Speaking of China
How about starting a re-education program about China? See this from Slate about two seventy year old women scheduled to go to work camps for requesting a protest permit too many times.
Boycotting the Olympics
Why the world has chosen to reward China with the international attention of the Olympics is one of the outrages of the year. This is the first time an authoritarian government has hosted the games. While the Chinese government is guilty of systematic human rights violations including religious oppression, mandatory abortions, economic rape of its most vulnerable citizen in the countryside, and gross disregard for the environment the international media is lavishing upbeat attention. Transnational corporations are seeing the Olympics as another opportunity to sell their products via glitzy ads while ignoring mass silencing of free speech. As this NPR report indicates global companies like Nike and Coca-Cola see human rights as the problem of governments not marketers. Even NBC News is seeing its journalism compromised by a too close relationship with the Olympic committee. Hear this report from NPR. With a heavy investment in the games, NBC is apparently reluctant to embarrass the Chinese. If those who have freedom of speech sell it for profit, who will be left to speak out? I think I will leave the television off.
Lost feminism
Cultural critic Camille Paglia offers an insightful and challenging appraisal of the current state of affairs within feminism. Read her lecture here published in Arion. She asks some important questions:
“What precisely is feminism? Is it a theory, an ideology, or a praxis (that is, a program for action)? Is feminism perhaps so Western in its premises that it cannot be exported to other cultures without distorting them? When we find feminism in medieval or Renaissance writers, are we exporting modern ideas backwards? Who is or is not a feminist, and who defines it? Who confers legitimacy or authenticity? Must a feminist be a member of a group or conform to a dominant ideology or its subsets? Who declares, and on what authority, what is or is not permissible to think or say about gender issues? And is feminism intrinsically a movement of the left, or can there be a feminism based on conservative or religious principles?”
On the right, we have those who see feminism as the boogey woman, the enemy of marriage, the family and the reason for the demise of manhood. On the left, we have those who want one narrow definition of what a feminist is and what a feminist must affirm. As Paglia points out in her lecture, the explosion in media has allowed different voices within feminism to be heard. What we our doing with our voice is yet unclear.
While the political and economic power western women have gained is a positive move, it doesn’t automatically bring about the good. It all depends on what we choose to do with our unprecedented position in global history. The story is not over and only time will tell if we will be even half as effective as some of the great women of the nineteenth century, a time when women had less formal power but more moral outrage. Our effective use of power will be measured in my book by whether we advocate for those who have less.