Egyptian Soapbox

طبعاً كلنا عارفين انه المرأة بتحكمها عواطفها

مثلاً : المرأة بتمشي تريل في الشوارع على أي راجل وبتتحرش بيهم وبتغتصبهم ساعات

المرأة لو رجعت البيت وملقتش أكل او لقته مش جاهز بتتجول لثور هائج

المرأة ممكن في قعدة هزار مع صحباتها بتحلف بالطلاق على صحبتها اللى هيا عامله ريجيم اصلاً عشان تكمل البسبوسة

المرأة مبتقدرش تستحمل بكاء ودوشه الأطفال لمدة نص ساعة والا عواطفها بتتعبها

المرأة بتحكمها عواطفها لو لقت جوزها بيخونها ممكن تقتلة في لحظتها

معروف انه في أغلب الأسر المصرية الأم هي اللى بتضرب وتشخط في الأولاد عشان معندهاش طوله بال وعواطفها بتحكمها

من خلال بحث قصير نكتشف انه الرجل ايضاً تحكمه عواطفة وكرشة وأعضاء اخرى

We decided long ago that the Male Chauvinist Pig was an unenlightened rube, but the Female Chauvinist Pig (FCP) has risen to a kind of exalted status. She is post-feminist. She is funny. She gets it. She doesn’t mind cartoonish stereotypes of female sexuality, and she doesn’t mind a cartoonishly macho response to them. The FCP asks: Why throw your boyfriend’s Playboy in a freedom trash when you could be partying at the Mansion? Why worry about disgusting or degrading when you could be giving - or getting - a lap dance yourself? Why try to beat them when you can join them?

We cannot shop our way to freedom. Even if we eventually manage to buy enough shoes, enough makeup and enough confidence-boosting surgical butchery to justify our place in the labour exchange of female beauty, we will find ourselves marginalised by the very process of physical transformation that promised to liberate us.

The double bind: if women said nice things, they were being female, therefore weak, and therefore bad writers. If they didn’t say nice things they weren’t proper women. Much better not to say anything at all.

For example, when a man strips off his clothes in a nightclub act, he doesn’t also take off his dignity, autonomy, and power as a human being, because there’s nothing in patriarchal culture that would interpret his behavior as giving up anything of real value to the women who watch him perform. If anything, he can get the male-centered satisfaction of having his body admired by women who lack the social power to treat his body like admired property. His relation to women in the audience doesn’t reflect a larger social reality in which men’s bodies are routinely regarded as objects to be sought after and controlled by women. But a woman who strips does so in a very different social context that changes entirely the meaning of her behavior and that of the men who watch her. In a patriarchal culture, her body has significance primarily in relation to men who value rights of access and use through various forms of contract, force, or purchase, from the bonds of love or marriage to prostitution to rape. Men who pay women to strip in front of them do far more than pay to watch someone they find beautiful or arousing take off her clothes. They also participate in a much wider social pattern that defines women’s existence in relation to pleasing men, to meeting male standards of attractiveness, and to being available for men’s appropriation and use. To some degree, the price of admission buys men the right to feel, if only in short-lived fantasy, a sense of indirect control over women’s bodies. Women who watch men strip, on the other hand, will find little in mainstream patriarchal culture that supports viewing or treating men in this way.

Because prejudice affects women and men so differently, calling antimale prejudice “sexism” distorts the reality of how systems of privilege work. Prejudice against women not only harms individual women, but perpetuates an oppressive system based on gender that harms women more deeply than any isolated instance of hurtful speech or discrimination. Antimale prejudice may hurt individual men, but it isn’t connected to a system that devalues maleness and oppresses men as a result. The difference between the two is so great that we need to distinguish the one from the other, and that’s what words like “sexism” and “racism” are for. Sexism distinguishes simple gender prejudice—which can affect men and women both—from the much deeper and broader consequence of expressing and perpetuating privilege and oppression. Without this distinction, we treat all harm as equivalent without taking into account important differences on both the personal and the social levels in what causes it and what it does to people.

Women who do not downplay or repress their sexualities—that is, who do not act like prey—are viewed stereotypically as “whores.” As stereotypes, both “virgin” and “whore” are disempowering, because they both frame female sexuality in terms of the predator/prey mindset. This is why reclaiming their sexuality has been such a double-edged sword for women. If a woman embraces her sexuality, it may be personally empowering for her, but she still has to deal with the fact that others will project the “whore” stereotype onto her and assume that she’s inviting male sexualization. In other words, a woman may be personally empowered, but she is not seen as being sexually powerful and autonomous in the culture at large. In order for that to happen, we as individuals must begin to challenge our own (as well as other people’s) perceptions and interpretations of gender. We must all move beyond viewing the world through the predator/prey mindset.

This, however, is the product of enlightened sexism, a force which has gained considerable momentum since the early and mid-1990s. Enlightened sexism insists that women have made plenty of progress because of feminism — indeed, full equality has allegedly been achieved — so now it’s OK, even amusing, to resurrect sexist stereotypes of girls and women. After all, these images can’t undermine women at this late date, right? More to the point, enlightened sexism sells the line that it is precisely through women’s calculated deployment of their faces, bodies, attire and sexuality that they gain and enjoy true power, power that is fun, and power that men not only will not resent, but also will embrace. So in the age of enlightened sexism there has been an explosion in makeover, match-making and modeling shows, a renewed emphasis on women’s breasts (and an explosive rise in the promotion of breast augmentation), an obsession with babies and motherhood in celebrity journalism (the rise of the creepy “bump patrol”), and a celebration of stay-at-home moms and “opting out” of the workforce.

Some, myself included, have referred to this state of affairs and this kind of media mix as “postfeminist.” Scholars like Angela McRobbie and Rosalind Gill have written very astutely about “postfeminism.” But I am now rejecting this term. It has gotten too gummed up by too many conflicting definitions. And besides, this term suggests that somehow feminism is at the root of this when it isn’t —it’s good, old-fashioned, grade-A sexism that reinforces good, old-fashioned, grade-A patriarchy. It’s just disguised much, much better, in seductive Manolo Blahniks and an Ipex bra.

Feminism thus must remain a dirty word, with feminists (particularly older ones) stereotyped as man-hating, shrill Ninjas from Hades. As this logic goes, feminism is so 1970s — grim, dowdy, aggrieved and passé — that it is now an impediment to female happiness and fulfillment. Thus, an amnesia about the women’s movement, and the rampant, now illegal, discrimination that produced it, is essential, so we’ll forget that politics matters. According to enlightened sexism, women now have a choice between feminism and anti-feminism and they just naturally and happily choose the latter because, well, anti-feminism has become cool, even hip. Indeed, enlightened sexism is meant to make patriarchy pleasurable for women.