The “us and them” mentality allows
us to continue to lie to ourselves in comfort.
Consider the Muslim woman’s burka so reviled by westerners, used to
demonstrate how fanatical Islam oppresses its women. Stand back for just a moment to
see how hypocritical this is. Our “rape
culture” is synonymous with the burka.
Consider: the burka’s purpose is to
protect women from lustful men’s minds, putting the responsibility completely
on women to protect themselves from rape or other violence. This suggests that a woman’s purity is
sacrosanct, while a man’s is non-existent and it is unreasonable to expect men
to control themselves.
Rape culture is no different. We blame women for their own rape and murder
if the circumstances were such that she was wearing revealing clothing, and
perhaps drunk and/or stoned. Her own
behavior was so bad that a man couldn’t possibly be expected to control
himself. What we’re really saying is
that the only way for women to protect themselves from violence is to wear a burka. Oh, hold on a second, we look down on Muslim
women for wearing the burka, and on the men who require that they wear them.
We can’t have it both ways. Either we should face up to our hypocrisy and
expect Western women to start wearing the burka or men have to accept
responsibility for their own sexual and violent urges. I vote for the latter, and somehow I don’t
think most non-Muslim women are going to start wearing the burka. This leaves us in a bit of a quandary.
In a perfect world, my daughters
should be able to show up at a party, naked, drunk and stoned, and be safe from
violence from the men at the party, who are also, by the way, naked, drunk and
stoned. We do not, however, live in a
perfect world. In fact, we live in a
world that values personal rights and freedoms above the use of common sense (which,
by the way, is hardly common as one person’s common sense is another person’s
nonsense). Therefore, it makes us angry
when our daughters show up at parties, almost naked, drunk and stoned, and get
raped or killed.
Am I blaming the victim? Not for a moment. I’m blaming a society that believes that,
even though high school health education teaches our children that the first
thing to go when we start to consume alcohol is our judgment, we still think
our daughters should be safe from violence when they show up at parties almost
naked, drunk and stoned, and therefore allow them to participate in such social
events. On the one hand, society is
right. They SHOULD BE safe, because anything
else is an affront to human dignity. The
reality is, and we have chosen this in preferring our personal rights and
freedoms over the safety of our children, our daughters are not safe from rape
or other violence, regardless of whether they show up at parties naked or
wearing a burka. Furthermore, our sons
are not responsible when using substances that their own parents use, and are
being taught by their parents that it is the girl’s fault if she gets raped,
because she didn’t cover herself up enough, or was drunk, or stoned.
It doesn’t matter which culture you
look at, Eastern Muslim or Western, er, whatever we are, the foundations for
what we live and die with every day have been firmly laid by none other than
ourselves. In the west, we think we are
so far advanced over the backward Muslims, we are so proud of our personal
liberties and freedoms, but we still blame the victim. One could even say that, in the Muslim world,
at least they’re honest about it – they require the women to protect themselves. We Westerners like to sit on our smug belief
that we treat women with equality because they can dress any way they want and
then continue to blame women for the crimes committed against them. True, crimes against women in the East are
appalling – but any crime is appalling, and the inequality is simply manifested
in different ways between East and West. The moment you start saying, “At least we
don’t… (insert crime here)” you are dismissing our culpability in different but
equally vile crimes that happen every minute of every day in the West.
I am not suggesting that we
eliminate the concept of our personal rights and freedoms. There are few concepts more conducive to a
society’s well-being. I AM suggesting
that we be honest about those things that may well be personal rights but in
reality contribute to the destruction of lives, families and society as a
whole, like the consumption of alcohol, and accept that teaching our children to
use it in moderation doesn’t work. If
even a tiny percentage of the population is going to be unable to control their
response to alcohol and therefore contribute to what we see happening every
day, its use needs to be eliminated. Prohibition clearly showed that making alcohol illegal does not work, so it has to be done in our daily personal choices. We have to willingly accept that while it may
be our right to drink alcohol, it is also our right to choose to refuse to for
the good of those who can’t control its use.
This goes for anything that falls under the category of “personal right
or freedom”. If it contributes to a
societal problem, we need to let it go. We
need to choose to teach our children to take responsibility for their own
actions, that a victim is never to blame, and then set the example.
We need to stop pointing fingers. We need to stop seeing each other as “other”
in ways that allow us to deny the need to make changes in ourselves. We need to take that hard look at ourselves
and ask, “How did I contribute to this problem?” Pointing fingers simply perpetuates
inequalities of any kind, racial, religious, ethnic or sexual, and continues to
threaten the safety and lives of our children.
As long as we are willing to blame someone else, whether it be the
victim or the Muslim, our children will continue to be martyrs to our belief in
the sovereignty of our personal rights and freedoms.
