h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"Women are still discriminated against and treated dreadfully all over the world and part of women's day should be there to remind us of this and to give us an annual kick up the backside to do something about it."

Quite bloody right too. I may be a man, but to me feminism is something that concerns all of us: the right to realise our true potential as human beings untrammelled by conventions. Amen to that.

BTW: some women are perfectly horrible. Just like some men. We have the inalienable right, independent of our sex, to be a**holes.

Do we really have the right? Maybe, but even if so, do we need to be? I think not.

No, but what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. I think that morally speaking women won the argument in favour of equality a long time ago. I'd rather now they focussed their energies upon realising the gains of that victory for *all* women, instead of a privileged Western cotierie trying to retain their own patch of moral high ground by indulging in the ideals of 'sensuous sisterhood'. Women in the developing world get a really rough deal.

Yes, that's true, and there are many things happening to them that make me sick to my back teeth. I have to admit, though, that I don't know what exactly I can do for example to save small girls from being circumcised.

Girls from being circumcised? How does that work?

Well, they're cut. I looked up German: beschneiden, we only have this one word here for the act of cutting boys- or girls.

It's called infibulation. They cut off the clitoris and outer labia, often without anasthetic. A completely pointless operation and one which, being that it is performed in Muslim countries, has only served to harden my aleady pretty stone-like heart against the religion.

The Nobel Prize-winning American physicist Steven Weinberg said, 'Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.'

They have their clitoris removed in some countries.

Well, I don't think it is said in the Quran that this should be done to women. As is so often the case, the interpretation of the religion is much more harmful than the religion itself. Unfortunately, you'll nearly always find the 'Ultras' in whatever the religion is called, using the religion as a justification for their abominable behaviour.

That is true. It's the ultras and the fundamentalists that give all the perfectly normal and pleasant religious types such a bad press. Like suicide bombers. They by definition aren't muslims because it's against the Quaran to commit suicide or to harm others, and yet they think they can justify themselves through their religion. Normal muslims hate suicide bombers as much as other people do.
(this is info I got of a half watched news program a while ago, the bits about bombers not being proper muslims. I could easily be wrong there but I think that is the gist of what was said)

But Jihad has been around since Mohammed.

Sorry, I don't follow. I'm not very knowledgeable about Islam.

Hmm, but Jihad was a 'holy war', wasn't it? Nothing like dropping bombs on unsuspecting people.

It was spreading the religion through conquest. I think the jump from point A to point B is pretty logical. I would make it myself, if I were a fervent Mohommedean.

But all this is totally beside the point.... the point being the treatment of women in developing countries?

Female circumcision happens in sub-Saharan Africa too, I've heard. I've heard the general belief is that otherwise a male might get castrated by 'teeth' right inside. And of course men are more important when it comes to deciding who to sacrafice.

Also, some places the circumcision heals in such a way as to prevent interc0urse, ensuring that the female remains a virgin until she's married off. Men are such disgusting creatures.

They have help from the women, Leo. It's usually women who do the infibulation to the girls. And it's women who suture other women. I'm not sure what would happen if these women just refused doing it.

There will always be women who agree. Either conceptually, or because they go along with the superstructure.

It's the idea I find disgusting. The concept of men blaming women for the 'weakness of their flesh' and castigating them accordingly is not foreign to our own culture. In the Medieval era, women were considered abomonible seducers, though was at least as common as seduction, probably more so. The proper place for a woman was therefore in the convent, but if that couldn't be arranged, locked in the house was OK too.

The concept is the same here: blame the women and punish them to prevent men from acting stupid.

*sneaks back and reinserts "rape" into sentence about what's as common as seduction.*

Back in about '92, I helped set up a group in Nottingham called Agenda: The Action Group to End Abuse. It's been so long ago since I had anything to do with it now I don't even know if it's still going. It was a male response to the refuge movement. We decided we had to muck in and do our bit to end domestic violence, hopefully by choking it off at source.

Of course, it was her fault, our clients would say. She know what she's doing and she brings it on herself. Still, at least she knows what the rules are. Except, of course the rules would change from week to week, day to day, minute to minute, and the woman wouldn't have any idea when the next fist would come out of nowhere. Or what damage it would do this time. In the end I realised that we couldn't change the fact these men were scumbags. We could, at best help them become scumbags who didn't beat their partners.

I see all the same self-justification, the exculpatory excuses, in the institutional sexism we see in various ethnic communities. The veiling, the mutilation, the 'honour killings'. It makes me ashamed to be male, at times.

I know the feeling, it's comparable to mine at times, of being ashamed to be German. In either case, we know we shouldn't be ashamed. We didn't choose our gender or nationality, we were born with them.
But I know what you're talking about.