Posts Tagged ‘CSW’
Bullies Beware: The Rebirth of the Feminine is Almost Here
There has been no shortage of shocking news during March’s Month of Madness. Despite the UN calling for a Happy Day this past Friday, it has not been happy for many. After two weeks of vigorous seminars and panels on the plight of violence against women across the globe at the Conference on the Status of Women, where all sorts of inspiring efforts are being put into action to lessen the physical and psychic damage on the feminine, Friday’s news brings yet another story of unspeakable cruelty towards an innocent.
Some of Kabul’s male citizens decided to play morality police and beat and burned alive a 27 year old woman who was accused of burning the Koran. Apparently, the victim may have had learning issues, not that that matters. It is the men who committed such barbarism who have issues…they are all completely mad.
That these men have cell phones and are leading supposed modern lives committed this atrocity in the diplomatic zone of Kabul, where so much international monies have gone to aid Afghanistan is shocking. That a religious leader defends this murder…beyond words.
As my cosmologist friends tell me, a solar eclipse is a force majeure, and if this act, on the last official day of the CSW and the eclipse, doesn’t bode for a rapid shift into another type of consciousness, then when will it ever come?
Nigerians girls abducted, women raped daily, elders tortured as witches, gay and transgender people persecuted…and our Mother Earth, trying to hold it together as she too has been decimated by the greed of capitalism and so- called progress.
We have plenty of statistics…one out of three women have experienced sexual violence and so forth.. IAWRT, The International Association of Women in Radio and Television’s brilliant reporting at the CSW on the percentages of women working in media…who’s delivering the stories that really pertain to women’s needs? The facts are presented…now let’s get on with changing the story.
The Lacanian therapist from France started her talk by describing her own burgeoning sense of herself as a youngster when her mother constantly told her early ‘she wasn’t good enough, she was a girl.’ The power of language to perpetuate myths in societies where patriarchy has gone amok.
As we come to the great Spring religious holidays, Easter, Passover, … let’s think back on traditions that predated Judaism and Christianity, taking place in the Middle East, Asia and Europe. Women’s birth was revered and honored, symbolized by eggs and blood. According to the archaeomythology (https://lefthandofeminism.wordpress.com/tag/easter/), decorated goose eggs were found in graves dating back to the 4th century and Persians celebrate No-rooz with red colored eggs 3000 years ago. The pagans celebrate Ostara, the uterus, life-giving, estrus, Easter, eggs… you do the math.
So can we make this a time of re-birth, celebrate a re-awakening of the feminine in all of us, where the masculine allies itself with the feminine instead of in competition and destruction. It takes real courage to wake up from a sleep like the one our consciousness has been in for so long. It is enough suffering. Dayenu.
Women…just want more than F…un…gathering strength at the UN
ts, Without going into UN-speak and trilling off lots of initials for groups that I’m only just becoming familiar with, let me say that events at the fifty-eighth session of the Commission on the Status of Women this week and next is a welcome energy in our all too male-centered consciousness.
Non-governmental organizations, ok, NGOs, from all regions of the world attend. It is the principal global policy-making body dedicated exclusively to gender equality and advancement of women.
This year’s main focus is on violence against women and sadly we know this comes in many forms: from control of women’s sexual reproductive rights, to inadequate care of pregnant women, to sexual trafficking of women and children and to prostitution.
The statistics are harrowing, the tales unforgiveable; and yet, they are all out in the open of New York, to be hammered, previsioned and sent back to the world, with new ideas on how to fix. It will be much harder to ignore the issues when they have been brought so close to all of our lives through NGO’s first hand experiences.
A panel today featured women who had been prostitutes. I will not say worked as prostitutes because they refuse to be identified with the 70’s concept of sexual worker. It is not work. It is a way to make very little money when all other doors are closed. The stories varied, but always they shared the common thread of having no other emotional or physical support. Some had come from an abusive situation and related to their mother’s passivity. Another, at 15 was homeless and fell under the spell of someone who offered her a way out. One woman can’t have children because of the damage to her cervix from ten years of being a prostitute.
Even in this poignant and angry program, there were moments of levity. One woman said it was the (I’ll use my own interpretation here) the religiosity of the precious all important male orgasm that had to be re thought. That the need men think they have to have a sexual release from a woman is so great that the sick institution of exploitation and abuse has continued to serve this biological master.
But there’s good news. The Nordic idea is to criminalize prostitution. But not arresting the women… only the johns. To turn the table on this power game and at the same time, educate men on how to appreciate women and learn to have consensual non-raping sex out of the market place…in intimacy. Because prostitution is rape for hire. It has survived in a market that sells body parts…but these parts come with souls and spirits and hearts that break at every trick. Does this mean another broken wing for Capitalism? Perhaps.
The Finnish delegation led a panel on birth. They have had an extremely good record being one of the first countries to support midwives. When the graph came up of the Western nations with highest rate of teenage pregnancy, guess who was on the top? Ok, easy one. .. The US! Go team.
Finland has sexual education and teaches protection and doesn’t teach shame about the body. The director, who funnily said he’d been interested in sex education ever since he was a teen, pointed out that the only time their excellent record of low birth mortality and little teenage pregnancy was when the economy fell apart, and the needed services to protect the above, were dropped. But as soon as the economy came back, so did high ratings due to education and services.
A young doctor from Mali spoke of the great need for medical support for young mothers, who are socially pushed to have children when they are young, but not given the medical support. One patient died because she had no prenatal and when she finally got to hospital, there was no blood supply for her. She was very, very young and the Dr. said she saw this once a day.
Tomorrow, a group I’m recently involved with, here we go IAWRT, International Association of Women in Radio and Television will sponsor a panel on women and ecology, showing a film made by four different women, around the globe and their own way of handling local environmental issues. Hands On: ClimateWomenChange, Women seeking solutions. One of the women, Jasmine Thomas of First Nation in Canada, Jasmine Thomas has witnessed the devastation from oil spills and leads an effort to prevent pipelines from being laid across her country.
These stories are alarming, yet thoroughly inspiring.
Through examples like e of the women in this film and all the women from the four corners of our beautiful Mother Earth, we may still be able to make something of this planet, preserving its beauty and spreading justice where none had been.
Film event: Friday, March 14, 2014, at the Salvation Army Auditorium, 221 E 52nd Street in Manhattan, from 12:30pm to 2:00pm.
notjustaboutsex 