Dear Editor,
Ms Gitanjali Persaud writes a very interesting piece on the sufferance of women, widening the canvass in space and time to conclude, if I may use your headline that ‘Men have been at the heart of the oppression of women for centuries’ (SN 16.4.09).
At first glance it is impossible to object to the statement if one sees that “men” have been at the heart of the oppression of everyone and everything from the start of time. Man is according to the Quran, capable of “oppression and evil and injustice.” So too, are women.
I find the letter from Ms Persaud useful for some of its detail. It refers to a chronology of the development of gender relations, however, that is based on a speculative history. The hypothesis about the transition from female earth-goddess to martial male gods is questionable and has been questioned. It is now being convincingly argued that humanity started with a unitary God and then declined into the other religious forms. Also ethnology does not support the idea of women everywhere being in inferior positions. The model best suited to the enormous variety of human cultures is that of role differentiation and power distribution along lines defined by the economic, legal and social characteristics of the culture under study.
Also, it is not correct to assert that women in societies that oppress them are all closet feminists. Nothing could be further from the truth. The role of women in the acculturation of their offspring and in the transmission of cultural “memes” and other ideological goods is well known. In a society where men beat women a lot of women will subscribe to the entire code that specifies when, why and where men may beat other men, slaves, the women, the kids, the help… In fact beatings are seldom individual impulses. Almost always socially tolerated. The problem we have before us is educating the country into how to deal with domestic conflict.
Take the case of opinions recently expressed by Messrs Freddie Kissoon and Ralph Ramkarran on the light sentencing of wife killers. It came out in Mr Kissoon’s article that one of the reasons may be a male judge’s identification with the offender in cases of infidelity. Even old English law was tolerant in cases of a man finding his wife in flagrante delicto. In short, chopping her to death was, by social convention, considered a natural comprehensible response. It still is in most parts of the world. So, as both writers led us to conclude, violence is never arbitrarily expressed when it is socially tolerated. It always respects generally accepted codes. On the other hand, too much salt in the curry could easily be the transposition of other emotions and reactions onto a single event (salty food) and target. He may simply not have liked the wife in the first place. Or lived in a world in which your masculinity was reaffirmed by beating wife and kids from time to time.
But what is chilling about our recent exchange, in which journalists Persaud and Cheryl Springer weigh in on the side of women, is the unmistakable exclusion with which the subject of male victimisation in spousal violence is regarded by these girls. They seem to want the discussion limited to the only kind of victim with which they may identify-girls.
Here we have a case where a third of the conjugal murder victims in Guyana are of the masculine sex and we run into a wall of indifference in the case of Ms Persaud who declares men excluded from an issue she wants limited to violence against women. Ms Springer goes further and declares that my introducing the idea of guilty females is outmoded and bigoted. One feels a slow chill descend the spine as you look again at Freddie’s suggestion that women get to do the judging in cases of spousal violence. They would, if we judge by the cases before us, instruct the jury or themselves find all women not guilty. It would be open season on Guyanese males.
No one in his right mind defends the oppression of women. But, again, the contempt, the disgust, underlying the attitudes revealed in this exchange give pause. It suggests that to the irrational disrespect of women is being grafted a disdainful disregard for men equally infantile in its irrationality.
What we need to do is to save both men and women from the bad upbringing that leads to these tragedies that find an extreme expression in the courts but find their normal quotidian expression in the little cruelties, selfishness and infidelities, (hi-tech and low) that explode in your partner’s hearts. Perhaps permanently crippling the guy.
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
