Moving On.....

Boo Hoo, another member of the feminasty decrying the fact that feminism is in it's last death throes and what a shame.
No more male-hating drivel, no more anti-male propoganda and no more "Women are perfection itself" lies and blatant hypocrisy. Feminism was a joke right from the beginning and it took the men's movement to kill it dead and rightly so. Now all we need to do is change a few laws or a thousand just to give us some equal ground.

Feminism is dead......what a shame !

Pamela Bone: Western sisters failing the fight

* On International Women's Day, where are the protests in our cities against stonings, honour killings or any other persecutions to which women are still subjected
* March 08, 2007

LET it be recorded that in the last decade of the 20th century the brave and great movement of Western feminism ended, not with a bang but with a whimper.
I am trying to work out just when it began to fade away. It was certainly still there in strength in Vienna in 1993, when the World Conference on Human Rights was held. I was there, not as a participant but as a very partisan reporter, cheering on the women from across the world who had been working for years to have the UN recognise women's rights as human rights.

It may surprise some who think feminism is frightfully old-fashioned, that it took until the 1990s for this to happen. "The human rights of women and the girl-child are an inalienable, integral and indivisible part of human rights," the Vienna Declaration proclaimed. It was a time of great triumph. I watched as representatives of some of the most misogynistic governments of the world took their place at the podium to commit to this declaration. They were lying through their teeth, of course, but I didn't know it then.

And it was still strong at the World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, where a global sisterhood united to defeat attempts by a curious alliance of Muslim and Christian (mainly Catholic) conservatives to prevent women having control over their own bodies. I was there too.

Beijing was a hard battle. American family associations strongly objected to the term women's and girls' sexual rights. Leaders of Islamic governments objected to the use of the word equal in relation to women's rights, preferring instead equitable. It was equitable that women should inherit half as much as a man, since men were obliged to spend their wealth to support women, they argued.

But we won again.

The Beijing Platform for Action made many important statements about the equality of women, such as: "The human rights of women include their right to have control over and decide freely and responsibly on matters related to their sexuality, including sexual and reproductive health, free of coercion, discrimination and violence."

These were exhilarating times. But between Beijing in 1995 and New York in September 2001 the unity was lost. Somewhere along the line it happened that only one part of that curious Beijing alliance could be seen as the enemy. While a US administration that refused to fund programs against AIDS unless they taught about chastity instead of condoms could rightly be criticised, the mullahs whose abuses of women's rights were very many degrees worse could not.

Was it before or after September 11 that thinkers of the Left - for feminism was a movement of the Left - decided that racism was a far more serious crime than sexism? When did cultural sensitivity trump women's rights? Was it about the time that Australian feminist Germaine Greer defended the practice of female genital mutilation because, as she pointed out, Western women put studs through their nipples and labia?

Consider this: a struggling, screaming little girl is held down by several people (usually women) while another woman cuts through her clitoris and inner labia, with the intention of ensuring this girl will never experience sexual pleasure; and the world's most famous feminist, to whom much is owed, I don't deny, can compare this practice to adult women choosing, for whatever silly reason, to decorate their sexual parts with metal. The UN estimates that three million girls are mutilated every year. It has lately been warning against the medicalisation of the practice: as societies develop, it is being carried out by health professionals, which doesn't make it less of an abuse.

I don't hold much hope on this International Women's Day of seeing big protests in Australian cities against female genital mutilation; or against honour killings, stonings, child marriages, forced seclusion or any of the other persecutions to which women are still subjected. The fire of Western feminism has quietly died away, first as a victim of its success, lately as a victim of cultural relativism, of anti-Americanism and reluctance to be seen to be condemning the enemies of the enemy.

Yet as Western women take their rights for granted, other women are just beginning to demand theirs. There will be marches in Europe this International Women's Day, organised by Muslim (or ex-Muslim) women reformers. They will march through Germany and France to present a grievance to the European Parliament in Brussels, saying that the veil is "a manifestation of political Islam and a symbol of the oppression of women".

In Pakistan, the Prevention of Anti-Women Practices Bill, which would ban forced marriages and give women rights over property, is before the national assembly. In Syria, the murder of a 16-year-old girl by her brother, at her family's request, has prompted a national debate about the leniency shown to perpetrators of honour killings.

In Saudi Arabia, Bill Gates, addressing a recent business seminar, told the segregated audience - women, their faces and bodies shrouded in black, behind a large partition - that the country would not achieve its ambition to become an economic power while it failed to use the talents of half the population. "One side of the audience loved it," he quipped later.

Change is happening. It would be nice to think the women pushing for change had support. Maybe they do and I just don't hear about it. There are organisations, such as the International Women's Development Agency, that work tirelessly for women in poor countries. They'll be getting a donation from me this International Women's Day.

Maybe my report on the death of Western feminism is greatly exaggerated. I hope so. "Don't be so polite, girls!" the old feminists used to sing. "Show a little fight, girls, show a little fight!" And amid the confusion, hold on to what was won in Vienna. Human rights are universal. And women's rights are human rights. Pamela Bone: Western sisters failing the fight