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Dec. 30, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
36:25
Which Ideology Liberates Women？ Part 1 - Feminism
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Islam or feminism?
Which one can truly liberate women?
This is like having a public debate about what's going to help you lose weight faster.
Pork chops or cream cakes.
So without further ado, kicking off with the case that feminism can truly liberate women, I'd like to welcome our first speaker, Julie Bindel, to make her presentation for the case of feminism.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, and I'm really appreciative of the invitation from Zara, who I met when we were both debating a similar topic to this for Voice of Russia Radio.
And whatever the debate is today, tonight between us, however heated it might get, whatever the deep divisions might be within our political philosophies and approaches, we were as one when a very misogynistic reactionary cleric came on the phone saying that women should basically be at home under subjugation.
So we were both flying the flag, I would say, for feminism.
Well, that does literally seem to be what the Quran commands women to do.
And abide quietly in your homes and do not flaunt your charms as they used to flaunt them in the old days of pagan ignorance.
And according to this article, that means that Muslim women are responsible for running the home and therefore should be centered around it.
And I proceed that just so that we know that, well, I consider you my sister, and I'm sure that when there are really serious issues facing us as women, then that we should bond together.
Yeah, but if she's going to be representing the Islamic version of what womanhood is, you guys are going to be differing greatly on what the issues are.
However, I'm a rabid secularist, but an equal opportunities one because I really am as critical of all three major religions and a few of the fringe ones with pretty much equal venom.
So Judaism, Christianity, Islam.
I think that ultimately religion is bad for women.
It's not that there's no proof of God.
It's not that organized religion is very clearly a man-made construct.
It's not that all of these holy books are A, mutually and often internally contradictory, and B, have no real base in fact.
There's no evidence for anything that they're really postulating.
Miracles, angels, gods, all this nonsense.
It's archaic, Iron Age bollocks from people who literally lived before science had been invented as a discipline.
But if it were positive for women...
I think that women cannot flourish living under religious law.
It can be the Koran, the Bible, the New Testament, the Old Testament.
The Talmud can all be interpreted, reinterpreted, misinterpreted.
You can go and do what my brother-in-law does, who's a religious Jew, a Hasid, and go rabbi shop to find the rabbi that will give the correct ruling when he wants to do something, whether it's drink a particular whiskey at Passover or attend his sister's civil partnership.
So I think for women, for me, there can be no question that religion is an oppressive force.
Okay, well, you surely mean Abrahamic religions are an oppressive force.
But even then, I love that that is the reason that you object to them.
It's not that they're wrong.
It's not that they're backwards.
It's not that they're clearly made up by man and obviously do not represent a deity.
In fact, it's not that we can't prove that a deity exists.
It's just because they are oppressive to women.
If they were good for women, then you'd be in favour of them, no matter how retrograde they were in all other areas.
This is the mark of a fucking ideologue.
It's man-made, it serves men.
The problem apparently being that it's serving men, not the fact that it's man-made.
And its primary imperative is to control the behaviour and sexuality, sexual behaviour and freedom of movement of women and their children.
Which is complete bollocks, because it turns out the primary imperative of religion is to actually maintain the sanctity and the primacy of the religion.
Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
Primary imperative.
So I'm sure you were about to applause, but you were told not to do it so often.
So I'll take that as an absolute agreement, shall I?
I'd take it as all the Muslim women in the room going, wow, that is a bizarre interpretation of every Abrahamic religion.
I think we need feminism more than ever right now.
Wow, really?
I would never have guessed.
I thought you were about to say, you know, I actually don't think we need feminism anymore.
I think this time has actually passed and I should get a new job.
Simply because of the backlash that has, I think, been nourished and nurtured through the rise of religious fundamentalism worldwide.
Well, that does sound really important, but unfortunately, fat first world feminists are busy dealing with the really important issues of video games and movies and lying about how people rape them.
And we hear much about how that rise is mainly Islam, but it isn't.
It's all three major religions.
And recently I went to Colorado, Denver, near Denver, to an area where, I think it was 25 years ago, there was a massacre in a school where a young man just went crazy and killed lots of children and it was terrible and after that the town that was already pretty Christian to start with became far more fundamentalist.
Given that they'd experienced a terrible tragedy, I'm not really that surprised.
And most of those people live by the rule, the absolute word of the Bible.
And I went as an undercover journalist as part of research I was doing for my book and I went to visit a, well I went to have therapy to try and turn me from being a lesbian, which I proudly am.
You.
To being heterosexual.
And there I saw some of the worst excesses of religious fundamentalism within Christianity.
I saw the absolute intolerance of difference.
I saw the desperate need to keep people like me in line.
In other words, have a husband and children, whether or not you choose that life.
She wasn't interested in whether my persona, because I was there undercover, wished to be shifted in my thinking so that I would be attracted to men.
No.
She just wanted me to stop exercising my sexual autonomy.
Look, that's exactly the same thing as you saying that religion is oppressive to women, which is why you are non-religious.
Neither one of you are addressing the core reasons which lead you both to believe that each other's attitudes regarding these subjects are incorrect.
But I think more importantly, you're talking to a room full of Muslims.
Stop giving them anecdotes regarding Christians.
That feminism had given me the right to do, and that's what feminism had given me.
If you decided tomorrow not to be a feminist, Julie, you would still have the right and ability to do these things.
You being a strong, independent lesbian is not contingent on you committing to feminism.
I've also, as I say, I have a brother-in-law who's a religious fundamentalist who married his daughter when she was 17 to a man she'd never been alone with.
Did she agree to it?
Just out of interest.
Things have not been going very well.
But I respect him as a human being.
I love him as a relative.
But I am appalled by the way that he has raised his children under a doctrine that says that women should be covered.
Where have I heard that before?
That boys are privileged from birth for being born male.
I really doubt that's a quote from the Bible.
That automatically they should earn more.
That's a feminist talking point, not a religious one.
Have more freedom in the private, the public sphere, and that the private domain is women's.
Finally, something the Abrahamic religions are actually describing.
So trust me, I'm really not picking on one particular religion.
You should be picking on one religion.
You are here to debate and debunk Islam's role in liberating women.
Now, I was interested to see you in looking at, you know, do women need feminism?
What will liberate women?
Which, of course, I'm saying is feminism as opposed to Islam.
I wonder if that long, uncomfortable pause has anything to do with the words false dichotomy.
Is the Young Foundation, which many of you will know, founded a social enterprise this year to encourage more Muslim young women into feminism, in fact, women of all ages.
And when that doesn't work, we're going to try mixing oil and water.
Now, we may well hear from my colleague when she speaks that feminism is a white Western concept that has no relevance in countries such as Pakistan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, wherever.
Britain, Australia, Canada, America.
And I would absolutely fundamentally disagree with that.
Because of course we know that there are thriving women's movements in Egypt, in Saudi Arabia, in Pakistan, in many, many countries.
That actually need a women's liberation movement to help women who are obviously oppressed.
Where women have been thoroughly oppressed, as we have everywhere in the world, in every country.
Fucking hell, that sounded like a point of faith, didn't it?
Oh, women have been terribly oppressed.
What's going on here?
Well, we're having a conference on how terribly oppressed women have been.
In the West, at least.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I can agree that people who are forced to dress head to toe in black in a desert might be oppressed.
I'm happy to concede that.
What I'm not happy to concede, Julie, is that you have ever been oppressed.
Old fat, professional feminists reading from their MacBook to a room full of women are the least oppressed people in our society.
Under patriarchy.
How many minutes is that before I said patriarchy?
That's not bad going.
And that word is patriarchy.
Dun-dun-dun.
Lightning.
What a surprise.
Another feminist who doesn't take the patriarchy seriously.
It's almost like nobody should be taking the idea of patriarchy seriously.
It's almost like there is no fucking patriarchy.
Unless you live in a Muslim country where the women there don't make jokes about patriarchy.
Probably because the police of vice and virtue would fucking do something to them.
I normally get it in in the first five seconds.
I'm slipping, I've got a cold.
Do you want to see what an actual patriarchy looks like?
Do you want to hear the actual conversations people who run patriarchies have and the justifications that they have for their actions?
Do you want to hear the actual conversation?
It's self-evident you don't live in one.
The women who do live in one do not laugh at the word patriarchy.
So, what's really interesting about the Young Foundation is that it had a huge response from many Muslim women who hadn't left their religion behind, who hadn't said, Well, we can be one or the other, or feminism says that we can't have our own private belief, which I believe religion is, it's a personal private belief, shouldn't be attached to the state.
They said that they had been precluded from feminism because of religious elders, because of patriarchs, because of men in their families who say feminism is a dirty word, they're all man-haters and lesbians, and what they'll do is they'll prevent you from being involved in religion.
And they also, many of these young women said, if you look on the website, they said, these debates about feminism and Islam are only ever held in academia.
And we don't get the chance to actually be there saying, well, yes, I'm a Muslim, I'm a religious Muslim, but yes, I think feminism is absolutely not just relevant to me, but utterly crucial.
Honestly, I think one of the reasons for this is that feminism doesn't stand up to scrutiny in the real world.
When its precepts are put to the test, they are simply found to be inferior or invalid or incompatible with other ideological positions.
And in the past year, in the past few years, we've seen the rise of a feminism in countries where we are told constantly by religious elders doesn't exist, shouldn't exist, and in fact thinks that we're just all you know, bourgeois Western women who are trying to impose something upon them.
I'm sure that's true.
But one thing I've noticed about feminists from Islamic countries is that they seem to have something legitimate to talk about.
Their primary weapon isn't their Apple laptop.
Their primary weapon, for example, in the case of this Kurdish feminist, is an AK-47 because she is actually defending her home so she doesn't get kidnapped and raped by ISIS.
Again, it's something to do with actual patriarchies being actually terrifying for women.
And we saw with the Arab Spring, we saw in Egypt that women were leading that revolution.
And I'm in touch with feminists all over the world, in a number of countries, where it's almost criminal to be an out-feminist.
And what happened after the women led the revolution?
Well, it didn't become a revolution.
It became a male takeover.
I'm going to guess that they weren't actually leading it then.
Where Egyptian Muslim woman after Egyptian Muslim woman started to write about, blog about, speak about how she had been sexually assaulted and harassed by male comrades during this quest for revolution, for equality.
I'm not sure that they were looking for equality, at least not in the way you're thinking of equality.
And where they have now been utterly sidelined because, of course, it was a threat to men on the left, on the left.
This is why we need feminism.
With social media, obviously, more women who are trapped within the confines of extreme patriarchy can now become feminists, even if it's online to begin with.
But what we're finding is women from, as I say, all over the world are engaging in discussions about oppression, repression, about being railroaded into a compulsory heterosexuality or family unit that there was no choosing of their own.
I tell you what, we're going to have to get first world feminists to talk about the plight of third world women a lot more often because you really do make it sound like feminism in the first world is just a bunch of entitled wealthy women complaining for the sake of it.
We also know that the first time that Islamic feminism was used as a term, as a phrase, it was in 1990 and in 1992, the feminist writer Charlotte Shacotte, I think it's Shakot, I can't read my own handwriting, maybe it's Shakot.
Anyway, an Iranian who took part in the 1979 revolution published the first issue of the Islamic Feminist Newsletter.
But it was banned.
It was banned by the state.
Unlike in Britain, where it's been embraced by the state.
Are you seeing the difference?
Are you seeing why people in the West just cannot stomach feminism anymore?
So if we see that as a response by patriarchal male elders, whether they're religious, political, whatever, as the threat of feminism, that tells us more than anything that we need feminism.
Look, saying that we need feminism because there are still people who are opposed to feminism is a silly line of reasoning.
One, you're not actually addressing any issues by saying it.
You're not actually giving a valid justification.
And two, that means if everyone turned around and said, you know what, we're not opposed to feminism, you have no reason to be a feminist.
Okay.
Zara may well argue that we all should be fighting injustice and that why choose feminism as an elitist movement?
Well, because other social justice movements are allowed to have a priority.
Other social justice movements that fight for an end to racism or an end to poverty aren't always told that their fight is irrelevant because they're not also fighting class oppression, race oppression, etc.
That's not why feminism is irrelevant.
Feminism is irrelevant because you don't even know what you're arguing for anymore.
You have stopped arguing for legal rights.
You have stopped arguing for anything that a man already has that you don't.
Now, bourgeois white Western women are arguing for privilege when they are arguing for feminism.
You are arguing to be protected from the consequences of your own choices.
Now, of course, to be a feminist, you have to also deplore and be against all the other institutionalised oppressions and inequalities in society.
But feminists have a right to prioritise the liberation of women from male oppression.
Honestly, just look at this cringe.
Liberate yourself from male oppression.
You're a fucking lesbian.
You aren't being oppressed by men.
You're not married.
You're on a stage with other women talking about how oppressed women are.
And those other women look like they are fucking cringing when you say in such a lackluster and half-hearted way, feminists have a right to fight against male oppression.
Yeah, well, if you can find some.
And I'm not an equalities feminist.
I think equality is for cowards.
Finally, a feminist with the balls to say it.
Go on, Julie.
We're not on the same playing field.
If we had 50% of women in Parliament in the UK, guess who'd shout the loudest and drown that 50% out?
Since we don't know, because it's never happened, should we just assume that women will be inferior, Julie?
Because that's what you're doing right now.
Assuming that women are inferior to men, and so we need more women than men, because one man Is worth more than one woman.
We need far more than 50%.
And I love winding my friend and colleague up over here, Mike Buchanan.
We'll talk later.
A proud anti-feminist.
So is your Muslim debate opponent, who we are yet to hear from.
Anyway, although I'm very distressed that you seem to think other feminists are your enemy more than me at the moment, Mike.
So I'm not doing something right.
Anyway, okay, so Zara might also argue that, of course, because there are different types of feminism and different ways to be a feminist, and all these kind of disparate women with all these weird views that that contradicts the basis of feminism, that feminism has no aim, has no direction.
Well, what I'll say to that is not going to be a rebuttal.
It's in fact going to be acquiescing to the argument.
Is.
That's right, there are millions of types of feminism, but it's mine that's correct.
Julie, are you actually a sleeper agent on a mission to destroy feminism?
Because that is the dumbest thing I think I've ever heard anyone say.
If every feminist says that, then none of you are correct.
You would all be saying that every other sect of feminism is wrong because it wasn't your sect of feminism, your particular brand of feminism.
You would have more success by arguing that they're all correct, by saying that it's the subjective reality of each woman's lived experience that creates their various brand of feminism and therefore none of them are wrong.
You would have more converts that way.
But saying they're all wrong except yours is fucking dumb.
Right, it's not.
It's not Margaret Thatcher's feminism.
Why not?
What do you think she would say?
Apart from my old women's lib nothing.
She would say, well, I mean, Julie Bindle's feminism's wrong.
It's mine that's the correct feminism.
And we're an impasse, Julie.
How do you prove that she's wrong?
It's not the pole dancy way to liberation feminism.
Are you sure?
Because I heard that they think it's the one true feminism.
Of the fourth wave.
It's not the slut walk, you know, let's just sort of think about the rights of the individual.
Yeah, why would it be?
Why would it be the rights of the individual?
Why wouldn't we just go full-on collectivist?
Go on, Julie.
It's feminism that's a political collective movement that says women are oppressed not by each individual man in all of our life circumstances, but by the system that privileges them for being born male.
Amazing.
It's not individual men because if you were to look at individual men, you would notice that individual men are not oppressing women.
The problem is that we live in a system that rewards merit and people who work hard.
And men work harder than women.
We know this statistically that men work harder than women.
We know that they work more hours a day, more days in a week, more weeks in a year and more years in their lives in more difficult jobs than women.
And this is the system that privileges men over women.
Because it privileges hard, difficult and demanding work over, I don't know, feminist blogging.
And so you think that someone who works in a steel mill or is a deep sea fisherman should be rewarded on par with someone like you.
That when women own 1% of the property in the world, when we do 66% of the work, but when we only earn overall globally 11% of the international wage, whatever.
Well, I am certainly concerned about the international wage whatever, but I am more concerned about your statistics.
Myth number one.
Women are half the world's population, working two-thirds of the world's working hours, receiving 10% of the world's income, and owning less than 1% of the world's property.
Well, this faux fact is routinely quoted by advocacy groups, by the World Bank, Oxfam, the United Nations.
But it's a fabrication.
More than 15 years ago, two Sussex University experts on gender and development explained that the slogan was simply made up by somebody at the UN back in the 80s.
And it just seems sort of right to that person.
There's no evidence that it was ever accurate, and it's certainly not accurate today.
In Africa, for example, Yale economist Cheryl Doss found that female land ownership ranged from 11% in Senegal to 54% in Rwanda and Burundi.
So, yeah, okay, what other nonsense do you have for us, Julie?
Then I think we're looking at oppression.
We can also see domestic violence, rape, forced marriage, child sexual abuse.
We can't deny that those things are gendered.
Well, I don't know, Julie.
I mean, not all of us are complete fucking ideologues.
I don't know about forced marriage, so I won't talk about it.
But I can talk about domestic violence that we know is not a gendered issue.
Rape is not a gendered issue.
Most rapes are male on male.
Why don't we talk about the female teachers who commit statutory rape against their own students?
Or we could just talk about the 64,000 women in the UK who are simply child molesters.
Is that what you'd like to talk about, Julie?
Is this what you mean when you say it's a gendered issue?
Are you actually saying that you are just a complete fucking apologist who cannot accurately represent the world around her?
We can say, of course, that some men suffer domestic violence.
We can also look at the skewed figures that suggest that 40% of men are the victims of female domestic violence, when in fact never a bed has been slept in in a refuge set up for male victims of domestic violence.
You know what, Bindle, I think you're full of shit.
I don't think you know what the numbers are.
I mean, the numbers are just the sheer number of places for men who have been domestically abused are, according to shelter, limited.
How limited?
Well, in the UK, in refuges and safe houses, there are 33 spaces dedicated to male victims of domestic violence, compared to around 4,000 spaces reserved for females.
Of course, I don't think it's any coincidence that nine out of ten people sleeping rough are male.
Given how phenomenally rare these shelters are, I would not be surprised if male victims of domestic abuse simply cannot fucking find the shelters.
There are barely any homicides, murders or manslaughters by women who've been repeatedly beating and stalking their male victims.
The morgues are full of women who are the victims of serious domestic violence.
Yeah, that's very dramatic and everything.
But the thing is, if you actually look at the homicide statistics, 65% of them are male.
So yes, while a woman is more likely to be killed by her partner, men are simply more likely to be killed.
There are 10 times the number of women in their children living in bed and breakfast accommodation because the refuges are so full.
And as we have covered, the men who are suffering in the same way simply end on the street.
I'm sure that some of you might say, it's the stigma, men can't report domestic violence.
That's not true.
If you're running for your life and trying to protect your children, you get over that stigma.
Women face stigma constantly.
So what is it?
Is there no stigma?
Or is it just easy to get over the stigma?
Or is it that women face a greater stigma?
You sound like you're talking shit, Julie.
You sound like you're completely, this has just gone off the rails for you.
You don't know what you're talking about.
You're like, well, well, I mean, it's worse for women.
I somehow know what men go through.
You don't know shares.
You've no idea what it's like to be a man who is being stigmatized for being abused by a woman.
You've no idea.
So shut your fat trap and stop pretending that you do.
Maybe you should employ some of the feminist principles that you hold so dear and try not to victim blame.
When we're told that we're to blame for rape, when we're stoned to death for being raped, when we're told that we're liars, that's that's a women's thing.
None of those things have ever happened to you, have they, Julie?
The word we is wildly inappropriate for you to use in this situation, isn't it, Julie?
That's not when male great victims come forward.
They have a dreadful ordeal within the criminal justice system.
But it is a male-on-female myth that says that women are making this up and if we are raped, we are to blame.
It's literally written within some of our legal systems.
Not in any civilized country, Julie.
Nowhere are people blaming women for being raped.
The rapist is to blame for being raped, which is why the rapist goes to jail.
If we in the West blamed women for being raped, they would be the ones who were punished.
They would go to jail or they might get stoned to death, as they do in some more backwards countries.
So we've probably only got one minute, so violence, of course, most violence in the world is perpetrated by men on men.
So most victims of violence are men.
Okay, can you do a bit of demonization of men since you've thrown that out there?
That's because men are socialised into, not born into, responding with violence if they can't win an argument.
You actually have that exactly backwards.
We're socialized not to be violent just because we've lost an argument.
The natural response to any kind of conflict is to fight back.
It's actually socialization that prevents that.
But do go on.
This filters down to the great discredit of women and children who are supposed to live under those circumstances of war, of conflict, where if we get in the way, we are the primary victims of that violence ourselves.
Honestly, it's amazing how you can say that men are committing violence against one another and that women can still somehow be the primary victims of that violence.
It's Clinton-esque.
The difference between the violence that women face from men is that we are violated and beaten and raped and tortured and forced into situations we don't want to be in because we are women and girls.
I know that doesn't sound ridiculous in your head, but logically, if that were the case, then every woman and girl would have been beaten and raped.
It wouldn't just be a percentage of them.
So I'll end by saying everywhere in the world we have patriarchy.
Everywhere in the world women live under a system of oppression.
Some countries, some legal systems, some regions are worse than others.
But one thing is for certain.
There's only one thing that unites all women everywhere.
And it's not Islam.
And it's not Christianity and it's not Judaism.
In fact, it's not religion at all.
It is, I'm afraid, the threat, the fear, and the reality of sexual and domestic violence.
If we haven't been raped or beaten, we live in fear of it, even if it's unconscious and we don't realise that we don't want to take a taxi or go out on our own late at night in case it happens to us.
It unites us and it's the only thing that does.
And what also unites women all over the world is the growing feminist movement that recognises that it's not a white Western bourgeois concept.
It's a politics of liberation and it's the only thing that can free us from the tyranny of our oppression.
Holy shit.
That is just the most insane thing I've ever heard.
She honestly thinks her position as a privileged first world woman is comparable to some woman in Eritrea getting her genital hacked off with a fucking rusty knife.
She thinks the one thing that can unite all women is feminism putting the fear of men into them.
Ironically, feminism is one of the most divisive ideologies ever.
Nothing unites women because women are not a united group.
They are a demographic.
There are too many women for them to be united.
Too many women in too many different situations with too many different life experiences who have too many different opinions.
Very few of them are radical man-hating lesbians.
But the most amazing thing about this is that Julie Bundle seems to have forgotten that she's trying to tell people that feminism can liberate them.
Because all she has presented is a narrative of fear.
Be afraid.
You're next.
That's not liberating, that's oppressive.
That's not going to liberate anyone.
That is going to condemn them to a life of paranoia.
Where women are afraid of living their lives as they choose, because statistically speaking, none of this is going to happen to the average woman.
And all of the events leading up to one of these terrible things are actually avoidable.
And the things that aren't are highly unlikely.
Feminism is being proselytized by radical man-hating lesbians because they are damaged people.
And they want you to be a damaged person as well.
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