I’ve been reading a whole bunch of books examining women’s rights versus the surge of religious fundamentalism (that exists in no small part to push back against women’s rights, though all fundies feel like they’re defending tradition and culture), but haven’t had a chance to review them. So here’s one big post reviewing all three new books out on the topic.
This weekend, I finished Michelle Goldberg’s The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World while doing all the hurry up and wait stuff you have to do while flying. Goldberg takes on the push against women’s rights as a worldwide phenomenon that takes different shapes in different cultures, but has this thread of patriarchy running through it. Unfortunately, that sort of description is probably the thing that will turn readers off due to a combination of some being uninterested in the global picture and some being allergic to the struggle between cultural relativism and human rights. But read it anyway—-Goldberg does a remarkable job of bringing the issues to life through old-fashioned journalistic story-telling, and she does a better job of navigating this relativism vs. rights debate than I’ve ever seen. She—-like myself—-tends to think that sacrificing people’s lives and health in the name of “culture”, as if culture weren’t a dynamic thing subject to change, is the product of ideological blinkers. But she believes people who do find misogynist religious traditions meaningful, and doesn’t do what I’d do, which is point out how selfish they are to impose on others what they merely choose.
Her book has given me a lot to think about, because she’s right that feminists are somewhat intimidated by absolutist cultural relativists, who traditionally hail from the left, but actually tend to hail more from the right now, even though right wingers who embrace cultural relativism do so only out of convenience and will drop it or embrace it depending strictly on what it gets them. The main sin of this extremism that Goldberg finds is that it condescendingly assumes that non-Western cultures are static and that only the most conservative members of those cultures get to define their cultures and traditions. To a degree, this is also done within the U.S., which I’ve experienced plenty with the description of liberal hotbed Austin, TX as somehow not really Texas, which is a way of ceding our entire culture to misogyny, racism, and homophobia, while ignoring that other liberal cultural traditions are also valid. Fears of Western imperialism are completely valid, but it’s hard to ignore that those fears are being exploited by people who are loyalists not to a nation or a people so much as to the patriarchy, and Goldberg proves this again and again by showing how different patriarchal cultures that usually exist in tension with each other will quickly set aside differences to oppress women. Since they have this in common, it only seems fair that feminists should support each other as well.
The recent battle over the excommunication of people who decided to save a 9-year-old Brazilian girl’s life even though she had lost all value as a human in the eyes of the Catholic Church the second she was raped illustrates the issues Goldberg grapples with beautifully. Right wingers and Catholic apologists love to paint abortion rights as an assault on their religion and culture, but what’s actually going on is that the church is attacking the Brazilian people under the guise of tradition. And the government and the people are pushing back against their own supposed cultural imperatives imposed by the church. Goldberg tells stories like this, and stories from people who sincerely feel that women should be sacrificed for tradition, and it’s all very interesting and mostly sympathetic. She also shatters certain myths about certain cultural practices in interesting ways. Do you think that Indian sex selection is something driven by poverty more than anything? Think again—-there’s a correlation between how wealthy people are and how willing they are to use it. (But this doesn’t mean that people who engage in it don’t have understandable reasons.) Does female genital mutilation strike you as a gaping cultural difference between those who practice and those who don’t, a difference so large it’s impossible to understand? Think again—-one of the most interesting things about that chapter is how people’s fears about adolescent female sexuality sound so much like ours. Goldberg also takes time to explain how best to navigate the territory of being both anti-imperialist and pro-human rights—-don’t try to impose cultural change by fiat, but do support like-minded people across cultures, and don’t condescendingly assume those people aren’t real members of their own society.