothers?" Didn’t he profess his love for perfume and women and prayer? The 14th-century Andalusian mystic Ibn'Arabi took his cue from this Prophet when he said that woman is the true revelation of God’s mercy and creativity. The world’s most beloved poet, Rumi, shared a similar view when he said that the creative activity reveals itself best in woman – she is creator, not creature.
The Qur’an speaks clearly about equality between men and women, their equal consideration (Q. 33:35) and equal potential (Q. 4:1). Furthermore – as it turns out – murder is un-Islamic, since to kill one is to kill all of humanity (Q. 5:32).
So, what kind of person kills someone because they filmed themselves being happy? What kind of society objectifies its own people to make them subservient to systems of consumerism? What kind of civilisation maligns half its population, whether crudely or sophisticatedly? Only the obsessively selfish.
We have to get over our obsession with ourselves, get over our egos, and look beyond our closed minds. If we don’t, we will always be slaves to our basest selves.
So, yes, that Pakistani boy should have known better. But, so should we all.
