Women and Punishment

I was reading Jill's post on Feministe about the surrogacy article in the New York Times. About three quarters of the way down, Jill discusses changes in American society's stigmatization of single motherhood. She rightly notes that "Women giving up their babies for adoption also have more rights than they did decades ago. Open adoptions are much more common. And while there is still an overwhelming silence on the psychological impact of adoption on birth mothers, the U.S. is a slightly more hospitable place to them than it once was."

Jill's excellent post, especially this part of it, makes me want to examine American culture's desire/tendency to punish women. Too frequently, Americans regard our culture as progressive, peaceful and egalitarian, while imagining the Middle East as belligerent, sexist, and regressive. I hope that by examining problematic American behavior and attitudes we can stop exoticizing the Middle East, influenced by Islam, and see universal problems as issues that are common, rather than indicators of difference. 

Hypothesis: both American culture and Middle Eastern culture punish women for "inappropriate" displays of sexual agency.  America has a culture based on capitalism, in which women are commodified. The Middle East, instead, has a family-based culture, in which women are objectified as property. Americans justify punishing women for their sexual agency for several reasons, all relating to the idea that a woman's sexual agency makes her less valuable as a commodity. Most men seem not to want to have sex with a woman many other men have had sex with, so a woman's value goes down if she has many sexual partners. This is why "slut" is a stinging insult with no male-oriented counterpart: men are not commodities, and so do not need to limit their exercise of sexual agency in order to remain desirable (overall). "Slut" can apply to a woman, even if she has no sexual experience whatsoever, based on the way she dresses or acts, as long as she seems to perpetuate the illusion of being widely sexually available. This use of the label "slut" shows that it is not reality that counts, but the perceived value of the woman as a commodity, not unlike a stock price. 

The first thing I thought about when reading the quoted portion of Jill's post was the shaming and ignoring of birth mothers. Do women who become pregnant at inopportune times, especially without being married, experience public shame?  Certainly teenagers who become pregnant out of wedlock are commonly considered shameful to their families (see: Bristol Palin, Jamie Lynn Spears). And, once pregnant, there's no win, since being pregnant is shameful and having an abortion means that a girl is not taking responsibility for her actions, apparently. So, if a girl is to take responsibility for her actions, she's supposed to carry the baby to term. I assume it is equally responsible behavior for a girl to give her baby up for adoption as it is for her to raise it.  

Why, in a culture where so many people, male or female, have sex before they are married, is accidental pregnancy shameful? Women have sex. Sex makes babies. Birth control is fallible. The only reason I can think of is the devaluation of the woman as a commodity because of the visible results of her sexual agency. And, look how we punish women for the sin of believing themselves the arbiters of their own sexual behavior: we encourage them to bring their pregnancies to term, rather than "selfishly" terminating, and then either encourage them to give up the child and forget they ever had a baby so it can be raised by people who played by the rules (so far as we know), or else allow them to languish in poverty and blame them when their children become criminals. Yet the narrative remains that pregnant women deserve to be pregnant, since it is the natural consequence of having sex, which they shouldn't be having outside of marriage, even though most adults do.

In the Middle East, and in many Muslim-dominated countries, such as Indonesia, women's roles are defined within a family paradigm. A woman's sexuality is regulated not by her market value, but by her position as an agent of honor or shame to her family. Her sexuality is therefore only properly directed toward bearing children in wedlock, or to her husband more generally. How is shaming a woman who makes herself "public", either by actually engaging in adultery or premarital sex, or simply be going out in public alone without shame (thereby allowing people tho believe she has sexual agency and is willing to exercise it outside her family) different in this society than in America? Is it worse for a woman to be defined as property of her family than as a commodity of society? Are the equally threatening, or are most Americans justified in believing themselves to be more progressive in their view of women than Middle Easterners? 

"She's not dressed like an American"

A friend of mine sent me this in response to my earlier post. It's a video of a series that John Quinones of ABC news did called "What Would You Do". In it, an actress in a headscarf is refused service at a bakery. The clerk, also an actor, tells her to leave because she is "not an American", and talks about how he doesn't know whether she is a terrorist or not. Some people agree with the clerk, and some tell the clerk he's out of line. Most customers say nothing. 

Why is hijab, the head scarf, so evocative? 

One of the customers who spoke out against the clerk's discriminatory behavior was a young Muslim woman who did not wear the scarf. When she demanded to know if the clerk was refusing to serve the actress based on her manner of dress, he said yes, that the actress was not dressed like an American, and did not share his culture. The customer defended the actress: "I am an American. She is my culture!" and the clerk replied, "You are dressed like an American." 

Do complaints about the way Muslim women dress that are similar to the clerk's exist simply because a headscarf is different than what American women usually wear? Is that complaint rooted in anger that a person would choose to separate him/herself from American culture by dressing in an obviously exceptional way? Is it rooted in fear that a woman who would dress that way is different and therefore dangerous, or associated with Islam and therefore dangerous? 

It is especially ironic that another young woman quoted in this video, who wears the scarf, feels that it makes her a target for harassment or violence. In many countries, the conventional wisdom is that a scarf is the mark of a modest woman, who will be defended when  harassed on the street. In 2005, "immodest" women were attacked with acid on the streets in Iraq. However, in the US, this woman's scarf, exercise of her first amendment right to free expression, makes her fearful of going out in public alone. This is frustrating to me: don't Americans think of themselves as more evolved than Middle Easterners partially because American women do not wear veils and can move in public freely?  Isn't part of the clerk's anger based on his unwillingness to be complicit in what he feels is an illegitimate and inferior culture? And isn't that culture inferior partially because women are marginalized in the popular Western conception of Islam? Indeed, the Bush Administration justified the invasion of Iraq partially on women's rights issues. So, marginalizing women because they wear the scarf in America is a truly backward way to defend the popular American position and the American, rights-based way of life. 

This paradox that a veiled woman is more subject to harassment than a woman dressed "as an American" reveals an unexamined, reactionary response to the veil, as well as a deep misunderstanding of American culture at its ugliest. American society is one in which women can expect a certain level of harassment. Harassment is the price a woman must pay for participating in the public sphere. The burden of that public harassment cannot be avoided, no matter what a woman does. If she dresses in a revealing way, she is harassed. If she is thin and pretty, she is harassed. If she is disabled or old and walks slowly, she is harassed. If she is fat, she is harassed. If she is very modest and covers her hair and her body's shape, she is harassed. This phenomenon is the consistent, throbbing cultural reminder to each woman that her participation is exceptional, conditioned upon her not making trouble, and revokable by men when she ceases to please. It reminds a woman that she is vulnerable. She can be silenced or raped when she "deserves it". In America we do not phrase this pernicious form of sexism as a pervasive cultural problem. Instead, we marvel at stories from Egypt and lament their problem with street harassment. Harassing a veiled woman is an embodiment of all these problems at once. Harassment denies an American woman her first amendment right to express herself in her dress and the practice of her religion; it forces her to either stay inside or bring a protector with her when she tries to participate publicly; it assesses her worth aesthetically, and because her scarf is visually offensive (or at least not titillating), she is worth nothing;  it reduces her to her visual association with the "other" and the "enemy". Harassing a veiled woman highlights all that Americans have in common with cultures that employ silence, pain, and death to keep their women in line. Which sucks, since that is presumably one of the reasons Americans don't like the veil in the first place. 

Beginning

I am starting this blog both to discuss and to enable my own education about the diversity within the "Muslim world". I want to begin by contesting that term: there are approximately 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, in countries including Malaysia, France, Morocco, Iraq, Afghanistan, Indonesia and Bangladesh. Just that small list should let you know that speaking or writing as if all Muslims think or act in the same way cannot be true. 

I begin this blog for two reasons: I'm writing a paper about women's movements in Iraq, and the way that amending the Iraqi constitution can help stabilize Iraq as a state. FYI, there have been women's movements in Iraq since the 1920's. More on that later. Anyway, the reason I started this blog today was because of my reaction to the interview on The Daily Show last night with Matthew Alexander. The video is worth a watch. Also, Mr. Alexander was on Hannity and Colmes last week to discuss his book and his time as an interrogator of terrorists in Iraq. 

Mr. Alexander's interrogation philosophy seems to be to develop rapport with the subject of interrogation and to refrain from using physical torture whenever possible. He says that it was more effective when he was interrogating associates of al-Zarqawi than physical torture would have been. He comments on the surprise that the subjects evinced when they were not physically abused, but rather shown respect for their culture. Alexander even apologized to one particular imam for American missteps in the early years of the invasion. He also mentions that physical torture enables al Quaeda to recruit new members who hate America.

Listening to this interview, I could not believe that this country continues to physically torture people when there is an effective alternative. Why, when we are the "liberators" of Iraq, are we not making the effort to communicate with Iraqis? Surely those who are desperate enough, like the imam in the example above, to bless suicide bombers show a hopelessness that perhaps we can assuage. Torturing these people does not help their representatives on a national level cooperate with us. Torture forces our interrogators to sublimate their own humanity and ignore the humanity of their subjects.  Alexander's methods indicate that he resisted dehumanizing the subjects he interrogated. 

I am hoping there is a larger lesson in Mr. Alexander's method: are Americans in Iraq now fighting Iraqis without listening to them, and can we be more successful with negotiation across the cultural divide with negotiation? And, more importantly, is developing rapport with subjects of interrogation a long term strategy for diminishing the number of people who are willing to join al Quaeda?