Hello from Paris!
After two glorious summery days, we’re back to grey drizzle, long underwear, and the tantalizing prospect of hibernation. That would ideally mean, not just an extra blanket on the bed, but pulling the plug, going offline, turning my back to the impossible world.
Instead, I’m thinking about the geo-political mess the United States has created in Afghanistan, and in particular the fate of Afghan women at the hands of the smug and violent Taliban men who are already beating up females for daring to take a taxi, firing us for daring to work outside our homes, forcing girls into sex and marriage instead of going to school because serving men and birthing babies is all we females are good for.
Some women there are fighting back, and if you want to help them with a donation, there are a bunch of links in Caroline Criado Perez' newsletter also cited above. My preference is for a fund for the especially hard-hit female journalists.
When I feel hopeless, and helpless, I try to think about chaos theory and consider that a bee beating its frantic wings in my St. Blaise window box might create a storm in, I dunno, Washington, D.C. or even Kabul. Every act expresses the world it comes from. The U.S. withdrawal, for instance, emerges from a giant, messy tapestry shot through with the same glittery threads of woman-hating that gave us the Taliban, but moderated by other strands, including two centuries of democracy and the separation of church and state. Still, the threads are there for everyone to see, and maybe even unravel.
In a recent article in The Mail, Niall Ferguson wrote about how, already in 2010, when ambassador Richard Holbrooke mentioned the importance of women’s rights in Afghanistan to then Vice-President Joe Biden, the man practically leapt out of his chair and bellowed:
“I am not sending my boy back there to risk his life on behalf of women's rights, it just won't work, that's not what they're there for…”
Because apparently Operation Enduring Freedom was only freedom for men, and even there, only as long as was politically expedient.
When Holbrooke remonstrated, Biden became heated: 'He said it ain't going to happen, he said I don't understand politics… We have to be on our way out, that we had to do what we did in Vietnam. This shocked me and I commented immediately that I thought we had a certain obligation to the people who had trusted us.
'He said, 'F*** that, we don't have to worry about that. We did it in Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger got away with it.'
The only mystery for me is why people don’t make the connection, and some of the same Americans outraged at the attacks on women in Afghanistan are totally silent about similar things happening at home—as if everything here were great.
But if Americans valued female lives, then men beating and killing women wouldn’t be such a marginal issue in the U.S., contraception would be easier to get, abortion rights wouldn’t be under attack, and there wouldn’t be more women than men living in poverty. And of course child-care would be affordable for all.
If Americans valued female lives, then our medical research wouldn’t use male bodies as the norm for hardware and medication which somehow never work the same on us. And if we valued female lives, wearing your hair short or long would just be a fashion choice, and not a crisis of identity. And we’d all have adequate fucking pockets in our pants.
If Americans valued female lives, it wouldn’t have taken almost ten years for a gay male editor to admit to me that maybe, just maybe, Hillary was hampered by virulent misogyny when she ran against Obama, and not just Trump. And it wouldn’t so often be the case that only men are interviewed for stories, only men are on panels, only men, only men, only men are.
And if Americans valued female lives, I wouldn’t have spent half my life fighting against my own LGBT community’s erasure of lesbian experience, lesbian histories, lesbian problems, lesbian voices, and even now have to defend that fucking word lesbian against attacks because it makes some male somewhere feel excluded and everything really should belong to them. Especially and including my homo female body.
Yes, if the “progressive” world valued female lives, then lesbians who turn their backs on baby-making and dick-sucking would no longer face the wrath of the patriarchy literally everywhere they turn.
As OK Karen wrote:
I have this theory about what drives the misogyny of incels and the Taliban and a million other movements that seek to destroy (but never fully kill off) half the human race. They’re all, like, connected. Here is my big idea: they just hate women. That’s it.
I know. It sounds tautologous. There ought to be something else underpinning the misogyny bit of their thinking, right? Well, no. I don’t think there is and to be honest, I’m sick of women not being considered important enough for hatred of us to centre us. It’s as though we’re too lowly even to be the subjects of our own oppression. Misogyny is constantly positioned as though it’s an expression of something else, a mere shadow projection of some deeper, more significant hatred that targets the real people, the men.
As for those people who speak out about Afghan women, but not women at home, is it distance that allows them to see the atrocities more clearly? Or is it the distance—Kabul is 6,730 miles from New York!!!—that allows them (us) to wave our hands in helplessness and safely express the horror without any obligation to act? After all, it’s so far away, what can we really do? While if we saw these attacks, and rapes and murders, and humiliations happening in the next state, the next county, next street, next door at the neighbors, in the next room, and did nothing… well… that might be morally indefensible, and obscene.
Yes, I think we carefully avert our eyes from the woman-hating at home because if we saw it, and did nothing, we might not be able to think of ourselves as good people.
Well, maybe we aren’t—good.
Maybe we’re just ordinary, and probably tired, paralyzed even, not just by men’s hate, but by our own fear and self-loathing and terrible desire to please, to be good, which means—for women—addressing the immense endless needs of others first.
I sometimes wonder what would happen if we quit thinking of ourselves as the failing, guilty saviors of the world, and allowed ourselves to be ordinary and mediocre, even selfish. If then we might risk some modest, concrete, manageable act for women right now, right here, and get to work beating our tiny, insignificant wings. And because woman-hating is a global phenomenon—like the fight against it—maybe this small act multiplied by others would one day become a storm. And the next time the American bull swaggered into a china shop, it wouldn’t mostly be women who pay. Better yet, maybe there wouldn’t be a next time at all, and the Minotaur would just continue snoozing safely in his maze.
Speaking of Bulls
If I was writing a dark, dystopian thriller I would set it in the Occitanie region of France, where I was last week, just outside Montpellier. I took a day trip to Nîmes where there are still traces of a much older, bloodier culture still expressed in the bullring, and endless carvings of elegant and terrifying bulls. Not to mention the local cuisine.
Speaking of Bullshit
When Biden got asked about people clinging to planes in Kabul to escape the Taliban, he immediately interrupted, saying: "That was four days ago, five days ago.”
His administration lied about horrified international response to the whole debacle. The Europeans think we’re great!
The Biden admin calls Afghans cowards.
"Biden can't say the Afghans are cowards. He left them behind." @RoryStewartUK tells @OliDugmore western leaders have only themselves to blame for the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan.And just to round off the cheerful news, lesbians attacked—again—at a refugee camp in Kenya.
That’s it for this week,
Disgruntledly yours,