Looking at flogging in a different light...
The Political is Sexual
by Laurie Fendrich
We’ve got so many problems at home right now that the last thing Americans want to think about is the predicament of women in faraway places. But if you’re at all like me, you were deeply shocked by the video of the flogging of the young woman in Pakistan that surfaced on the Internet last week. Look, it’s not as if I don’t know these things happen in the world. It’s just that seeing such a vivid, specific example drove it home to me more viscerally.
The video (apparently taken surreptitiously with a cell phone) shows a 17-year-old Pakistani girl lying in a prone position in some kind of outdoor public area. A large crowd of men is gathered in a circle around her. Her burqa has been pulled up so that you see her legs and bottom, clothed in full-length pink pants. Three men, one of whom is said to be her brother, firmly hold her hands and feet to the ground while a fourth beats her on the buttocks with a heavy-looking bludgeon.
The flogging took place in Pakistan’s northwestern Swat valley, apparently sometime in January - about a month before our so-called ally, the “democratic” Pakistani government, made peace with the Taliban by ceding to it the right to set up Islamic courts in the region. The public punishment inflicted on the girl by this particular group of Taliban adherents was variously attributed to her infidelity, her refusal to marry a particular man who had been chosen for her, or to her leaving her home accompanied by her father-in-law instead of a proper direct male relative.
No one is contesting that the beating took place. In what should come as no surprise, some Taliban spokesman or other remarked that the flogging was appropriate, and the girl deserved it. He added that the only problem was that it was done in public and the flogger wasn’t a pre-pubescent boy. (What better way to teach a young boy healthy attitudes toward women and sex?) Many regular Pakistanis, along with human-rights advocates around the world, were appalled. Pakistani television played the video repeatedly all weekend long. The uproar in Pakistan was sufficient to make the country’s chief judge decide to review the incident (supposedly starting today).
What struck me most about the whole event wasn’t so much the fatiguing fact that yet again men somewhere in the world are doing bad things to women. No, it was the obvious psychosexual dynamics that no one was even bothering to mention. When it comes to the Taliban and women, the heart of the matter isn’t abstract political struggles, or general issues of control over women, or tribal this or that. It’s sexual perversion.
We may feel disgust at societies that control the public behavior of women through corporal punishment, but pragmatists like me concede that direct interference is generally out of the question. The world’s a big place and most of its institutionalized abuses are going to take time, continuous legal pressure, and the steady spread of enlightened ideas pushing against old customs before we’ll see any change.
Yet this particular flogging brought out something particularly bothersome that none of the major media outlets seems to think significant enough to mention. The “public” witnessing the flogging consisted entirely of men (if there’s a woman in there, I sure can’t spot her). In a society where men rarely catch even a glimpse of an ankle of a female who’s not a relative, watching a female who’s not a family member with her burqa pulled up high while her buttocks are beaten amounts to big-time sexual titillation. That crowd of men gathered to watch the flogging? Sexual voyeurs, plain and simple.
Instead of endlessly talking about abstract universal human rights, public leaders and commentators all over the world - especially those who are male - should call these men out for sexual perversion.
Everyone should loudly proclaim that men who flog women - and especially men who watch men while they flog women - are sickos. I have no delusions that this would somehow effect dramatic change. Like I said, the world needs to have patience. But in places where honor counts as much as, if not more than law, shaming (especially regarding male sexual behavior) ought to be part of the arsenal used to defend women.
Posted at 12:47:45 PM on April 6, 2009 | All postings by Laurie Fendrich
Laurie Fendrich, a painter who lives and works in New York, is a professor of fine arts at Hofstra University. Her writing has focused on the place of art and artists in society and the education of young artists, but she has also written essays questioning the viability of beauty in a post-Darwin era, the meaning of abstract painting, and the tyranny of outcomes assessment. She will blog about university life, the arts. and culture.
http://chronicle.com/review/brainstorm/index.php?id=1288
I have never thought of it that way. But when she broke it down in terms of men rarely being able to see under a woman's burqa yet all of the witnesses to the flogging were men, I was like, "DAMN...it's almost like a snuff film."