Reply #7: results: sisters killed, acid thrown, rapes for honor... please

[dusmcj]

the documented history of abuse of women in service of social power structures which remove their power and then place them on a pedestal where they are expected to remain silent, pure, deferential and first virginal and then fertile says all that's needed about how Islam is too frequently lived, implemented. Conservatives are the defenders of a way of life where we make nice little models about how things "should" be, and then try to force reality to coincide. The problem is that consistently, the "should" is self-serving, and defies reality in the service of unrighteous personal advancement. It is wonderfully convenient to have well-defined roles and differentiation for the genders, where everyone knows their place, has their sphere of overt control (women inside the home in these models) and leaves each other's turf well-enough alone. It allows us to be lazy, refer to a set of rules, and say "you're not following the recipe". It is also restrictive, and de facto has wasted the talent of 50% of the species in too many instances for too many millenia. My own suspicion is that the human mind, being relatively simple, has taken the literally receptive physical role of the female in heterosexual coitus and transferred its structure to social roles, etc. - I cause you to receive my prong during sex, so why shouldn't you receive my other initiatives in other realms. Duh, but then we're stupid, provably.

The plain fact is that Islam as lived is too often used as an excuse for perpetuation of the worst of human society and development, the slaver culture where the notion of ownership pervades everything, in this instance including gender relations. All pieties about intent aside, I propose that this may be a structural effect of the very differentiation asserted by Islam that the linked article refers to - if you predefine that there are clear differences (which are what is wished for but largely fail to coincide with physical reality - the seeds of both genders are biologically present in each, and all flows from there whether we like it or not, i.e. difference is largely social artifice) then you allow yourself to have them whether they are justified or not. But regardless of whether discrimination is institutionalized by Islam's very structure, its results are clear - beatings, abuse, coercion, theft of free choice in relationships or sexual activity, waste of talent, repressed psyches, undue advancement for incompetent and immature men, involuntary servitude to abusive spousal family members of both genders, killings, honor rapes, etc.

There simply are universal, and inherent, civil rights, and respecting them is more important than respecting cultural diversity. Cultures can be defective even as we understand that difference is not necessarily deficiency, and Muslim culture, as lived, too frequently provably is. (And as usual, it's the universal problem of changing the people, not necessarily the structure.)

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