This may not be Bill Maher’s funniest “bit” on his Real Time show, but it’s one of his best: a diatribe against the oppression of women in most majority-Islamic countries. He does get in a few humorous licks at American protesters who, he says, should be fighting Muslim gender apartheid instead of putting up tents and doing performative protests. And he’s right: half the population in countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan and, yes, territories like Gaza, aren’t even close to having equal opportunity. This problem is sorely neglected by most Western feminists.
Not only are women surely restive under these restrictions, which are immoral because they treat people grossly unequally, but it would be much better for these societies to tap the potential of people with two X chromosomes. It’s impossible for me to agree that maintaining gender apartheid (usually derived from bogus religious beliefs) is socially better than giving women equal opportunities. We know this is true from how Iran and Afghanistan used to be before they became fundamentalist Islamic countries, and how they are now, with veiled and monitored women agitating against the restrictions of the regimes. Do a Google Image search for “Women, Afghanistan, 1970s” and then compare it to a search for “Women, Afghanistan, 202os“. (See this post as well.)
h/t Muffy
“Gender” is a concept first published in the occult doctrine The Kybalion in 1908. Robert Stoller and John Money first published medical literature using the concept in the 60s to promote their experimentations. See Stoller’s Sex and Gender or Money’s Man, Woman, Boy, Girl.
Apartheid is a term used to describe the practice of racial segregation in South Africa from 1948 to 1990.
The first writing I can find that connects gender to apartheid is :
The Apartheid of Sex: A Manifesto on the Freedom of Gender
Martine Aliana Rothblatt
January 17, 1995
The writing is gnostic — “freedom” is freedom from the prison of society — and dialectical, synthesizing the true racial apartheid of South Africa with an occult doctrine of gender to produce a sublated understanding of the whole.
Aufheben der apartheid
The United Nations control of the spiritual evolution of Homo sapiens, currently in the form of it’s religious precept of Inclusion, depends on world agreement on the above dialectical synthesis of gender and apartheid.
See New Genesis by Robert Muller and the Sustainable Development Goals.
How is it that in the USA, and probably much of the west, most of the most apt social commentary comes from comedians?
Good point. Part of the problem is that almost everyone else who speaks out seems to be speechifying, often using stock phrasing and tired constructs that tend to start sounding the same regardless of the subject being addressed. It’s almost custom made for being tuned out.
But comedians often veer away from the formula, creating more unique ways of making their points. They entertain, leavening the rhetoric with humorous (at least to their intended audience) jabs and unexpected angles on the subject. They can simultaneously be sharper and yet less threatening.
It’s an odd phenomenon but not really new, if you consider the role that the arts have played historically.
It’s not necessarily the best, but it gets the largest audience which these comedians already draw. A lot of sugar for a little medicine.
I’ve found comedians to be very clever and they typically are keen observers so they have a unique way of seeing things that others miss. They also have a bit of a licence for pushing the envelope (though this licence seems to be more restricted these days) so they can say things others cannot.
+1 includes Tim Minchin
There are far more social commentators on op-eds, blogs, and so on. Far more, really. But humorists can get a larger audience if they are also funny simply because people always like to share a laugh about crazy times.
Mark Twain would be an early example of humorists who found rich pickings in this sort of thing.
Not only are too few western feminists protesting the status and treatment of women under Islamic regimes, but too many of them are actually aligning themselves with those regimes, some of them literally bowing down in prayer when they’re not even Muslim. In an effort to appear … tolerant? Not racist?? Worldly??? It’s incoherent.
They did that hear, and non-Muslims worshiped, when they had the call to prayer in the encampment (five times a day). Same reason why non-Muslims wear keffiyehs, I guess.
“…It would be much better for these societies to tap the potential of people with two X chromosomes.”
For these societies, the only worthy potential of people with two X chromosomes is their reproductive potential – to produce enough babies for replacing the current generation and, if possible, even more for expansion and jihad.
And I hate to admit that their logic is flawless. Every single society with women’s rights is in a self-extinction spiral, and many are trying to mitigate it by welcoming immigrants from incompatible cultures that are in fact more likely to hasten the host culture’s demise.
As a childless older woman with a PhD who regularly passes young Hijab-wearing women with four or five young children on the street, I (sadly) agree. As Bill Maher said in a similar context, there must be some middle ground.
Regarding Iran, despite legal inequality, the intellectual potential of women is tapped there no less and perhaps even to a greater degree than in the West. 60 % of University students are women, the first female Fields medal winner was an Iranian who was a student of female math professor at an Iranian university. The effect of high female education and professional participation in Iran is a fertility rate of 1,66.
Women’s rights per se seem to be less of a problem than high education and full workforce participation in the professions.
I relocated to NC from NY and I’m horrified at how backwards it is down here.
I’m a Boomer and just about everyone I know went to college. In NYC, we lived at home and had part-time jobs. There wasn’t the distraction of the internet back then. And a lot of my college jobs were fun!
I’ve met many young girls down here, through animal rescue work, with a bunch of children, no child support, no daycare, no careers. Nothing but depression. And Jesus.
To you and Ruth: Agree with you both. One of the issues in the US is that raising children is extremely expensive and there is no external support. Educated professionals, especially women, talk about the intense amount of time, work, and lack of help when children are young. I am not referring to engagement by fathers. Our society is designed for people to produce at work, and nothing seems to have changed with regard to child rearing now that many women have jobs, regardless of whether they are careers. Mixing raising a family with a demanding career sounds exhausting.
Not to dispute your experiences or observations, but I am also encouraged by the long-term secularization of people from many different cultures in Canada. Among first-generation visible minorities in Canada, only about 22% have no religion. But among third- or later-generation members of visible minorities, almost 50% have no religion.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en
This even holds for Muslims but less strongly: among third-generation or later visible minorities, those with no religion outnumber Muslims about 15 to 1; even among first-generation visible minorities those with no religion outnumber Muslims by a slim margin of about 5 to 4. That reflects massive recent immigration to Canada from Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Turkey, and other Muslim-majority countries.
Admittedly that doesn’t address the economic problems associated with inverted age distributions (there are >6 million Canadians 65 years and older; only ~4.5 million 15-24 years old). But it suggests the arc bends toward the secular worldview.
One group that seems to buck the trend are believers in North American traditional indigenous spirituality: among Canadians 65 years and older, those with no religion outnumber traditional indigenous believers (<6000 of them) by 200 to 1; among Canadians 15-24 years, there are still few believers (~13,000) but they are outnumbered by those with no religion only by about 130 to 1. Maybe those kids are onto something and it really is turtles all the way down.
Yes, many on the Left are confused, or afraid of the reaction they will get if they criticize. I certainly don’t want to align myself with people who are bigoted against religions and cultures not their own. And that is what often happens if an American points out the treatment of women in these countries: we are labeled as xenophobes. Add to that women in the US who state how proud they are to “choose” hijab, how liberating it is, how they are only expressing their modesty via free will.