In view of the recent 100th anniversary of the first International Women's Day, I thought it appropriate to make some remarks on how the First World yes actually imposes gender oppression on the women of the Third World by highlighting an example.
Indian students riot against "Eve teasing" cops -- March 4, 2011
"Eve teasing" is a sexist euphemism for a sustained pattern of public sexual harassment or public sexual assault of women by men. It is very common in today's South Asia; especially in India, but also in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal. "Eve" refers to the biblical temptress (suggesting that women bear responsibility for their own victimization) and "teasing" (suggesting that the offense is trivial and perhaps a legitimate courtship ritual) refers to such acts as publicly stalking, brushing, and groping women, among other things. (Some of the 'other things' have come to include acid throwing and bride burning.) It was as a results of these sorts of activities that "From January to November 2010, 26 women and one father of a bullied girl committed suicide in Bangladesh, and 10 men and two women were murdered after protesting against sexual harassment, according to a local rights group." But this is not simply the result of the continuation of traditional South Asian cultures. No, it is largely a new development, emerging as a significant factor in the region only in the last half-century or so.
Though the problem received public and media attention in 1960s, it was in the following decades, when more and more women started going out to colleges and work independently, which means they are often no longer accompanied by a male escort as had been a norm in traditional society, that the problem grew from a relatively rare issue to one of epidemic proportions. Many activists correctly blame the rising incidents of sexual harassment against women on the influence of Western culture. While imperialism has always held down the global countryside by combining domination of its economies overall by foreigners with the maintaining of traditional feudal arrangements throughout the bulk of the countries in question. After the switch from traditional-style colonial domination to neo-colonial domination through imposed neo-liberalism though, the population of the global countryside began a far more rapid migration to urban areas, with a huge proportion winding up as what the imperialist system finds to be unusable "excess humanity", consigned to miserable slums. Part of the result of this has been a marked increase in the total proportion of Third World economies under the control of foreign capitalists. As the First World consolidates its economic grip on the Third World in this way, one inevitable result is the increasing intrusion of the cultures of these privileged foreigners into, and their coming to replace, the traditional, feudal cultures of the global countryside (now also increasingly the global slum, as just explained): eradication of cultural independence.
South Asia is going through this transition, much like the Third World more generally. It largely remains a rural, feudal country, but also has seen significant urbanization and the rapid eradication of its cultural independence in the last several decades. Thus, regarding the woman question, one finds a mixture of rotten, patriarchal feudal customs mixed in with the drastically rising influence of Western, pornographic media. The result is that, in India for example, 70% of married women aged 15 to 49 are victims of beatings or coerced sex and, in 1990, half the total crimes reported against women were related to sexual assault and harassment at the workplace. And no, contrary to the argument of the local conservatives, "covering up" does not make a notable difference in terms of a woman's likelihood of facing this harassment or assault.
Thus we see but one example of how, in pursuing its interests, the imperialist world winds up in effect heaping new oppressions like this on the exploited world, even while maintaining the old oppressions to a large degree as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment