Women's Rights & Issues
Related: About this forumthe common roots of misogynist culture in pakistan and the us
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Madiha Tahir is an independent journalist based in Pakistan and a filmmaker whose documentary Wounds of Waziristan focuses on the impact of U.S. drone strikes on ordinary Pakistanis. She has just co-edited a new volume of essays called Dispatches From Pakistan, along with Qalandar Bux Memon and Vijay Prashad. In an interview on Uprising, I asked Tahir whether she gets the culture question often. She agreed that this is the predominant frame through which this story has been discussed, and its unfortunate because it doesnt have anything to do with culture. It has to do with sexism, patriarchy, misogynyand those issues are not specific to Pakistan or to Muslims.
Tahirs statements are confirmed by the ugly fact that, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1 in 6 women reported experiencing rape or attempted rape at some time in their lives. Additionally, a quarter of all American women have experienced domestic violence, and a third of all women killed in this nation are victims of homicide by their current or former partner or spouse.
A new study concluding that Americans tend to take hurricanes with female names less seriously than those with male names proves just how implicitly sexism is embedded in the culture of this nation. And a look at these photos of a Tennessee survivor of domestic violence should also perhaps elicit the question: What is it about the culture of the U.S. that generates such misogyny?
Even the recent massacre by a 22-year-old man in Isla Vista, Calif., who announced his planned slaughter of women as collective punishment for a life of sexual rejection, proves that we all live somewhere within the spectrum of misogynist culture that stretches from California to Calcutta and beyond. Tahir cited the Isla Vista case as further proof that if there is a cultural explanation for horrific killings of women, it is a global one.
But what spurs such deep-seated misogyny? Pakistan lies just south of Afghanistan, where the U.S. has fought a 12-year-long war, and lies in the vicinity of the disputed territory of Kashmir, which is considered the largest militarized zone in the world. Pakistans own Northwest Frontier Province has been the target of U.S. drone strikes for years. I asked Tahir whether the constant backdrop of militarism was linked to violence against women. She didnt hesitate, saying, Yes, absolutely, militarism is deeply implicated in gender violence, and patriarchy more generally. In Pakistan, for all our democratic milestones about half the country is effectively under occupation, such as the army-controlled Balochistan and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas where the U.S. drops bombs from unmanned aerial vehicles. These parts of Pakistan witness, according to Tahir, daily violence being meted out by state and non-state actors, and that feeds into an atmosphere in which violence is seen as the tool for conflict resolution.
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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/06/06-7