Men Called the Shots When It Came to Sexual Desire

Posted by Oui | Jun 14, 2016 | 14 |

Pakistan and the pill — Check your male privilege at the door | Dawn.com |

I recently had the pleasure of feeling my ovaries constrict when reading a news item: the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan seems to think it is quite dandy to warn Muslims against family planning or birth control.

“Rejecting motherhood means giving up on humanity,” he said, and that too, on live television.

…
Consider the consequences of choosing to put off child rearing: women are disrupting the status quo in a world where men have done as they please since time immemorial.

It is no wonder then that men will scream themselves hoarse about how this or that religious edict is being made to collapse so that women can cavort and be hellish, but what they really fear is that women will have some spare time, some loose change and some ungoverned flexibility.

Also read: How Pakistani organisations don’t want to deal with pregnant professionals

Their world will have to accommodate another voice, another perspective and a wider social view. Our holy men and their brethren are terrified by this change; they are outraged and offended.

Their masculinity, which has till recently been their monopoly over the world, is losing steam and their male privilege is beginning to look a lot like a deflated ego.

Contraception has toppled their social order and of course they’re going to squeal.

As women, we need not pay heed to the shallow interpretations of men. We need not abdicate our foremost responsibility to them and their fraternity, which is the basic right to move up and out, to breathe, stride forth and evolve.

We no longer need to birth and be banished from widespread acceptability; we can be our own economic and social agents with the help of the little pills they’d rather not let us see.

Council of Islamic Ideology: Pushing Pakistan back to the caves

About The Author

Oui

1904 World Fair -- Meet me at St. Louis!

14 Comments

Marie3 on June 14, 2016 at 11:58 am

And just what does Erdogan plan to do with all his excess population? Keep sending them to European countries?
- mino on June 14, 2016 at 12:03 pm
  
  You joke, but population pressure is a new method of expanding territory without guns. Depends on the willingness of opponents to use guns in enough quantity, though.
  - Marie3 on June 14, 2016 at 12:19 pm
    
    Actually wasn’t joking. Controlling the size of the population in various countries used emigration as a relief valve for a few centuries. Once more effective modern forms of birth control were developed, countries through their institutions) and individuals were able to be far more responsible. Many were and many adopted the Catholic Church strategy to win the world by outbreeding everyone else regardless of how poor and desperate their own people become.
- mino on June 14, 2016 at 2:50 pm
  
  Displace the Kurds, probably.
  - Marie3 on June 14, 2016 at 3:14 pm
    
    And the Syrians on his way to restoring the Caliphate.
    
    But seriously, what would Turkey today be like if so many Turks hadn’t emigrated to Germany, etc. over the past fifty years?
das monde on June 14, 2016 at 9:07 pm

I will spill some hot water on myself here, but having familiarized myself with the PUA logic somewhat (and checked some examples and observations), I “have” to ask these foolish questions regarding empowering women:

(1) Do women generally respect people over which they have power?

(2) Do powerful women have outsized respect for their own (few) authorities?

I will not suggest that empowering women is wrong even if the answers are generally not charming. But I guess powerful women would have to know themselves no less deeply than stoics.
- Marie3 on June 14, 2016 at 11:24 pm
  
  PUA is merely a reformulation of how to get laid, but on the cheap.
  
  wrt to your two questions, depends upon the woman. For those that are truly competent and moved into a position of power on the basis of her own merits and also is secure in her person, the answer to the first question is yes and the second question is no.
subina143 on June 15, 2016 at 2:13 am

Separated, you won’t feel that the woman before you is meeting you for the first run through. Her primary intention is to make you feel good and give enormous delight. http://subina.in
- Oui on June 15, 2016 at 2:17 am
  
  It takes all sorts to describe the “human” race …
fjallstrom on June 15, 2016 at 5:58 am

I doubt that Erdogan’s edicts will have much effect on demographics. Turkey has 2.05 children per woman (and dropping), so women in Turkey already has to much free time to get them back to the kitchen. I think statements like this are mainly about giving red meat to the rural conservatives that supports him and dreams about “the good old days”.

Turkey will have to deal with population increase anyway as the generations over 40 are smaller (and had more kids) and will be replaced with larger groups if children per woman doesn’t drop dramatically.
- Oui on June 15, 2016 at 7:16 am
  Agriculture, peasantry and poverty in Turkey in the neo-liberal age [pdf – 241 pages]
  by Murat Öztürk - Wageningen Academics, The Netherlands
  
  Thus, while the rural population grew by around 40% in the three decades 1950-80 (from around fifteen to twenty-five million people), the urban population quadrupled and that in the cities of ten thousand plus residents saw a five-fold increase (from four to twenty million) (Demir and Çabuk 2011). Steering cultural life and driving economic development, Istanbul was the main magnet for this exodus from the countryside, but all the major cities saw exponential growth during this period, even relative to the exponential overall rise in population. The population of Ankara, for example, rose by a half in the 70s alone, a decade in which well over half a million people annually were migrating to the large cities. Large areas of squatter development or shanty housing (gecekondu) sprang up. Mass poverty had become a defining characteristic of the new urban society.
  
  For Turkey as a relatively poor country on the borders of Europe, the latter part of the twentieth century also saw the phenomenon of large scale emigration. People travelled to the then EEC and other European countries – especially to Germany on its guest worker programme – as these entered the post-war reconstruction and economic development period of the fifties and sixties with a booming demand for labour. The outflow of people to Europe – primarily of the rural poor – contributed to a further dampening of what became a very slow population increase in the Turkish countryside, especially as compared to the rocketing figures in the cities. In fact, the combined migration to the cities and the West not only saw the number of city dwellers nationwide finally outstripping that of villagers during the 80s, but also the beginning of an overall decline in the country’s rural population. Nevertheless, even at the turn of the millennium, still something approaching a half of all working people in Turkey were active in the agricultural sector.
  
  Introducing neo-liberalism into Turkey
  
  Neo-liberal policies had been on the Turkish agenda since the 1980s, but farming had largely been spared (eventually as a function of the extension granted to developing nations by the Agreement on Agriculture part of the WTO Uruguay Round, which gave them until 2004 to meet reduction targets for customs duties, domestic supports and export subsidies). At the very end of the millennium, the government negotiated a stabilisation program with the IMF, which was itself flawed. A financial crisis followed, peaking in December 2001. The Turkish economy was protected by IMF loans, to the tune of some twenty billion dollars, the price for which was a new, concentrated round of neo-liberal policies, and which were now expanded to included the agricultural sector. As free market orientated reforms were suddenly catapulted into the forefront of economic policy.
  
  ○ Turkey: High Kurdish Birth Rate Raises Questions About Future
  
  The Kurdish community of Turkey, which represents at least 15 percent of the country’s overall population and dominates the south-eastern region) has such a high birth rate, that some observers — most prominently Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan — believe Kurds could become a majority in Turkey within another generation.
  
  According to Turkish government statistics, the average Kurdish woman in Turkey gives birth to about four children, more than double the rate for other Turkish mothers.
  
  Thus, Turkey is facing a demographic time bomb — Kurds, who tend to be concentrated in the country’s impoverished southeast and are generally poorer and less educated — could conceivably outnumber Turks within about 30 years should present patterns persist.
  - mino on June 15, 2016 at 8:36 am
    
    The neolibs learned to take out small agriculture first. Why do you think Africa, that used to be have food security through well-adapted peasant agriculture, now faces routine episodes of food insecurity, necessitating the West to feed them with our surpluses. It is sickening.
Oui on June 18, 2016 at 2:24 am
The author was interviewed on France24 this morning. I took just a few minutes to recognize she was a special lady …
Joumana Haddad: ‘I live in a country that hates me’ | The Guardian – August 2010 |

The first year that Joumana Haddad took her new magazine to the Beirut book fair, her posters were torn down, there were bitter complaints to the director and Hezbollah, whose stall was directly opposite hers, tried to close her down. The second year, despite the 250 other outfits she could have found herself facing, they encountered each other again. Despite their complete – and mutual – disapproval, “We were just smiling at each other, nodding, saying ‘Hello, how are you?'” Peals of laughter.

Haddad has many other critics, not all of them so gentlemanly. They hack into her website and fill her inbox with threats of rape and murder and stoning, call her debauched, immoral, criminal and wicked, a bleak litany she appears to accept as an unavoidable consequence of what she does – which is to write deliberately personal, often explicit poetry; edit the cultural pages of Lebanon’s leading daily, An-Nahar, the first woman to do such a job in the Arab world; and – the project that causes the greatest cascades of opprobrium – publish Jasad, a glossy quarterly magazine dedicated to the body. It contains serious reportage about polygamy, virginity and forced marriage, but also erotic stories and personal testimony, all of which must be published under the author’s real name.

The threats aren’t likely to end any time soon: Haddad’s latest project, I Killed Scheherazade: Confessions of An Angry Arab Woman, began as a furious response to a passing comment by a Swedish journalist interviewing her about Jasad (“Most of us in the west,” said that hapless lady, “are not familiar with the possibility of liberated Arab women like you existing”) and expanded into a vivid assertion of individuality, free speech, free choice and dignity against religious bigotry, prejudice and the herd instinct both within and outside the Arab world, and within and outside Islam; Haddad herself comes from a Catholic family, and she criticises Christians as well as Muslims. Written in forthright, aphoristic English (she also speaks French, Arabic, Armenian, Spanish and Italian) it is often frankly thrilling, because it carries the frisson of true risk, and of earned fury:

“These backward-looking obscurantists” – Arab defenders of chastity – “are thieves. They are desecrators.
They are murderers. And, on top of everything, they are stupid. And this is perhaps the cruellest blow.”

“We have done, and keep on doing, almost everything we can to encourage intolerance towards us.”

“Being an Arab today means you need to be a hypocrite.”

“The Arab mind is in crisis. And because of this it wants everyone to be in crisis with it … The Arab mind
cannot handle questions, because questions can hurt and upset the murky calm of the swamp.”

She has no time, either, for defence of women just because they are women – voting for Hillary Clinton, for instance, or Ségolène Royale, simply because they are female. “No, and a thousand times no, for such an insulting, superficial kind of solidarity. Women deserve more. Much more.”
- Oui on June 18, 2016 at 2:36 am
  
  ○ Joumana Haddad: A writer who loves to be hated

Men Called the Shots When It Came to Sexual Desire

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Oui

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