Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Naomi Wolf, Writer Arrested
The latest author to put her hands behind her back at an Occupy Wall Street event, is feminist author Naomi Wolf. Urged on by the tradition of Martin Luther King jr., on the importance to engage in civil disobedience against unjust laws, Wolf joins others in an act of civil disobedience. Today, such civil disobedience rallies against the unethical practices of Wall Street and the government, economic and cultural officials who promote, participate or ignore the practices.
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There is nothing feminist about Wolf except that she assumes that persona for her left boyfriends. So please do not blot feminism by labeling her a feminist. She is not concerned with global women's liberation only with male left armchair warriors. She does not represent women fighting for freedom. In fact she is the enemy of women's freedom along with her boyfriends. She is anti Semitic and supports the muslim brotherhood. At the OWS demonstration she represents her Stalinist friends not women.
The shameless phenomenon of Western leftist feminists abandoning millions of persecuted Muslim women under Islamic gender apartheid continues.
Naomi Wolf has now come forward to say that she finds the Islamic chador sexy and supports its institutionalization throughout the Islamic world.
Never mind that Muslim women in most cases do not have a choice of whether or not to cover themselves, and face bodily harm and death if they do not veil. How much, one wonders, does Wolf care about Aqsa Parvez, a 16-year-old Muslim girl who was murdered by her father for refusing to wear the veil? Does Wolf think that honor murder is sexy too? Does it warm Wolf’s heart that Aqsa’s grave remains unmarked because her family is doing its best to erase all remnants of her 16-year existence on earth?
Aqsa Parvez
Phyllis Chesler, a hero in the fight on behalf of persecuted Muslim women, has made mince meat out of Wolf’s arguments in her recent superb piece in Pajamas Media.
Phyllis Chesler
The David Horowitz Freedom Center has powerfully exposed leftist feminists’ lack of attention to women’s rights in the Muslim world
It is, of course, very clear why leftist feminists would ally themselves with the persecutors and mutilators of Muslim women. It makes total sense that they would reach out in solidarity to misogynist monsters who enforce the veiling of women.
Leftist feminists have long sought to prevent men from appreciating women’s physical beauty. Labeling this appreciation the “objectification” and “exploitation” of the female body, these feminists have tried to prevent women from using their beauty and sexuality as they themselves see fit. Just as fellow travelers such as Orville Schell, Claudie Broyelle, and Shirley MacLaine were enchanted with the enforced Maoist dress that attempted to desexualize Chinese citizens, so the new generation of leftist believers and feminists genuflects before the Islamist burqa. The burqa, like the Maoist uniform, further attracts them by virtue of the fact that women in Islamist societies have no say in whether or not they will wear it. Longing to submerge themselves in a totality where their own choices will be negated, these leftist believers, like Wolf, are always drawn to a totalitarian ethos that forbids freedom of conscience.
Wolf is now in great company with Dr. Unni Wikan, a professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo. Wikan’s solution for the high incidence of Muslims raping Norwegian women (who are committing the crime of being unveiled) stresses neither punishment of the perpetrators nor repudiation of the Islamic theology that legitimizes such abuse of women. Rather, Wikan instructs Norwegian women to veil themselves. “Norwegian women must understand that we live in a Multicultural society,” she states ” and adapt themselves to it.”
Question to Wolf, Wikan and the rest of their leftist feminist flock: Have you no sense of shame, at long last?
http://cleveland.cbslocal.com/2011/10/18/occupy-cleveland-protester-alleges-she-was-raped/
http://occupywallst.org/forum/19-year-old-student-raped-at-occupy-protest/
Looks like they need some real feminist organizers.
THIS IS THE POST BY CHESLER:
Naomi Wolf Discovers That Shrouds Are Sexy
Women in chadors are really feminist ninja warriors. Rather than allow themselves to be gawked at by male strangers, they choose to defeat the “male gaze” by hiding from it in plain view.
But don’t you worry: Beneath that chador, abaya, burqa, or veil, there is a sexy courtesan wearing “Victoria Secret, elegant fashion, and skin care lotion,” just waiting for her husband to come home for a night of wild and sensuous marital lovemaking.
Obviously, these are not my ideas. I am quoting from a piece by Naomi Wolf that appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald a few days ago. Yes, Wolf is the bubbly, feminist author who once advised Vice President Al “The Climate” Gore on what colors he should wear while campaigning and who is or was friendly with Gore’s daughter. Full disclosure: I have casually known Wolf and her parents for more than a quarter-century.
Wolf recently traveled to Morocco, Jordan, and Eygpt, where she found the women “as interested in allure, seduction, and pleasure as women anywhere in the world.” Whew! What a relief. She writes:
“Many Muslim women I spoke with did not feel at all subjugated by the chador or the headscarf. On the contrary, they felt liberated from what they experienced as the intrusive, commodifying, basely sexualizing Western gaze. … Many women said something like this: …’how tiring it can be to be on display all the time. When I wear my headscarf or chador, people relate to me as an individual, not an object; I feel respected.’ This may not be expressed in a traditional Western feminist set of images, but it is a recognizably Western feminist set of feelings.”
Really? If so, I’m the Queen of England.
Now that Wolf is no longer the doe-eyed ingenue of yesteryear, she sees the advantage of not being on view at all times. A Westerner, “playing” Muslim-dress up, Wolf claims that hiding in plain view gave her “a novel sense of calm and serenity. I felt, yes, in certain ways, free.” In addition, Wolf believes that the marital sex is hotter when women “cover” and reveal their faces and bodies only to their husbands.
Marabel Morgan lives! In the mid-1970s, Morgan advised wives to greet their husbands at the door wearing sexy clothing and/or transparent saran wrap with only themselves underneath. Her book, Total Woman, sold more than ten million copies. According to Morgan, a Christian, “It’s only when a woman surrenders her life to her husband, reveres and worships him and is willing to serve him, that she becomes really beautiful to him.”
Well, what can I say? Here’s a few things.
Most Muslim girls and women are not given a choice about wearing the chador, burqa, abaya, niqab, jilbab, or hijab (headscarf), and those who resist are beaten, threatened with death, arrested, caned or lashed, jailed, or honor murdered by their own families. Is Wolfe thoroughly unfamiliar with the news coming out of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan on these very subjects? Has she forgotten the tragic, fiery deaths of those schoolgirls in Saudi Arabia who, in trying to flee their burning schoolhouse, were improperly veiled and who were beaten back by the all-powerful Saudi Morality Police?
CHESLER CONTINUED:
Most Muslim girls and women are impoverished and wear rags, not expensive Western clothing beneath their coverings. Only the pampered, super-controlled, often isolated, and uber-materialistic daughters of wealth, mainly in the Gulf states, but also among the ruling classes in the Islamic world, match Wolf’s portrait of well kept courtesan-wives.
Being veiled and obedient does not save a Muslim girl or woman from being incested, battered, stalked, gang-raped, or maritally raped nor does it stop her husband from taking multiple wives and girlfriends or from frequenting brothels. A fully “covered” girl-child, anywhere between the ages of 10-15, may still be forced into an arranged marriage, perhaps with her first cousin, perhaps with a man old enough to be her grandfather, and she is not allowed to leave him, not even if he beats her black and blue every single day.
Wolf claims that she donned a “shalwar kameez and a headscarf” for a trip to the bazaar. I suggest that Wolf understand that the shalwar kameez and headscarf that she playfully wore in Morocco are not the problem.
I wonder how Wolf would feel if she’d donned a burqa, chador (full body bags) or niqab (face mask) for that same trip; how well she would do in an isolation chamber that effectively blocked her five senses and made it difficult, if not impossible, for her to communicate with others?
And, by the way, the eerie effect, ultimately, of shrouded women is that they become invisible. They cease to exist. They are literally ghosts.
Wolf presents the West as anti-woman because it treats women as sex objects. Am I happy about pornography and prostitution in the West? Hell no and, unlike Wolf, I’ve fought against them–but to portray these vices as a “Western” evil, and one that the Islamic world opposes, is sheer madness.
It is well known that the Arabs and Muslims kept and still keep sex slaves–they are very involved in the global trafficking in girls and women and frequent prostitutes on every continent. You will find pornography magazines in every princely tent–those for boys as well as for girls. I am told that the Saudis fly in fresh planeloads of Parisian prostitutes every week. Perhaps they veil them before they conduct their all-night and all-day orgies. Or, perhaps they view them as natural, “infidel” prey.
Let me suggest that Wolf read a book that is coming out in September, written by a Christian-American woman, Mary Laurel Ross, whose American Air Force husband trained the Saudi Air Force. It is called Veiled Honor and is a timely, comprehensive, “nuanced” (Wolf calls for “nuance” in our understanding of “female freedom”) account of her approximately fifteen year sojourn in Saudi Arabia. I would also suggest that Wolf read the works of Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Infidel) and Nonie Darwish (Cruel and Usual Punishment) for starters.
Then again, I suspect that Wolf is not necessarily looking for any “nuanced” truths about “female freedom” but is, rather, fishing for Saudi gold and positioning herself within the Democratic Party. After all, what she has written in this brief article supports President Obama’s position vis a vis the Muslim world.
In my very first post above i forgot to put quotes on James Gladzov's comments -- the post is all James starting with this sentence:
The shameless phenomenon of Western leftist feminists abandoning millions of persecuted Muslim women under Islamic gender apartheid continues...
and all the rest is James' work.
You may say, Why post James at all?
Because he brings up the feminist concept of objectification by appearances which was never completed in the second wave.
I think we should write about it as feminists and I always try to make women think about it. I think we did not get to the heart of it but just started the process of understanding the dynamic. In seeing the other, I think we always objectify as we want to see our dream self.
Anyway it is interesting but not the topic of your post. And my only point in all this is that you, especially you, should be careful about who you say is a feminist. Your politics are not feminist - they are left politics. So do not co-opt feminism.
There are very few women who separate women's issues from political parties and ideology. Few women understand the struggle for global gender caste liberation in feminist terms today. Naomi Wolf does not minimally qualify in my opinion.
Well after writing all day on your blog, the doorbell just rang and I received a package from you, given with Sisterly Love - I am happy with these interesting birth day presents - Thank You -- just goes to show - politics should not be as important as I hold it to be. Thank You for these feminist presents.
I will get into this stuff now........
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