Sunday, August 23, 2009

"Saving the World's Women"

The entire issue of the New York Times Sunday Magazine this weekend is dedicated to the idea of "Saving the World's Women," essentially prompting the reader to blame everything from poverty to terrorism on patriarchal men in the South and to regard aid and philanthropy from the North as the solution. Such an idea is fit only for satire, but the magazine presents it earnestly, as a new idea, as if the world hadn't been through centuries of tandem development of liberal feminism and imperialism.

What little sense of irony in the issue is found in a short piece on the phenomenon of feminist-hawk spam.

The idea of giving aid to "female deliverance" seems to give a lot of liberals of both sexes the same pleasure as the idea of buying aid for "male enhancement" gives to all too many men. The difference is that the former, unlike the latter, is not felt as a guilty pleasure but on the contrary as a righteous one, especially since it's entirely forgotten that, once upon a time, America paid the same type of fundamentalists -- now featured as dark villains in a new literary genre called R2P, which is part Gothic-novel, part captivity-narrative -- to fight a jihad, throwing acid on the faces of women and castrating men who were, or were seen to be, in favor of the Marxist Modern.

1 comment:

CEJ said...

Japan is deathly afraid that any hard swing left would piss off the US. Even as unilateral trade, fiscal and monetary policies out of the US erode Japan's status as a 'most favored' trade partner who is most favored with real profits, they still see the status quo as safer than what the left might stir up.
Lacking any other multilateral ties (almost everything Japan does goes through their dominant partner, the US), they fear what the US might do if confronted by an independent Japan.