If this is your first time here, it
may be worth first orienting yourself by having a look at those
articles, or the more general discussions about gender,
what it means, and why it is a problem. Let us briefly recall, in
any case, some of its further problems. They include, but are not
limited to:
gender inequality;
gender conflict;
the subjection of women in almost all spheres of public and private
life;
hegemonic relationship dynamics;
hegemonic family structures;
hostility to sexual diversity;
the mistreatment of people who are not biologically male or female,
such as intersex people;
the mistreatment of people who do not conform to masculine or
feminine gender expectations, the consequences of which include
exclusion, alienation, mental health problems and
suicide;
and the abomination that is rape, among others.
Today we confront a third and final myth. It is the belief that some
societies, cultures, religions and/or ethnic groups are better or
worse at gender problems than others.
It might inhabit statements like these:
“[Religion X] is
repressive towards women.”
“
[Culture Y] is a
conservative culture, and still does not tolerate homosexuality.”
(For why the word still
is a problem in itself here, see the
second myth.)
“Unlike [Country Z],
democracy and human rights are in our national DNA.”
And inevitably: “Why are
you complaining about [Gender
Problem N]? Don't you realise that it is better in this
country than anywhere else? If you don't like it here then fuck off
to [Country Z].”
As with the Myth of Modernity, these
may sound like entirely fair sentiments in certain places and times.
But let us be clear. When we challenge this myth, we are not
suggesting that [Religion X] does not
currently have serious problems with its subjection of women. We do
not mean that [Culture Y] does not
have homophobia problems, nor even that [Country Z] is better at
[Gender Problem N] than the country of the fellow comparing them. We
will not ignore, in this article, the very real and deplorable
problems of countries and cultures and faiths all over the world when
it comes to gender.
What we are questioning is the idea
that any of these are inherently better or worse than any
of the others. The key word here
is inherently.
That is to say, it is very possible
that, say, Japan, currently
and arguably,
experiences less gender inequality and gender conflict than, for
example, India. This however, does not let us say that India
is worse at gender problems than Japan.
The reason might be that gender inequality and gender conflict exists
at all in both
countries, meaning both are in an infinitely broken condition.
Or we might be ignoring the mass gender atrocities Japan committed a
few decades ago during the Pacific War, or the fact that a lot of
Japan's current subjection of women is expressed through constraining
social norms and expectations, rather than a culture of open
violence. Or we might be forgetting, also for example, that Indians
have reacted, on the whole, with greater systematic outrage, popular activism and rigorous confrontation of their gender problems than has been the case in Japan.
The
bottom line, nonetheless, is that gender is and has long been an unjustifiable problem in both
countries. To suggest one is any better than
the other ignores their unique and complex stories; ignores their
changes over time; ignores the variations within them; and above all,
shoves aside the most important concern, which is that gender
problems exist at all
in both countries when they straightforwardly should not.
The idea that such comparisons are meaningful, in ignorance of this,
on purpose or otherwise, is the Myth of the Others. The myth,
that is, that gender might be more a problem with “them”, and
less a problem with “us” – or vice versa – when in fact it is
a catastrophe for us all.
It does not matter, by the way, who
exactly “we” or “they” are. The statement is problematic from
any perspective,
including yours, wherever you are – that is after all the point.
The Myth of the Others might be the belief that either Christians or
Muslims have worse gender problems than one another; or Europeans and
Africans; or settler and indigenous communities; or -isms and -isms;
or the global North and the global South.
All comparisons like this are first,
inaccurate; second, divisive; and third, pointless. We are all
bad at gender. All societies, all cultures, all nations, all
religions have colossal mistakes to face up to. Indeed, we have not
grasped the problem of gender until we recognise it to be precisely of
such dreadful magnitude as makes these comparisons meaningless.
In other words, we are all
struggling to climb the same cliff out of the same gendered hell. And
it is high time we worked together to get us all
out of there, rather than pulling out our iPhones mid-climb and
trying to take pictures at angles that make it look like we have
climbed higher than everybody else.
So instead, I would like to suggest the case is the following.
No
societies, cultures, religions or ethnic groups are inherently
gendered.
None, however, are immune to gender and its problems.
When gender exists in a society, culture, religion or ethnic group,
it is not part of that group but a problem with that
group.
And in the final analysis, gender is a universal problem
facing all humankind regardless of nation, culture, religion
or any other line of division.
Let us look now at some of the forms the myth takes. It may appear an
us vs. them myth, but look again: it cuts both ways.
The Blobs Return
A few days ago, I was reading a news article on sexual violence in
video games, and lamenting, as one must, that such a
magnificent and promising art medium has become one of the most bile-infested bastions of
gendered nastiness in the world today, particularly in Europe and the
United States. (That in itself, by the way, is a subject for another
time: video game design suffocates beneath the ooze of gendered
tropes, while misogyny of the most reprehensible order gushes from
the orifices of so many player communities. In particular, there are
those among the latter who shriek abuse, death threats and rape
threats, at any person – particularly any woman – who dares to
draw attention to the problem.)
The reason I mention this here is that on that occasion, I resisted
my better judgement and scrolled down to the Comments section, which,
as anyone well-travelled on the internet will tell you, has an effect
akin to accidentally dropping your sanity into the latrine and only
realising it just after you've pressed the flush and stand watching
helpless as it vanishes to oblivion. And sure enough, one comment
immediately lived up to this custom. It was somebody
claiming, vehemently and with customary disdain for grammar, that
genderedness in video games had no importance because 'actual' rape –
presumably 100% unrelated to the wider culture of gender violence, of
which games are a part – was happening in 'places like Africa'.
Yes, you read that right. 'Places like Africa'.
Now we could just about construe that as accurate, if we define
'places like' to mean 'places with human beings'. In that case
'places like Africa' would equally include Europe, Asia, the Americas
and Australasia, all of which suffer horrifically under the rape
pandemic. But somehow I don't think the commentator meant it that
way.
I recalled, at this point, a different article that has stuck in my
memory for several years. The author and context escape me, but I
remember it was castigating feminists in Europe and the US for their
criticism of the subjection of women there, when according to the
author, these countries were the best in the world at equality,
tolerance and women's rights. The feminists, he asserted, should
therefore stop attacking their own 'democratic' and 'developed'
countries, and focus instead on the relative barbarisms of the Middle
East, Asia and – though he perhaps did not use the exact phrase –
'places like those'.
Here we see the Myth of the Others
in its most crude and honest form. It states: “we are a good blob;
they are a bad blob”. But we may note that its target is rarely the Others themselves. More often,
it is You. When You attempt to make the case that Our group is not
simply a “good blob” but something more complex than that, the
“bad blobs” of the Others are deposited upon your arguments as a
caricatured point of comparison, to either dissuade you from your
case, or to shame you for making it in the first place when others
are, by this image, so obviously worse. In other words, this Myth is
a political tool: a box of blobs we unleash to bounce attention away
from our own societies' gendered problems, and to smother critiques
of them.
In other words, it is the moral equivalent of the argument
that “(our) Dictator Jia killed only 9 million people, while
(their) Dictator Yi killed 10 million, so take it easy on Dictator
Jia”. And the parameters of comparison are
about the same with gender, when we recall from the previous article
that:
Humanity drowns in a sea of
overlapping gendered pandemics – domestic violence, emotional
abuse, sexual slavery, sexual apartheid, female infanticide, “honour”
killings, “morality” police, gender-related mental health
problems and suicides, bride kidnappings, human trafficking, genital
mutilation, unequal laws and wages and sizes of meals and recognition
of evidence in court, hegemonic and arbitrary body image standards,
failed relationships, child custody battles, and cultural media
saturated to bursting with the same gendered tropes, ugly stereotypes
and male-female relationship dynamics repeated over and over again.
...and when we recall, moreover,
that most of these not only exist but rampage across even the
most so-called “liberal”, “democratic” and “developed”
societies in the world. Indeed, the level at which gender is a
problem transcends such notions. “Democracy”, “development”
and related chimeras have no relevance to gender except in so far
that because of gender, they do not exist.
It gets worse though. They,
the Others themselves, or rather those responsible for Their gendered
problems, know exactly how to take advantage of the Myth of the
Others to cover for their misdeeds.
The Relativist's Defence
During the rise
of the universal human rights regime in the late twentieth
century, a certain line of argument gained popularity. Its most
organised manifestation was the “Asian Values” platform erected
by characters like Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore and Mahathir Mohamad in
Malaysia. They stood upon this platform, and declared that societies
have their own cultures and identities that do not necessarily
reflect “Western” values like human rights. In the Asian Values
case, for example, Asians, as a matter of culture, supposedly
preferred authoritarian governance, obedience to authority, and
collective harmony rather than individual freedom. It is thus in
societies' best interests, the argument goes, that they be permitted
to organise themselves according to their own cultural values, rather
than be bullied or pressured by those colonial Westerners into
changing to become like them.
This so-called cultural relativism is now mostly discredited. There
is nothing wrong, of course, with the idea of cultural
self-determination. But “Asian values” is hollow when we consider
that “Asia” is not a monolithic unit – not a blob – but in
fact some four billion people spread across 44 million of the most
diverse square kilometres in the world, making the idea of any
homogeneous “Asian-ness” a nothing. We may also note that plenty
of these four billion Asians categorically oppose authoritarianism
and repression – perhaps you know some of them – and that such
critics as Anwar Ibrahim, Chee Soon Juan, Lee Teng-hui and Amartya
Sen have as much claim to represent Asians as the likes of Mahathir
or the other Lee in Singapore. As indeed, we must sadly admit, do
Mahinda Rajapaksa or Osama Bin Laden. You might say there are
actually four billion sets of Asian Values, not one.
Nonetheless, the same species of cultural relativism has lashed out
across much of the world with a popular appeal far surpassing its
substantive integrity. It has been wheeled out to excuse the
imprisonment of dissidents here, to cover for crimes against humanity
there, often in the guise of anti-colonial or anti-capitalist
struggle or the defence of national sovereignty. Its credence has
naturally suffered blows – the advocates for “Asian values”
themselves, for example, were made miserable when the prosperity they
claimed would result from that path spectacularly disintegrated in
the 1997 East Asian financial crisis.
However, one of its fronts has yet to collapse. It is, of course,
gender.
Cultural relativism on gender is a curious mirror image of the Myth
of the Others. Those who exercise it accept the gender problems in
their societies, but deny they are problems. Instead, they
take pride in these problems and even consider them marks of national
or cultural superiority over others. These roles and rules for men
and women are our religious values, we say. There have been no
homosexuals here for thousands of years, we say. The immaculate
language of morality, purity, tradition and self-determination is
unfurled to shroud gendered cruelties in a mantle of solemn and
severe respectability. And then comes the killer blow: the Others.
They are out to get us, we claim. They seek to pollute our
values, corrode our culture, compromise our innocence, and make us as
selfish and sinful and materialistic as they. If you don't believe
it, just look at them!
Yet this is no more than another
exercise in blobs. From the gender relativist's perspective, the
world is divided into two portions: We
and They. We
are reduced to a good blob: homogeneous, pure, with a single,
undiluted culture and heritage unchanged since the dawn of the
universe, the archetype of moral life. They
are reduced to a bad blob: cultureless, dissolute, a shambling mass
of greed and perdition that devours all it touches and has shed all
capacity to know right and wrong. The latter, these relativists
advance, must not be allowed to touch the former. We
must protect our societies - our children! - from Their
contamination.
We talk here not merely of Wahhabi clerics or Putin or the Indian BJP,
however, but of a more pervasive smog that has poisoned the entire
global gender discourse. Ultimately it does away with all real
meaning between Us and Them, uniting the two in
complicity and reducing this relativist non-argument to plain
disingenuousness. Cases in point are Western companies like
McDonaldses and Starbucks who segregate men and women in their Saudi
restaurants, covering for themselves by claiming sensitivity to
others' cultures, whereas it is actually because feeding off those
markets matters more to them than human rights. Consider also
politicians who wheel out the relativist's defence to fend off
difficult questions about the countries they want to sell weapons to.
In other instances it is more
insidious. For example, take the myth of the “conservative
country”. I would swear I have heard this label applied to every
country in the world at least once by now by the mainstream British
media, most frequently the BBC, when considering gendered repression,
sexual violence, or hostility to sexual minorities in countries they
cannot be bothered to properly research. In fact there
are no “conservative countries”.
Countries are diverse, as discussed under the Myth
of Modernity, and any honourable conservative must surely feel
mortified when that term “conservative” – which after all
refers to a legitimate segment of any society's political mosaic –
gets applied like this to gendered abhorrences with no place in the
universe, and whose existence represents the mosaic's tiles being
blasted off and the earth beneath them scorched.
There is a troubling puzzle here. How have proud concepts like
morality and tradition come to be associated with
gender inequality, gendered conflict, the subjection of women,
hegemonic family and relationship systems, and uncompromising hatred
of sexual diversity? How can anyone even consider, let alone believe,
that these things have anything to do with morality in the face of
the lacerating pain they visit upon the souls and carcasses of people
they love?
Politics can only go some way to explain this. Absolutely, elites
from Henry VIII to Goodluck Jonathan have an established history of
inciting populist hatred against conjured bogeymen to win public
support, or more particularly to distract people from their own
incompetence or corruption. Our societies' long
failures
to develop a sober, informed conversation about sexuality and gender
make these fertile ground for such illusions. But their effectiveness
in too many places and times suggests that many people genuinely
believe that a more coercive, repressive gendered society is a good
thing – or at least, that it is worth it for the sake of (again,
the illusion of) moral and cultural integrity. No scheming
politician, no matter how clever, could orchestrate madness like
that.
Perhaps the power of these broken narratives can only be understood
against the wider horror of recent human history. The shadows of
colonialism and slavery fell upon the world's civilisations and diced
them to ribbons, producing traumas, conflicts, and existential confusion that
plague them to this day; and it is within those shattered mindsets
that people have been immediately confronted with the terror of
culture-eroding, value-destroying market fundamentalist
globalisation. Perhaps it is no wonder we are insane.
And so we get the madness that is “[insert gender atrocity here] is our
culture, so do not criticise us.” Warped as We who make that
claim are, we do not understand the logical poverty, and
soul-destroying cruelty, of that statement. Correspondingly, against
a They who are increasingly aware of their own cultural
brokenness, who grapple with the shame of their colonial and
neo-colonial misdeeds, that is a devastating statement. It carries a
corollary of “you know you are in no position to do so”: not
morally, because you have no high horse to ride on; not physically,
because you no longer rule the world.
So in the end, They too give in to this mirror of the Myth of
the Others. How many people do you know who, on hearing your
criticisms of gendered crimes elsewhere, respond with the infuriating
relativist's defence of “but that is their culture”?
Racism by any other name...
To be clear then, the Myth of the Others narrative has two basic
problems.
The first is reductionism. All societies, cultures and
religions, whether ours or theirs, are extremely
diverse and exhibit enormous variety in their values and beliefs,
often in contestation with one another. The comparisons and
caricatures of the Myth of the Others ignore this variety, and would
have us believe that societies, cultures and religions are blobs in
which everyone – or everyone judged to matter – believes the same
things and behaves in the same ways.
Its second problem is essentialism. Societies, cultures and
religions, whether ours or theirs, are on journeys.
They have always been changing, evolving and revolving in countless
directions through history. Nations awash in war rape, witch-burnings, and the most hideously coercive gendered roles, as was once the very image of Europe, have
transformed into places which abhor capital punishment in all
circumstances, and where concerted efforts against sexual violence
exist at most levels of society. Nations once famous for striving for
equality between men and women, like Turkey or Afghanistan, have lost
focus, or altogether crashed into the abyssal depths of gendered
carnage. However, the myth ignores these changes and would have us
consider that its caricatures of societies reflect them at an
essential level. That is to say, it suggests that those societies
have always been that way, and always will be – freedom as part of
who we are, repression as part of who they are.
In short, the Myth of the Others ignores two of the most fundamental
facts about all cultures: that they are diverse, and that they
change. The equation is simple: reductionism plus essentialism equals
blob.
So let's cut those blobs up once and for all, shall we? Remember: we
must cut both ways.
In one direction, we have the
societies that consider themselves in a better position – mostly
Western European societies and their offshoots like the US. There the
Myth of the Others compartmentalises the problems of gender into
distant and frightening otherlands of savagery. Foreign countries,
cultures and belief systems are reduced to monochrome blobs of
barbarism, ignoring that they are always complex, always diverse, and
contain a great deal of people struggling against the mistakes and
failures of their own fellows. By the same token, people of these
would-be better societies are invited to ignore that the problems of
gender still afflict their societies to a magnitude utterly beyond
pardon, and more dangerously yet, led to forget that their own
histories are saturated, over centuries and perhaps millennia until
extremely recent decades, with
gendered atrocities as grotesque as anything carried out by the likes
of ISIL or the militias of eastern Congo today. Do we say, then, that
these atrocities are British traditions, or Canadian culture, or
Australian values? No, and quite rightly not. But neither should we dare
believe there is anything inherent in
these cultures, values or belief systems that would stop them
happening again in those places in future.
In the other direction, we have
those so visited by the odious habit of appealing to cultural
relativism to justify their gender crimes. Like the aforementioned
societies, gendered horrors have often infested their cultures, their
traditions, or their values too. But that does not mean they define,
say, African cultures, Indian traditions or Muslim values at an
essential level. On the contrary, these are each as diverse as
galaxies, have undergone massive changes over the centuries, and will
continue to do so; indeed the most ironic change of all has been the
absorption of gendered norms, values, and laws – especially those
hostile to sexual diversity – from the very colonising countries
they claim these beliefs are resisting. Neither do these feeble
excuses for morality reflect these cultures even in the present, for
there are huge numbers of people in every culture, every nation and
every religion who have devoted their lives to overthrowing gendered
repression, who believe their respective groups have it in them to do
so much better, and who make the toughest of sacrifices for the
struggle to make it so.
As such, if the Myth of the Others seems more convoluted and complex
than either of the previous two myths, there is good reason. This
myth stands squarely upon the junction of two colossal fault systems.
The first, as we have explored in these articles, is that of gender,
which has divided and pitted us against one another in all the most
unconscionable of ways. The second, which here we meet, is another
great and terrible divider, which has been no less senseless, no less
pitiless and no less corrupting to the journey of the human race for
a similar length of time. It is, of course, racism.
This is why we must reject the Myth of the Others, by falling back
upon our common humanity: the knowledge, accessible to us all, that
all of us share over 99% of the same genome and all of us hurt when
we bleed. Gender has divided us more than enough as it is. The last
thing we need, in the struggle against it, is to be further divided
by the stuff that gave us colonialism, slavery, two world wars,
countless genocides and ethnic cleansings, and the ongoing alienation
between the North and the South – or indeed, that most racially
reducing and essentialising notion of “developed” versus
“developing” countries.
Let no-one ever hear you defend gender and its problems by calling
them a result of someone's culture, or tradition, or religion, or
ethnic or national identity. It is no different from suggesting that
getting incinerated by a nuclear bomb was a cultural practice of
Hiroshima, or telling a person with malaria that the
Plasmodium
parasite is part of his or her body. As a means of attack, it is
self-injurious: it will generate shudders and awkward silence, and
rightly so. As a means of defence, it is at best intellectually lazy,
and at worst a most unfathomable evil.
Gender's tentacles have different widths, lengths and colours in
different lands, but it has legitimate claim to none of them. Gender
is not African, Asian, American, European, or indigenous; not the
product of any ethnicity or territory. Gender is not Christian,
Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or Confucian; it does not belong in
any religion or spiritual system. In any place, any system, in which
gender exists – and right now that includes most of them – it is
not of them, but a problem with them, and a problem
they will surmount.
Gender has no nationality, no ethnicity, no
culture and no religion. It makes barbarians of us all.
 |
| Thus concludes this
series on Three Myths in the Struggle Against Gender. As thanks for
reading, here is something nice, transcending time, space, and gender
itself. |
