and are forced to marry their rapists? More sexist than that?

The Telegraph identifies with the British right, it's called the Torygraph for a reason. They write articles mainly to discredit the EU and UN.

This is one of them. Notice the number of replies and the poll. It's red meat for their readership.

Rashida Manjoo shot herself in the foot and the Telegraph will now exploit her clueless comments.

The Telegraph is their Weekly Standard/Fox News. It reflects mainstream conservative opinion.

This article was not written to inform, but to inflame. The Sun, The Daily Mail, and The Telegraph run nonstop anti-EU and anti-UN stories because they hate international law and the Labour Party. Look at the comments to that article, those are Conservative voters.

Hey, I tried to educate you. *shrugs*

and your argument sides with the right leaning paper.

yes, the tilted right newspaper was dismissing the woman. kinda just like you. so yea... you side with the right tilting paper. thanks for educating me but i already knew this.

Oh wait, that was here. At least it's illegal, but that doesn't seem to stop it from happening.

violent crimes against women and girls generally. Yes, even here in the U.S. too.

By a lot of measures - inequality, poverty, crime - Britain is sadly down near the U.S. as developed countries go.

treated as second class property, or heck, even slave class citizens. And in India, don't they still do the child brides weddings? Those girls don't have any choice at all.

In fact most of those who purchase women and girls sold through human trafficking are men from the US and Western Europe.

Sex tourism is heavily Western European and American.

young women living this recognize it and i am really impressed with their efforts the last couple years. they gave the u.s. a good wake up call and thru out europe

Just read this the other day.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2014/03/24/293855961/a-few-more-thoughts-on-sexism-in-latin-america

FTR, I may be jaded or have confirmation bias as I have lived in the UK, Colombia and Peru.

as do and have other Latin American nations. More of new lawyers in Brazil are women than men, and Brazil has a network of police stations staffed and run by women to combat rape and domestic violence.

The idea that white Westerners are somehow superior to the rest of the world simply is not supported by data, like the gender gap index.

So if we elect Hillary will we have less sexism?

Never said or think White Westerners were superior just linked an article, said I thought the OP was a stretch and said I have lived a few places.

Do you have comments on the article I linked?

and I provided you data on the gender gap that shows much more than "if Hillary were president we wouldn't have a problem." You don't care. That's fine. I'm sorry I mistook your participation in the thread as actual interest in the subject matter. I won't repeat the mistake again.

They don't mean the same thing.

Because reading upthread seems to be a difference of opinion on other terms as well.

Gollygee is a trained professional.

More spread out (but individual acts not necessarily that bad), vs. worse. And people are saying, "No, it isn't more spread out, because worse individual acts have happened over here." It makes sense that places where women are kept out of sight or required to have male escorts would not have as many individual acts of sexism. But being kept out of sight and being required to have male escorts is misogynist and worse, and in addition the horrible (but fewer) individual acts that happen are worse.

violent and abusive material, which the recent law in Britain - however flawed - was intended to address.

From other discussions here anything from porn to wearing a bikini on a magazine cover is seen as degrading and dehumanizing to women causing people to not respect them at all (and thus fuels sexist attitudes that leads to worse things).

Most any action can be seen through a lens similar to that - complimenting someone, making a remark about a dress (yeah, men don't often comment on how other men in places like washington dress because they pretty much all wear dark suits and power ties and black shoes - ain't much to comment on if you ask me. Same goes with hair styles and such really. Men are boring).

Point is one sees a slew of things which are called out as being sources and causes of problems. And when, like in this thread, you compare those problems across the globe in an effort to rate a country as the worst it seems just a tad odd to me that folks honestly believe (or would want to promote the belief) that the UK is the worst.

Point out issues they have, sure, we do that all the time on a million other issues. But marking them as the top of the heap just ain't flying with me.

It's not that things like bikini photos or porn are so bad in themselves, it's more the cultural standards and assumptions - often grossly unrealistic and unfair - that they tend to reflect, even if unconsciously.

I myself am firmly anti-censorship, and you certainly won't see me railing against sexual imagery in and of itself. But I do think it's important to deconstruct, at least a little, the images we often unthinkingly consume in our daily lives.

And yes, in Iran unmarried women are not allowed to go out in public unaccompanied by a male relative, but the UK is much, much worse.

And just because in many Middle Eastern countries women are accosted on the street and arrested for not covering their hair and bodies in the religiously correct manner, and in the UK women are allowed to wear bikinis, this does not mean that the UK is not the most sexist country in the world.

I am in awe of this Rashida Manjoo and her formidable skills in identifying problematic sexism.

You have a valid point, of course, but the most egregious examples of sexism aren't the only valid ones.

*Edit: corrected grammatical error.

was of someone who knew she must make an important statement on UK women's rights and equality, but who just climbed out of a cesspool of hatred (including gendercide, rape as a weapon of war, etc, etc.) for women in places all over the world so bad, she decided to wipe off her shoes, climb up to the top step and only consider the easiest and safest to comment on.

100 schoolgirls kidnapped in Nigeria by suspected extremists

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria - Suspected Islamic extremists abducted about 100 female students from a school in northeast Nigeria before dawn Tuesday, but some of the teens managed to escape from the back of an open truck, officials said.

The girls were abducted after midnight from a school in Chibok, on the edge of the Sambisa Forest that is an insurgent hideout, said Borno state police commissioner Tanko Lawan.

Gunmen killed a soldier and police officer guarding the school, then took off with at least 100 students, a State Security Service official said.

A local government official said he did not know how many of the girls have escaped but that "many" have walked through the bushes and back to Chibok. The girls were piled into the back of an open truck and, as it was traveling, some grabbed at low-hanging branches to swing off while others jumped off the slow-moving vehicle, he said. The two officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to give information to reporters.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024826030


Could be worse. Could be porn, whistling, or someone taking pics of them eating (as was noted in the article of the OP as reasons why the UK is the most sexist)

Of course one (at a time) isn't as bad as a hundred, but it seems more a difference of degree than kind.

And why do you always reduce this to the most trivial examples? Almost seems like you're belittling the subject.

The problems faced by women (and others) all over the world certainly exist.

And if you think the US is like Nigeria when it comes to women I don't know what to tell you. Both countries have problems with everything from how the poor are treated, gays, and women - but the degree of them is worlds apart.

supposedly trivial examples of sexism, because of the cultural biases they reflect which cause harm to both women and men.

To provide an analogy, of course not allowing gays to marry isn't the same as physically harming them. But those are still two points along the same spectrum, however loathe to admit it some might be.

Instead of twisting yourselves into knots to defend something that obviously is untrue, you can say something like "well, yes, certainly there is much very unpleasant sexism in the UK, but obviously we disagree that the UK is the worst country in the world in this regard, given the treatment of women in the Middle East, for example". And nobody will think that you are "betraying the cause".

And discussing how to make things better is what we generally do on DU.

But the Uk being the worst? Yeah....I ain't buying that.

I decided I want to see how it goes. Now if it was a discussion of developed secular nations, it would be interesting.
No matter what atrocities are performed on women in every nation, every day, legal or not legal- the whole comparison thing is useless and divisive. And often racist.

an assumption that we are better than those brown-skinned, superstitious folk.

Because the Brits are white and therefore superior? Britain ranks 18th on the Global Gender gap index, better than the US but worse than some other European countries. http://www.policymic.com/articles/87107/the-global-gender-gap-index-is-out-and-america-s-rank-is-even-worse-than-we-thought

I just don't have the energy at this late hour to muster up a response. Sorry. If you want to interpret that as you winning the argument, be my guest.

They don't know the difference between sexism and misogyny, and they haven't read the article, just the headline.

I find the comments in the article interesting, although I don't nessisarily agree with the conclusion.

Could it be that the local experts on feminism on DU use both terms interchangeably on threads? Discussing a swimsuit cover for example you hear 'misogyny' and 'sexism' both rattled around as the cause of the cover existing.

Benevolent sexism being discussed and the same thing crops up.

Basically, the core of sexism is considered a hatred of women (misogyny) and when you compare hatred of women I don't see the UK as being up there with places like Nigeria or Saudi Arabia.

And since, as noted, the two terms are married here and used as a 'team' then it is no wonder people don't see the difference between the two terms.

Poor teachers make for poor students.

but the unrealistic beauty standards it represents are certainly a problem for many women's self-esteem.

That isn't something I do and quite frankly I don't especially want to talk to you.


I'm not here to teach anyone that's already made up thier mind.


Which reminds me of a great argument about truth I just had with my 15 year old grandson. I ended up telling him to go read Plato and then we'd talk. I also said since I've already read Plato, I was going to go read comic books. Which is how I feel right now.

Have any of you ever actually been in the UK?

and I disagree with her statement. For those who think her experience may be limited and thus she is being naive, here's some info about her from [link:wisemuslimwomen.org|:

"Manjoo is a South African feminist lawyer; she has devoted her career to the area of violence against women, specifically in Algeria, Nigeria, Pakistan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, and the Middle East. In South Africa, she served as an Advocate of the High Court and the country’s Commission on Gender Equality."

Her statement sounds like hyperbole to me, something she said to start people talking.

My own experience is that sexism manifests itself in different ways in different cultures. I've lived in Brazil, the UK, and the US. I noticed no difference between the US and UK on these issues, but Brazil was different--worse in some ways and better in others. The woman in the article comments mainly on media culture and social interaction on the street.

There is a historical basis to differences in standing of women. Women were deprived basic rights, including the right to own property, under English common law that influenced the formation of US law. In contrast, Portuguese and Brazilian law required that daughters were provided for in their fathers wills, and their husbands were required to keep the principal of a dowry secure for the wife's use. That may seem like a random bit of historical trivia, but it certainly influence the inability of US married women to have property in their own name until ~70s, and that may reflect more pervasive inequality as well.

The place I've visited where men were the grabbiest, as in total strangers touching me, was Italy. Now I could have had a string of bad luck there. It's hard to say. I wasn't in the country that long.

sexism in different ways, and often what's accepted in one culture is not accepted in another - your Italian experience, for example.

One of the best articles I've read on women's legal and economic rights is by Jo Freeman, some very eye-opening stuff here: http://www.jofreeman.com/lawandpolicy/revlaw1.htm|

Edited to add that while I think that her statement is meant to bring attention to the issue of sexism in the UK (and by extension other European countries and the US), I would argue the statement is a poor choice and brings the wrong sort of attention, as exhibited by comments in the article and here at DU.

i feel like that is an important part of this.

just the portrayal of women in the media

Okay.

Also, it's only about countries she visited.

Flawed article there.

In the United States it's particularly pernicious
with regard to looks, youth, and rape.