'Imperial democracy mainstreams women's rights discourse into foreign policy and militarises women for imperial goals' - Zillah Eisenstein
'It is the policies of the ruling class - including policies that institutionalise sexism and racism in society; policies that fuel hate and aggression and take resources away from beneficial programmes - which promote and perpetuate this violence.' - Leilani Dowell
You're basically rallying against sexism and patriarchy, and of course you're ABSOLUTELY correct. But my position is that sexism always has historical, political, class and economic dimensions. It's not enough to say "men should westernize and stop treating kids and women badly" without examining other things.
And often the notion that we in the civilized world are "liberating" women and men from "sexist", "barbarians" is but a pretext and a myth. We engeder this backwardness, benefit from it, and support those who do. Every "liberated" woman in the west has a small army of oppressed women halfway around the world supporting her.
It will be righteous African and Indian and Middle Eastern men and women, those with morality and guts, who slowly and inevitably reform these countries. The West, as it exists as some vague ideological entity, doesn't care much, and will do everything it can to hamper this development.
A sick African man can kidnap and rape a thousand African girls, an Islamist can stone a million women, a Hindu Indian can rape a thousand villagers, and I would not hold them responsible. People are the products of larger forces, the personal is a product of the social, behaviour is a product of systems, and often we in the "West" condemn these people in a condescending way without realising our complicity and how we directly benefit from "their" backwardness.
And when you look at the actual history of these countries, you will see that they were all becoming secular, liberal and "civilized", until we started fanning flames of hate and giving platforms to barbaric people. Human beings aren't stupid. We evolve, we change and we learn compassion and love. In this respect you are absoltely correct: we (hopefully) will become more moral, more "liberal" (in the classical, enlightenment sense). Unfortunately there are jerks on both sides, East and West, who do everything to hamper this.
Other further ironies: it was World War 2, and so massive bloodshed, which "liberated" women by giving them toursers and putting them in factories to make guns and bombs. Likewise, it was the need for a larger workforce (and so the ability to push down wages for both men and women- ie more workers, more competition, smaller salaries), which "liberated" the western woman. Even things like condoms and the pill, which had a bigger effect on women's liberation than well-meaning activists, had dark flip-sides.
