It's just amazing that the opposing view to this ancient Hindu misogynist practice would be referred to as feminism, but that's just how far India has come over the last two centuries, and no small thanks to British colonialism inspite of its otherwise oppressive effects.


http://www.csuchico.edu/~chein...9/parrilla/parr1.htm

The story about the Hindu practice raises (for me) the question of where are the Moslem feminists . . . or the American/European feminists publically criticizing misogynist tendencies and practices in the Islamic world?

Phil:

That's a good question. While Muslim feminists don't abound, they are active and publishing; here's a partial list:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_feminism


But the second part to your question is quite revealing, especially when one considers the contrast between Muslim feminist outcry over the violent misogynist behavior of their culture and the mute response of feminists in the West to their crisis. But there's really no hard insight to be culled for an explaination of this discrepancy, as Western feminists would be pulling the multi-cultural/entitlement rug out from under their feet where most of them to question Muslim culture. Here's a revealing article addressing that very issue, which was posted elsewhere on another thread:

http://www.city-journal.org/ht..._1_why_feminism.html

"As you look at this inventory of brutality, the question bears repeating: Where are the demonstrations, the articles, the petitions, the resolutions, the vindications of the rights of Islamic women by American feminists? The weird fact is that, even after the excesses of the Taliban did more to forge an American consensus about women�s rights than 30 years of speeches by Gloria Steinem, feminists refused to touch this subject. They have averted their eyes from the harsh, blatant oppression of millions of women, even while they have continued to stare into the Western patriarchal abyss, indignant over female executives who cannot join an exclusive golf club and college women who do not have their own lacrosse teams."

"But look more deeply into the matter, and you realize that the sound of feminist silence about the savage fundamentalist Muslim oppression of women has its own perverse logic. The silence is a direct outgrowth of the way feminist theory has developed in recent years. Now mired in self-righteous sentimentalism, multicultural nonjudgmentalism, and internationalist utopianism, feminism has lost the language to make the universalist moral claims of equal dignity and individual freedom that once rendered it so compelling. No wonder that most Americans, trying to deal with the realities of a post-9/11 world, are paying feminists no mind."

"To understand the current sisterly silence about the sort of tyranny that the women�s movement came into existence to attack, it is helpful to think of feminisms plural rather than singular. Though not entirely discrete philosophies, each of three different feminisms has its own distinct reasons for causing activists to �lose their voice� in the face of women�s oppression."

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Read it all.