Clearly, women still have a long way to go in their quest for equal rights

In Sudan, a woman named Miriam Ibrahim has been sentenced to death for marrying a Christian man.

When her brother was interviewed by the media, he said that he was happy with the sentence because his sister had gone against Islam by marrying an apostate.

In Pakistan, 18-year-old Saba Maqsood was shot and thrown in a canal by members of her own family because she had married a man of her own choice.

In India, two cousins aged 12 and 14 were raped and hanged on a tree by their rapists. The head of a regional party stated that he opposed the death penalty for the rapists because “boys commit mistakes” and should not be hanged for rape.

The above cases illustrate how far women still need to go to attain equal rights. The rising cases of violence against women show that women’s bodies are still viewed by many societies as belonging to men.

Women still do not own their own bodies, despite the many gains that women are supposed to have achieved since the advent of the feminist movement in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, I would say that the backlash against women has intensified in the past two decades.

We see it everywhere — on music videos, in advertising, even in the boardroom. In many music videos women’s bodies are displayed in the most provocative and crude manner. Many rappers use the word “bitch” to describe women.

Young girls and boys watching these videos begin seeing women as sex objects who exist for the sole pleasure of men. And since women’s bodies are considered to belong to men, the line between rape and sex gets blurred.

PSEUDO AUTONOMY

This is the type of confusion that led an Indian minister to state that rape is “sometimes right, sometimes wrong”, a comment that was widely condemned by Indian women.

On Kenyan television, female news anchors have taken to showing their legs and cleavage in order to boost their station’s ratings. Many female viewers, like myself, have switched to watching international television stations, where the female anchors know that their job is to deliver the news, not to titillate the viewer.

In her book, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women, which was published in the early 1990s, journalist Susan Faludi stated: “What has made women unhappy in the last decade is not their equality — which they don’t yet have — but the rising pressure to halt, and even reverse, women’s quest for equality.”

Faludi argues that even women who are considered successful and economically independent are controlled by the dictates of male-dominated societies, which not only decide how women should behave, but what they should look like and wear.

Capitalistic, patriarchal societies have reduced women to mere consumers and sex objects. Advertising tells women what they should consume and wear, and women slavishly follow the trends. 

In the Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch notes: “The advertising industry thus encourages the pseudo-emancipation of women, flattering them with its insinuating reminder, ‘You’ve come a long way, baby’, and disguising the freedom to consume as genuine autonomy.”

Women are thus encouraged to buy, buy, and buy some more by corporations run by men. Women, on their part, confuse the ability to consume with liberation. This is the reason women will be the first ones to object to a law banning miniskirts.

While I abhor the idea that the state or a law should determine what women should or should not wear (especially when there is no such law for men), I find the debate to be superficial and obscurantist, especially in a world where women’s lives are under real threat and where the consumption of certain products can be life-threatening (high-heeled stiletto shoes, for instance, are not only extremely uncomfortable contraptions, they also restrict women’s movements and are known to damage feet and ankles).

Women and girls are still being circumcised, raped, tortured, and murdered because male-dominated societies cannot bear the thought of them enjoying their freedom. Men are deciding whom women should marry or live with. Women have clearly not come a long way, baby.