Essay: Why the Annihilation of Women Doesn’t Anger The World

[redqueen]

http://thelyonreview.com/2012/05/26/why-the-annihilation-of-women-2/


In another two decades, India will have annihilated 20 percent of its female population. To get an estimate of how many women that would be, add up the entire populations of Sweden, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium and Portugal. In less than a century, more than 50 million women have been targeted simply for being female and wiped out from India. Millions have been killed before birth. Millions killed as infants. Millions killed as little girls. Thousands killed as new brides. Thousands killed as they are forced through repeated, back-to-back, unsafe abortions to get rid of girls. Thousands more killed for so-called “honor” or branded as “witches” and mob lynched. And many burnt alive as widows on the pyres of their husbands. Killed at every stage of life–simply for being female! There is no other human group in history that has been persecuted and annihilated on this scale. So, how did the world close its eyes to this?

...

How could I have slept though the annihilation of my own kind? How did I, an Indian woman, live on in such oblivion to the systematic and targeted elimination of millions of Indian women? Why did it evoke no response in me – no anxiety, no outrage, no resistance, no action? Not even involved thought! There is something so indescribable and bizarre about asking that question. I wonder if others belonging to groups that were targets of genocides have done the same?

...

I had once asked an American friend, a feminist, what she thought the response of the women’s and human rights groups in the U.S. would have been, if 50 million women had been selectively annihilated there –killed in the millions before and after birth, as girls and as women. She said, “They would have brought down the Capitol with their bare hands!”

So I wondered why they would respond differently to the genocide of women in India. Perhaps it is as author Taslima Nasreen observes in her book, No Country For Women. She says that communities tend to view women as the property of the communities they are born and raised in. When the human rights of women in one community are abused, the other community politely looks away. They think: It is “their” community. Let them deal with “their” women the way they see fit. Just as they would with all matters of personal property.

Exactly:

When the human rights of women in one community are abused, the other community politely looks away. They think: It is “their” community. Let them deal with “their” women the way they see fit. Just as they would with all matters of personal property.

[ismnotwasm]

1. I don't even know to respond to this exactly

My first thought is that misogyny expresses itself in so many ways, it is, perhaps a continuum, from dumb blonde 'jokes' to the sexualization of little girls, to sex on demand provided to men by the sex industry, to rape, murder and the treating of the female gender as so much refuse;

A third and very important factor I now realize is the cultural internalization of the dehumanization of women. Yes, I did grow up like everyone else in India hearing about baby girls being trashed and married women being burnt to death – but there is a deep-rooted, cultural conditioning that taught us very early on to disregard these events, to remain unmoved, like we would if we heard news about the weather. If a cow was slaughtered in a Hindu neighborhood, there would be religious riots and reprisals across the country. So very early, those of us who grew up in India – learned to prioritize the value of different types of lives. The life of a cow was more sacred than the life of a girl or a woman.

I browsed through Germaine Greer's "The Whole Women" because it seemed to me she had something to say about this, but I couldn't find the specific quote, other than the old one "most women have no idea how much men hate them"

(Another book I have to reread, I realize Greer is Persona non grata many circles---but that is one badass book)

[redqueen]

2. It's overwhelming.

It makes me think of how only certain types of violence against women are deemed newsworthy. And how violence against certain types of women isn't deemed newsworthy unless it reaches monstrous proportions.