Am I the only one a little miffed that this week’s New York Times Magazine’s Saving the World’s Women doesn’t feature one story on the state of women’s oppression — in the US? Perhaps the state of women on our shores is most highlighted in “The Power of the Purse ,” an article that boasts that 43 percent of people in the wealthiest tier are women. While all this can be counted towards progress, the absence of information on sexism in the US coupled with this kind of coverage on women’s wealth gives off the impression that Western women aren’t particularly in crisis. This is ironic in a story that implies that two-thirds of feminist philanthropic donations — roughly 375 million — are going towards domestic causes.
Don’t get me wrong: I revel in any opportunity to see the word “feminist” or the phrase “patriarchal culture” in mainstream news. It’s also very informative to learn that having a better education and more money can sometimes raise the probability you’ll discriminate against your girl-child and that iodine deficiency is a feminist issue. However, I can’t help but approach with caution the framing of women’s rights oppression when different cultures in developing countries are the sole focus.
There is a tendency in our culture to only be able to identify a problem when we are faced with extremes. To be clear: any woman, anywhere that has experienced sex trafficking, acid attacks, bride burning or mass rape deserves an aggressive international response on multiple fronts. However, I am worried that too many are willing to take the world to task on gender as long as they don’t ever use feminist perception to gaze inward. And in this process of comparing underfinanced sports teams in the US to sexual servitude in Asia, the femicide, pervasive violence, and covert sexism that routinely occurs on our shores becomes invisibilized.
I think that the New York Times could take another crack at documenting women’s oppression from a domestic perspective. This time they should make a print request to a writer like Uma Narayan at Vassar College. While her most recent work on media portrayals of women’s oppression is a little dated, Chapter 3 in her text Dislocating Cultures goes to the core of the implications of closeting US women’s oppression. Narayan could enlighten their readership on an issue such as domestic violence fatalities in the US. Lastly, she could also offer a more complicated analysis on the potentially problematic associations that are being made in this issue with terrorism and gender discrimination, which have cultural and faith stereotypes as the subtext.
0 TrackBacks
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: The State of Women's Oppression -- in the US.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.feministing.com/cgi-bin/movabletype/mt-tb.fcgi/15649
I agree, and I was more than miffed when the article used the word _gendercide_ in quotes, as it it were the writers' own invention. How about gynocide? It's not like people kill men, just for their being men.
I used to access many political website on a regular basis. Not just mainstream news, but anti-corp, anti-war, post 911, and a lot of leftist kind of sites. It was always paranoia inducing kind of stuff written there which caused me to do quite a bit of acitivism from water as a human right to WMD's (small arms are WMD's). And then I stopped, and I went back to those sites quite a while later, and what I noticed was than nothing had changed. There was still reports of the world being on the verge of some new clandestine war, or some new rights stripping law was just about to take effect. I realized that these sites (global research example) and authors (Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, example) are just another kind of business. Your article on oppression of women in the US is exactly the same kind of misleading untruth. You're in business too. You owe your readers (starting with Liz) and apology.
Sorry, but what? Maybe I'm just sleepy today, but I fail to see how that comment is relevant or even makes sense.
Actually I was more writing it for myself. The article in question reminded me of the same kind of articles in those political blogs. Too even consider that women are oppressed in the US compared to what women are going through in 3rd world countries is just horrible. It's the same kind of chicken little hysteria that you may see in one of those newspapers in the checkout line in the grocery store, just there to keep people sucked in. Used toilet paper has more journalistic merit.
This post is basically a rant about people who use third world countries as an excuse to derail. My guess is that you just saw the title and typed that reply without even reading it.
Warren: Do stop by the Feminism 101 blogs, such as Finally, A Feminism 101 Blog. "Why are you concentrating so hard on X when Y is so much more important?" is a good one.